1. I'm a fan of @margaretomara, and the civil service is a wonderful accomplishment. However, we have to acknowledge Bill Clinton destroyed the civil service in the 1990s and insane amounts of corruption have pervaded American politics for decades.
@margaretomara 2. The 'reinventing government' charade led by Gore and then pushed by Cheney was about destroying the civil service and shoveling money to contractors. pogo.org/report/2011/09…
@margaretomara 3. Clinton and Gore "loosened rules on sole source—i.e. monopoly—contracts, and slashed the Defense Logistics Agency, resulting in thousands of employees with deep knowledge of defense contracting leaving the public sector."
theamericanconservative.com/articles/ameri…
theamericanconservative.com/articles/ameri…
@margaretomara 4. Today there's a crisis in government, because civil servants can't really do much anymore. The expertise is gone. A lot of the complaining about Trump is indeed self-serving whining from incompetent partisan Democrats. It doesn't make them wrong.
@margaretomara 5. The Obama admin was corrupt. There were no 'scandals' because neither the GOP or Dems had an interest in pointing out the corruption. But it was bad. Here's @rosenblawg and @bwstucki on one of the lesser noticed racist implications of that corruption. newfoodeconomy.org/usda-black-far…
@margaretomara @rosenblawg 6. Whether it's flavored vaping, opioids, 737 Max - the scandals today that impact our world were part of the Obama era and Obama officials oversaw the problems. Obama's corruption wasn't tacky or overt like Trump, but he taught Americans democracy can't work.
@margaretomara @rosenblawg 7. The people I know involved in procurement say the Obama admin was as bad or worse than the Bush era. Just rancid levels. Trump's worse, but Trump ran *on corruption.* He just promised to cut his voters in on the corruption.
@margaretomara @rosenblawg 8. I see this piece by @margaretomara not as a validation of the civil service but as a call to restore it. Had it been functional, we would have known about the 737 Max problem before it crashed. That's what great civil servants do. Or I should say, did. nytimes.com/2019/10/26/opi…
@margaretomara @rosenblawg 9. And yes, I go into the history of this corruption in Goliath. Here's an excerpt on Clinton's administration. vice.com/en_us/article/…
