Haley’s Plan to Gut the Government Is Even Worse Than Trump’s

Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

Among Donald Trump’s many troubling second-term aspirations is his planned assault on the federal civil-service system. He wants MAGA bravos to take over the “deep state,” replacing thousands of allegedly disloyal civil servants to reduce resistance to his other outrageous proposals.

But even Trump would go easy on bureaucrats compared to rival Nikki Haley, who apparently wants to fire (or at least transfer) every single federal employee after five years of service:

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell accurately calls this proposal “a good way to destroy the basic machinery of government,” and then gets more specific:

This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.

Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.

And everyone else who has some valuable, specialized expertise, and who, because of a sense of duty and belief in their public mission, is willing to tolerate constant denigration from elected officials and lower pay than they could receive in the private sector.

Haley hasn’t gotten very specific on exactly what she proposes to do to implement this intensely demagogic “term limit for bureaucrats” notion, or what executive powers or new grants of authority from Congress she would rely on to create all the immense havoc Rampell fears. She may have gotten the idea from Florida senator Rick Scott, whose “11-point Plan to Rescue America” included (in both its original and revised versions) a proposal to impose a 12-year term limit for non-defense federal employees. The term-limit idea didn’t get a lot of attention because commentators (including delighted Democrats and an irritated Mitch McConnell) were too busy addressing such equally dumb ideas as mandatory minimum income taxes for the working poor and a five-year sunset on all federal programs. For all I know, Haley or one of her underlings got to the five-year term limit by mixing up two different Scott howlers.

In any event, as David Corn points out at Mother Jones, Haley’s insistence on a five-year expiration date for jobs in the public sector doesn’t comport well with the six-year stints she enjoyed in the South Carolina legislature and as governor of the Palmetto State. More generally, it’s yet another data point suggesting that the media habit of calling this protégée of Sarah Palin and hireling of Donald Trump a “moderate” really needs to end. Haley’s extremism is truly multifaceted, as Ana Marie Cox observes in the New Republic:

Haley has little else but far-right positions and deeply conservative policies in her portfolio. She has supported granting fetuses civil rights, a pseudoscientific arrangement that once undergirded Ireland’s abortion laws, and that turned out great. She’s anti–gun control and wants metal detectors and law enforcement stationed at every school. She has said that Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill “doesn’t go far enough,” she has pledged to fight any measure to limit police funding, she believes that critical race theory “is going to hold back generations of young people.” (In a roundabout way—since CRT scaremongering is an excuse to ban books—I suppose she’s right about that.)

And that list doesn’t even include her gubernatorial effort to bar private-sector unions from operating in South Carolina or her recent demands for cutting Social Security benefits (via a retirement-age boost and means-testing), and her ferocious attitude toward Palestinians caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas. Perhaps Haley hasn’t quite tried to out-Trump Trump on every issue, as Ron DeSantis has done. But she’s worse than Trump on blowing up the federal government. And the fact that the more respectable remnants of the pre-Trump Republican Party are looking to this deeply reactionary politician for salvation is a sign of just how far the GOP has fallen.