the logic of loyalty rather than law

An excerpt from the Substack of Don Moynihan, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. We encourage you to read the whole article there.

Government shutdowns are bad. They inflict pain on the economy, on those who rely upon public services, and on those who provide those services. They reduce state capacity.

But only Trump and his budget chief Russ Vought are brave enough to ask: what if shutdowns aren’t painful enough? How can we make things worse? How can we use this as an opportunity to target our political enemies? Never mind if it illegally strips away valuable public services that we all rely on.

The central ethos of a personalist regime is that government should be run via the logic of loyalty rather than law. We are seeing this play out with the shutdown.

Last Friday, the same day that the White House dropped $20 billion to bail out political allies in Argentina, and political allies who had invested in Argentina, they announced layoffs of over federal 4,000 employees. A disproportionate number were in Health in Human Services. . . .

During shutdowns, both parties try to blame the other. This is entirely understandable. Yet historically, there were some limits. One is that Presidents did not convert government resources, including public employees, into partisan mouthpieces. Another is that politicians might have had their own narrative, but they typically did not tell outright lies about how shutdowns work. Finally, Presidents did not use the shutdown to try to target their political enemies.

The Trump administration is doing all three. . .

Does the Hatch Act still exist?

A simple interpretation of the Hatch Act is that government officials, whether the President or a civil servant, cannot use government resources for partisan purposes. The Trump administration largely stopped monitoring Hatch Act violations in its first term. Indeed, Trump officials seemed to enjoy violating it, as when they held Republican National Convention events at the White House.

Separating where politics ends and their public office begins is always difficult, but the Trump administration has gone well beyond past practices when it comes to the shutdown. Government websites describe the “Radical Left Democrat” shutdown or the “Democrat-led government shutdown.”

Civil servants were encouraged to blame Democrats in their out-of-office email replies when being furloughed. Some were given no choice at all, with political appointees hijacking their email to add partisan messaging. I cannot recall such a blatant example of federal employees being coerced to adopt partisan speech. . . .