If Presidents Can’t Control Executive Agencies, Elections Are Fake

Amid the hundreds of substantive executive actions President Donald Trump has taken in his first two weeks back in the White House, perhaps none matter more than his efforts at bureaucracy-busting. That notably includes what Julie Kelly calls a “Friday night massacre” days ago of the Department of Justice’s January 6 prosecutorial staff, which erased 30-40 temporary positions Biden’s DOJ had attempted to make permanent.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, “arguably, he has done more in two weeks than Trump’s entire Department of Justice did during his first term,” Kelly said in a Saturday video. So has acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, both while the Senate confirmation of U.S. attorney general nominee Pam Bondi remains pending.

Together, they’ve sought the firing or retirements of numerous top FBI and DOJ personnel, and an accounting of all FBI personnel involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 prosecutions. Martin is also directing an internal probe into the DOJ’s abuse of a post-Enron obstruction statute that the Supreme Court said the department used unlawfully to imprison right-leaning Capitol protesters with help from Constitution-hating federal judges. CIA mouthpiece Ken Dilanian complained on NBC, “This is probably the biggest purge in the modern history of the FBI, and we’re talking about most of the senior leadership at the bureau.”

The Office of Personnel Management and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are also posing prominent test cases for how the Trump administration can reform a federal bureaucracy that has, by design, resisted elected control since its inception. The administration is considering folding USAID into the State Department, and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) doge Elon Musk claimed early Monday morning Trump supports doing so. The two agencies have long engaged in power struggles.

USAID is widely perceived as a CIA front organization. Former State Department official Mike Benz says USAID has funded international censorship and regime change operations. As demonstrated by journalists Diana West and M. Stanton Evans, the State Department has embedded Communist subversives from well before Whittaker Chambers all the way through secretaries Hillary Clinton and Antony Blinken, making it another top strategic threat to American self-governance.

Last Monday, acting agency administrator Jason Gray placed 50-60 USAID employees on paid administrative leave while he investigates “information that they may have been conspiring to circumvent Trump’s executive orders requiring the halting of federal aid funds to overseas programs and all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the agency,” reported RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree.

Saturday night, officials from DOGE attempted to enter USAID to begin accounting for its personnel and funding. Security Director Jack Voorhees and deputy Brian McGill physically barred them, and were subsequently placed on leave, CNN and Fox reported Sunday.

The administration says claims that DOGE personnel didn’t have proper security clearances to access USAID information are false. According to a 2024 book by former Trump administration USAID official Mark Moyar, Masters of Corruption, Vorhees routinely weaponized security clearances to stymie the policies of elected officials.

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday complaining about the incident and insisting that “by law” Congress must determine whether the president can revise a president-created agency.

USAID officials placed on leave include Voorhees, Employee and Labor Relations Director Nicholas Gottlieb, and Assistant General Counsel for Ethics Jack Ohlweiler. Moyar’s book says Ohlweiler and Voorhees are some of the agency’s most politicized employees.

Masters of Corruption says Voorhees intentionally delayed Moyar’s security clearance so he could not enact Trump’s policies and in alleged retaliation for Moyar reporting entrenched corruption and criminal activity at the agency. It says Voorhees lied to Moyar and others about delaying the clearance. It alleges Ohlweiler helped deny Moyar a security clearance on partisan grounds, with no due process.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent letters to USAID about the alleged whistleblower retaliation, naming Voorhees. He received non-answers.

Moyar also demonstrates that many agency inspectors general work to cover up corruption rather than reduce it. That was certainly the case for the inspectors general who closed their books on Spygate-related power abuses, whose work led to no significant prosecutions and elicited noncooperation from numerous key players. The Trump administration has also already fired some 17 agency inspectors general.

In his book, Moyar says he was harassed by the national security state for disclosing evidence about USAID that included: “unauthorized personnel actions, most notably the creation of a new civil service deputy; bullying of employees; allocation of nearly all CMC travel money to two individuals; maintenance of a small inner circle of favorites that dominates hiring panels and receives most of the perks, such as bonuses and slots at war college courses; marginalization of senior foreign service officers and elevation of pliant junior foreign service officers…[and] conflicts of interest.”

USAID has funded organizations facilitating illegal migration into the United States, foreign abortions, climate change hysteria, transgender ideology, international Marxism, and anti-white racism, according to a 2022 Heritage Foundation report. The report also says USAID has funded organizations that fund leftist district attorneys who encourage crime and use their offices to prosecute Americans for disagreeing with Democrats.

Former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield testified before Congress that USAID helped fund the development of the Covid-19 virus. A 2018 inspector general report found USAID funding had fueled opium farming in Afghanistan, which funds terrorism.

Ignoring all this, Democrats and corporate media insist Trump’s aid funding freeze is risking “millions of lives” via suspending food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance. But such assistance is a front for a malignant agency threatening American lives and sovereignty and pumping leftist priorities across the globe.

Other incoherent responses from Democrat media include that a president can’t erase an agency another president created (USAID) but also can’t create an agency (DOGE). It’s not about logic, it’s about maintaining power by any means possible. As Chris Bray points out, Democrats today are filing lawsuits claiming every executive action is literally Orange Hitler, while just about five years ago they were the ones demanding everyone obey illegal Covid executive orders or we were killing grandma and deserving of jail time.

Democrats claiming Trump will “politicize” agencies by installing “loyalists” are only expressing rage that Republicans are attempting to take the keys to the unconstitutional power structure Democrats have controlled for more than a century. Besides creating an illegitimate shadow government erasing constitutional government. the bureaucracy is itself a politicized patronage system.

The bureaucracy also distributes patronage by doling out favors and finances: favorable decisions and contracts. It’s unseemly — and wrong — for public employees to have privileges unattainable for most of the Americans paying their salaries. That includes effectively being protected from ever being fired, even for rank insubordination or incompetence.

If the executive cannot control his own personnel, agencies, and funding lawfully given to him by a duly elected Congress, elections mean nothing. If the executive is not actually an executor, then the entire bureaucracy is an autocratic, self-licking ice cream cone. It runs the country, not any elected official. And Congress is complicit, because it allows the distribution of opium funds to Afghanistan and queer “safe spaces” in Kenya without ever having to take a public vote on any of this garbage, so long as these taxpayer-provided slush funds slather their retirements and relatives with “nonprofit” and “contractor” lard.

Whatever you want to call unelected bureaucrats and “nonprofit” grifters distributing funds obtained from American citizens against our consent as expressed in elections and line-item votes, it is not a republic, nor a democracy. If Trump can’t fire his own employees and redistribute public funds the executive branch has been given by law, he’s not really the president, and elections are fake.

All this means Trump isn’t “weaponizing” or “politicizing” these agencies. He’s fighting their inherent weaponization. Firing and investigating people who abuse public power, and ending the theft of American labor to fund evil international patronage schemes — that isn’t retribution, it’s justice.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.