The Revolving Door Project, an influential liberal group that aims to change how Washington’s public-private back and forth operates, has a new target in sight: purging the government of loyalists to President Donald Trump after incoming President Joe Biden takes office.
The group laid out the urgency of taking proactive steps to do that in a “De-Trumpification” memo released January 8. And it’s continued to press the case now that Biden is in the White House.
“Removing these officials who have remained in this administration despite its abuses, and who, in some cases, have actively abetted those transgressions, is a first step that the Biden administration can take immediately,” memo co-author Eleanor Eagan told Blue Tent earlier this month.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that the new administration has already fired some key Trump appointees whose positions were scheduled to continue into Biden’s tenure, including the “surgeon general, the National Labor Relations Board’s powerful general counsel, and the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.” But the Post also noted that getting rid of many lower-level Trump appointees would not be easy because dozens of these officials had their status “converted to permanent civil service roles that will allow them to stay in government for years to come. These new career officials are protected from partisan removal unless the new administration discovers that they got their jobs illegally—without competition and because of their political affiliation.”
A question of loyalty
The Revolving Door is keen to push forward the work of extirpating Trump holdovers who’ve sought to burrow into the bureaucracy. Central to the argument of the group’s memo is the notorious Trump reliance on loyalty from his staffers. These loyalty tests, the memo argues, have rendered all Trump appointees unfit for office.
In the memo, written by Eagan and Revolving Door Project founder Jeff Hauser, the group calls for “holdovers” to be rooted out—though how many are in place is a mystery.
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Eagan.
Eagan told Blue Tent that Congress and the Biden administration need to work together to make the program work and determine the scope of the problem.
“Investigations into hiring practices, personnel actions, reorganizations and other administrative maneuvers with regard to personnel across the breadth of the federal government can help us move beyond isolated anecdotes and toward a more comprehensive picture of what the Trump administration accomplished,” Eagan said. “From there, lawmakers can begin to consider short- and long-term solutions.”
Eagan added that the memo authors have not heard from the incoming administration on their plan.
Trust the process
Revolving Door sees de-Trumpification as part of a necessary rejection of Trump and everything he stands for—especially after the Capitol riot on January 6.
The memo calls on Biden to ask for resignations from all Trump appointees, and then for the administration and Congress to look into hiring practices and personnel actions in order to expose surreptitiously installed loyalists.
“Only by really coming to terms with everything that the outgoing administration did will it be possible to move forward and to implement the sorts of reforms that can make our governing system more resilient into the future,” Eagan said. “In the short term, these sorts of investigations and actions can help minimize the damage that the Trump administration caused and would continue to cause.”
And, she added, the process can’t stop there.
“It is our hope that they make clear the need for more fundamental reforms and for more attention to the people and institutions that carry out policy,” said Eagan.
