The President's Management Agenda includes controversial policies and proposals such as aggressive use of outsourcing to replace civil servants, reliance on 'faith-based initiatives' and rollbacks of civil service rights. [...]
'Presidents come and go but the civil service is designed to serve whoever occupies the swivel chair in the Oval Office,' Ruch added. 'It is downright creepy that now every museum curator, supervising scientist and chief ranger must be okayed by a high-level political appointee.'
Creepy is, I suppose, the best marginally objective word that can be placed on it. What the Bush administration and Republican Party has done is expand the number of purely political appointees far beyond even normal crony-laden levels, drilling those appointees deeper into various government functions, and giving them unprecedented instruction to short-circuit scientific studies and otherwise enforce 'ideological purity' on the science and everyday function of basic government tasks.
That the Bush administration is openly hostile to science and book-learning is hardly new news, but it is worth reflecting on how quickly they managed to find these new sunken levels of cronyism and corruption, and what a long-term project restoring basic competence to these functions of government might yet turn out to be. We've been losing a great many experienced, apolitical career civil servants, in the Bush years, resulting in a 'brain drain' in everything from the EPA to Energy to Customs to the CIA and DOD. And they're being replaced by campaign consultants, drivers, lobbyists and others who the Party owes favors to.
Hunter's post references 3 reSources on 3 articles with a common central theme.
