What should Trump do about resistant bureaucrats in the federal government?

From The Hill on December 13:

The Department of Energy said Tuesday it will reject the request by President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team to name staffers who worked on climate change programs. Energy spokesman Eben Burnhan-Snyder said the agency received “significant feedback” from workers regarding a questionnaire from the transition team that leaked last week. “Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled,” Snyder said.

From Francis Menton at Manhattan Contrarian:

Well, I guess that’s how it works in the Federal Government: If the requests of your new boss make you “unsettled,” you just “reject” them. And if that’s how they react to a simple request for information as to who is doing what, imagine how they are going to react when they actually get an assignment to do something that runs counter to what they think should be done!

…There is absolutely nothing “nonpartisan” about this. The Department of Energy is substantially if not entirely engaged in carrying out policies that are favored by Democrats and opposed by Republicans — policies like promoting and subsidizing wind and solar energy and hamstringing and restricting fossil fuels. Do you think that even the Energy Information Agency is nonpartisan? Don’t be ridiculous. Their “levelized cost of energy” reports are carefully engineered to defraud the American people into supporting “renewable” energy by downplaying the real costs of wind and solar energy by a factor of five or ten or more. The same overt or covert partisanship is equally if not more true at Education, HUD, EPA, and, for that matter, throughout the government.

Here are the presidential results from the District of Columbia. Hillary Clinton got 90.9% of the votes, a percentage far higher than her percent in any of the fifty states. (Her highest percentage in any of the states was in Hawaii at 62.3%.) Donald Trump and Gary Johnson between them won just 5.7% of the votes in D.C., about 17,600 votes in total. But think about this: Washington has a substantial Republican establishment. The RNC is headquartered in DC. The Republicans held substantial majorities in both the House and Senate before the recent election, and the Republican members of Congress plus their committees had something in the range of 4000 staffers based in the District. And those people have families. And there is a substantial group of Republican, conservative and libertarian think tanks and policy organizations based in D.C. — as examples, consider the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Federalist Society, and so forth. And their staffers also have families. Add up all the professional and paid Republican and conservative-side people in Washington and their families, and you have accounted for literally every Republican vote in the District. The number of Republicans actually working in the government has to be so small that you will need a microscope to find them.

…So here’s the modest proposal: If the government cannot fire these people, then it can assign them to other tasks in other places. By fortuitous coincidence, the recent several years have seen downsizing in two sectors known for having very large buildings, many of them located in remote and out-of-the-way areas. Those two sectors are manufacturing and retail. Places like rural Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Arkansas, and upstate New York — not to mention northern Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and even Alaska — are littered with abandoned K-Marts, JC Penney’s and Sears stores, as well as abandoned factories of all sorts. These buildings can be leased for a song. Hundreds of federal employees can be assigned to each such location.

Send each such employee a memo: “Starting Monday morning at 9 AM, your job will be located at the former Sears Hometown store, 2308 11th Avenue West, Williston, North Dakota. If you report for work, you will await such assignments as may be given to you at that location. If you do not show up, your pay will be continued until your unused vacation and sick leave are exhausted, and then your pay will stop.”

Read more here.