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Comment by justsocrateasin | Hacker News Reader

Why so much distrust for our civil servants? Have you met any of these people? I grew up in the DC area and both liberal and conservative civil servants are dedicated to truth, science, and the well being of the American people. Sure, there are exceptions, corruption is everywhere, etc. but by and large, the people who work in government agencies have our interests in mind. I say this as a liberal who briefly consulted for U.S. Customs and Border Protection - the people working at that agency understand immigration far better than I ever could. If you left it up to radical politicians to decide immigration, you'd be left with policies that swung too far in either direction every four years.

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> Why so much distrust for our civil servants?

What have they done to earn my trust? Why would I choose to outsource critical decisions pertaining to my own life and affairs to strangers who are not meaningfully accountable to me and have no direct understanding of my values or interests, regardless of how well-intentioned they may be?

What possible reason could there be to give civil servants authority to make decisions that materially impact us without any oversight or accountability?

Yes, I was a government contractor for a significant portion of my career. This certainly didn't encourage me to trust elected officials or agency employees.

Hey, you can have this position. Just realize that you've lost your future right to complain about project 2025 when that passes and every agency has all their civil servants replaced.

Why would they have lost their right to complain?

They would lose their right to complain because they are putting their faith in civil servants.

Therefore, when civil servants are put into place from the other side, they can't complain.

They are putting their faith in a system of civil servants that want to serve the country and do their job, in comparison to those selected to break the system.

I don’t think they lose the right to complain.

Ok got it.

So then actually, yes the ruling was correct, and yes people are right to put this power back into the hands of congress, and out of the hands of civil servants.

Whatever terrible thing that someone would be complaining about in the future, it is mitigated by this correct ruling that helps stop that supposedly bad thing.

If you want to accept that position that I just laid out, then fine. You agree with me, but you would also be agreeing with the supreme court decision.

The era of a bipartisan civil service is past. The civil service, at least those offices which are in and around DC, is heavily liberal and is trending more so over time. In 2020, DC went 92% for Biden, and Biden also handily won every county with significant government employment in Maryland and Virginia.

Though I couldn't easily find any hard statistics, which may not exist for Hatch Act reasons or otherwise, I'd rate the current composition of the DC-centered civil service at around 70-80% Democrats; defense and intelligence a little lower, health and social services a little higher. If current trends continue, this will reach 90% in many agencies within a decade.

Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter. It is obviously not representative of the country as a whole, though that is only based on a rather shallow and one-dimensional analysis. However, it explains at least part of why this is happening.

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