What’s Next for the Woke Bureaucrats in the Administrative State?
President-elect Donald Trump poses a serious threat to the woke bureaucrats and their left-wing allies who have injected their ideology into the administrative state, but these activists won’t be giving up easily.
As Trump staffs up for a second term, the bureaucrats have hatched at least three strategies to oppose him: returning to the left-wing nonprofit sphere to act as a government-in-waiting; passing new regulations to cement their ideology into the rules before Trump can reverse them; and burrowing into the bureaucracy to oppose him from within, the same way they did during his first term.
Trump will enter office Jan. 20 with a mandate to drain the swamp, but the swamp is working overtime to clog up the drains while it still can.
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Here’s how the swamp is fighting back to defend its bureaucracy.
1. The Revolving Door
Trump has vowed to carry out a mass deportation of illegal aliens, but it is often better for aliens to “deport” themselves by leaving the country on their own terms. Similarly, some woke bureaucrats in the administrative state have begun the process of self-deportation, electing to depart the Biden-Harris administration on their own terms before Trump forces them out of government.
Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, is getting the heck out of Dodge. She’ll be taking over as president of The Wilderness Society in February.
The Wilderness Society, like so many other environmentalist groups, began with the noble goal of conservation, but has since become a woke activist group that opposes fossil fuels and supports “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.
As I explain in my forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” Stone-Manning is already well familiar with the environmental activism sphere. She spent four years at the National Wildlife Federation before joining the Biden-Harris administration.
The National Wildlife Federation has worked hand in glove with the federal bureaucracy. In 2009, the Interior Department (which includes the Bureau of Land Management) found that the Bureau of Land Management was consulting with National Wildlife Federation staff on budgeting and that the staff were writing and editing official BLM materials to promote the federation’s priorities.
“We’re honored that some of our team members have served in and gone on to serve in essential state, local, and federal roles, including in Democratic and Republican administrations,” Mike Saccone, the federation’s vice president of communications, told me in remarks for the book.
Of course, The Wilderness Society also wanted a cut of the action. The Functional Government Initiative revealed in 2023 that Wilderness Society lobbyists brainstormed “legal and policy pathways” with Interior Department lawyers regarding the Twin Metals project in Minnesota. Interior later canceled leases owned by Twin Metals Minnesota, terminating a critical minerals project, as The Wilderness Society had demanded.
Stone-Manning, who notoriously wrote a threatening letter on behalf of tree-striking eco-terrorists, represents the first Biden-Harris administration official to leave in the lead-up to Jan. 20, but she won’t be the last.
2. ‘Trump-Proofing’ the Bureaucracy
Even before Trump won the 2024 presidential election, bureaucrats had been gearing up to “Trump-proof” the administrative state.
In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that will make it harder for Trump to reinstate his “Schedule F” executive order—an order that would have made it easier for the president to fire certain bureaucrats.
Public sector unions have also schemed with bureaucrats to tie Trump’s hands ahead of time.
The Environmental Protection Agency and its employees’ unions signed a collective bargaining agreement in May that created mechanisms for employees to report any other employee whom they deem to have had “improper influence” on a scientific study.
Public sector unions may also be working to extend collective bargaining agreements to preserve certain perks, like working remotely.
Similarly, the National Institutes of Health has designated an official to identify political meddling in the agency’s work, creating a scientific integrity council to review any such cases, Politico reported.
Of course, “political meddling” is in the eye of the beholder. Conservatives rightly consider Chicken Little climate warnings (the burning of fossil fuels will bring about the end of the world) a form of political meddling in science.
Unfortunately, the bureaucrats who staff these agencies would likely consider any attempt to dial down the doomsday rhetoric a form of “political meddling,” even though the American people selected Trump, who ran on a platform of unleashing all forms of energy production, including fossil fuels.
The organization Protect the Public’s Trust has compiled a list of at least a dozen breaches of scientific integrity under the Biden administration.
Although Biden issued a Scientific Integrity Memorandum early in office, claiming that “[s]cientific findings should never be distorted or influenced by political considerations,” his Office of Science and Technology Policy “formally recognized” “indigenous knowledge” as “one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States.”
Federal agencies “do not need to judge, validate, or evaluate Indigenous Knowledge using other forms of knowledge in order to include Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making,” Biden’s science office said.
3. Retrenchment
Of course, many bureaucrats will simply refuse to leave.
While some federal bureaucrats are already looking for other work, many are feverishly working to protect their jobs ahead of the Trump purge, The Washington Post reported.
Bureaucrats have started scrubbing social media and even changing their job titles in an effort to preserve their woke functions in the coming new Trump administration.
Some agencies are reclassifying jobs with “titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change,” the Post reports.
In other words, the Environmental Protection Agency is working to reclassify the climate activist and purveyor of critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against black people) who got hired to further “environmental justice,” to hide the real reason he has a job.
This will prevent the Trump administration from identifying woke activists and rooting them out, thus enabling these activists to undermine Trump’s agenda from within.
Given how vociferously the deep state fought the first Trump administration, leaking to the press and helping to launch the Trump-Russia probe and the first impeachment, Trump’s second administration must take the threats of entrenched bureaucrats quite seriously.
I humbly suggest that my book, “The Woketopus,” is a good place to start. It lays out many of the woke nonprofits that staff and advise the administrative state, bankrolled by the likes of Alex Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
This vast network should serve as a tool in identifying the worst offenders who seek to turn the federal government into a tool for the woke agenda.
