The Year of the Civil Servant
Never before have the roles of government workers taken on such significance. But there could be consequences to using their power to undermine the administration.
It’s never easy to be a civil servant when the White House changes hands, and especially when it changes political parties. When a new president ascends to the Oval Office, he becomes at once civil servants’ new boss and the personification of whatever changes he promised on the campaign trail—changes, that is, to the very work those civil servants were dutifully executing until the moment he was sworn in on Inauguration Day.
Rarely have those revisions been as dramatic as the ones pledged by then-candidate Donald Trump, and never before has civil servants’ role in government taken on such significance.
