Employee Quality

This anonymous op-ed piece by a senior member of President Trump's administration has certainly caused a lot of sound and fury in political circles. As much as many liberals view it as a vindication of their criticism of the president, I think it's important to remember that this isn't a good thing to be seeing. In fact, there are articles like this one that go so far as to say this sort of internal disobedience in the executive branch rises to the level of a constitutional crisis.

On one hand, anyone who thinks that President Trump's ideas go too far has at least some reason to be happy that there are people actively trying to prevent those ideas from being implemented. However, relying on the president to make mistakes (in this case, not hiring trustworthy or competent staff members) in order to prevent his agenda from going through is not a particularly reliable way to stop him. Nor, for that matter, are we even certain that whoever wrote that article really cares all that much about anything other than making themselves look good - as the second article points out, this might actually make holding the president back harder, and that calls the actual motive of the author into question.

Of course, there's also the possibility that unelected bureaucrats and political appointees exerting this much influence over policy is more power than they should be wielding - I'm reasonably certain that's where the idea of a constitutional crisis comes from. I don't think things are that bad, myself - it's another crack in the appropriate distribution of powers and oversight responsibilities that our system is supposed to rely on, but compared to all the damage we already had, this particular example doesn't make things that much worse.