The venality of popular vote loser Donald Trump and his administration is only matched by its incompetence. That and the fact that Trump just doesn't give a damn about actually governing. The cost of that is very high, and it's starting to hit hard.
Max Stier, who tracks federal vacancies as head of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, likened the administration to a government run by substitute teachers.
“You might have a wonderful educator coming into the class for a day, or a week, or a couple of weeks,” he said. “But they get no respect.”
For millions of Americans, the consequences are real. Vacancies have stalled pay raises for thousands of federal workers. A mortgage rule to help home buyers has been stuck in limbo for more than a year. And the Internal Revenue Service is short bodies to push out regulations related to the new tax law, stymieing businesses.
Consider the case of Jonathan Keefover, a civil servant working as a customer service specialist for the Social Security Administration. In October 2016, a raise for him and fellow SSA staff in Birmingham, Alabama, was approved. Then the election happened. Then the Office of Personnel Management director was gone and a new one was not confirmed until just last month. That raise he was supposed to get—between $40 and $80 per month—still hasn't happened. Why? Jacque Simon, a council member and policy director of the AFGE employee union explains. "The regulation just never got written," she said. "The career staff were like, 'We didn’t feel like we had authority to move ahead.' If they’d had a boss telling them what to do, they would have done it."
Part of it is Trump's negligence, he has sent far fewer nominees for administration positions to the Senate than his predecessors. Also, there is so much churn in his administration because the people he does pick are so awful that there are always high-level vacancies. A very large part of the problem is that those Trump people who have been confirmed are committed to destroying all the work that career government people have devoted their service to doing, so they're leaving and not being replaced. Part of it is Democrats working to slow down the nominations Trump has made precisely because he is picking people intent on destroying government.
A big part of it is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell putting his focus on stacking the federal courts with Trump's ideologues. Trump might be behind his predecessors in naming executive personnel, but he's way ahead on appeals court confirmations—15 so far. Because McConnell is as bad as Trump—he doesn't care if government functions at all. He cares about creating a far-right judiciary for at least the next generation.