Government Reform: Fire Them All

It's natural in a presidential election to focus on the ticket--even the top spot on the ticket. But, if, as now seems likely, Bill Clinton wins the race, a new and uncertain Congress may prove to be the least of his problems. And the Arkansas governor has given little indication that he understands his likely greatest challenge.

The Republicans have used their control of the federal government for 20 of the last 24 years to place right-wing ideologues within executive and regulatory agencies. This has led to the subversion, of not only the civil service, but also of the clear intent of many of the laws the bureaucrats have sworn to enforce.

If Clinton--or even an unlikely President Perot--enters the White House next January, they will be facing a hostile takeover of the federal government.

A case in point. In the spring of 1983, top officials of President Reagan's Justice Department, preparing to block the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, agreed to accompany Jesse Jackson on a tour of the Black Belt in Mississippi to investigate schemes to bar or dilute the African American vote.

Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds and his chief deputy, Charles Cooper, a former clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, made the trip.

At the first stop, Jackson began the meeting with a prayer by joining hands with Reynolds and Cooper, whose hands in turn were clasped by Black civil rights workers from Mississippi. Immediately following the prayer, Reynolds and Cooper, apparently believing the preliminaries to be over, tried to release Jackson's grip. Rather than oblige, Jackson clamped down, and began singing the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome," which, of course, was joined in by Blacks in attendance, complete with body swayings from side to side.

Cooper and Reynolds turned purple red, but the Justice official, having announced the trip by citing Bobby Kennedy's visit to the same region 20 years earlier, could hardly be seen on camera struggling to free himself form Jackson's embrace.

By the second verse, the two chalked-faced officials, at least, were mouthing some of the words. Later, Cooper told me the episode had been the most embarrassing of his entire life. "I kept thinking," he said, "What will my friends think when they see this?"

The point here is that the Justice Department, and all the other federal agencies of any consequence, have been saturated at all levels by officials openly hostile to the legislative mission of those agencies. The ideological litmus test didn't end with appointments to the federal bench.

In the Justice Department, not only for areas like civil rights, the agency seems hopelessly captivated by right-wingers. Attorney General William Barr's actions involving Iraqgate--including his denial of a Congressional request for a special prosecutor--are only the latest evidence for that. So is the Central Intelligence Agency, having admitting to lying to Congress and a federal court about the use of taxpayer money in Iraq's pre-war military build-up.

In environmental matters, people like An Gorsuch were set in place to subvert the clear intent of laws like the Clean Air and Water Acts, as well as bills concerning toxic waste. On other domestic fronts, people like Sam Pierce, now the subject of a grand jury investigation, almost totally wrecked any commitment the federal government had to the Fair Housing Act, and to low and moderate income housing.

Whether it was the Food and Drug Administration, or the Occupation Safety and Health Administration, bureaucrats either went along with the demolition or found other jobs. Any civil servant of conscience had to be driven out long ago. The Competitiveness Council, first headed by George Bush and now by Dan Quayle, raised this corruption to new heights, by gutting laws and regulations at the behest of campaign contributors.

If Clinton wins, in order to get anything done at all, he'll have to fire everybody down to a GS-14.

Kenneth R. Walker, an independent television producer and columnist, is a fellow at the Institute of Politics.