Trump Begins Draining the Swamp, and the Public Approves

Donald Trump isn’t just draining the swamp.  In some cases, he’s prosecuting it.  

And the public is loving it.  

So much for the longstanding tradition of “lame duck” second-term presidencies.  

This week, the Trump administration began the process of downsizing our oversized and overpaid federal bureaucracy.  In a correspondence to government employees, the administration offered the choice of either returning to their offices full-time and accepting updated job performance standards or accepting a severance from employment in exchange for eight months’ pay and benefits.  

The correspondence also advised that future downsizing of the bloated federal workforce was also likely:  

While a few agencies and even branches of the military are likely to see increases in the size of their workforce, the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.  These actions are likely to include the use of furloughs and the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.  

In a section that would come as no shock to private-sector employees who don’t enjoy the broad protections against discipline and termination for performance or disciplinary issues that federal government workers enjoy, the offer also explained that recipients could expect “enhanced standards of conduct” in the near future:  

The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work.  Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward.  Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination.  

Only in government and its cheerleading mainstream media would such standards offend.  

All of this begins to restore sanity to federal government employment.  It’s bad enough that government workers enjoy outsized salaries and benefits compared to private sector counterparts, and remain largely beyond termination or even discipline in many cases.  But making matters worse, they increasingly exercise more and more suffocating control over our lives on everything from what cars we drive to our internet service to what news we can access.  A restoration of commonsense standards is long overdue.  

That also follows a Department of Justice advisory that it will begin prosecuting state and local government officials who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.  

Accordingly, Trump’s first week back in office renders the term “break-neck” insufficient.  

By reinstating a more muscular foreign policy, Trump has already cowed intransigent nations like Colombia into accepting his will on illegal immigration mitigation.  Mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens is underway, and the histrionic left is powerless to stop it beyond hurling tired accusations of racism and insensitivity.  He’s combating racial discrimination in the guise of “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) obsessions in the military and civilian ranks.  His impressive new Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is disrupting the mainstream media’s lazy assumption that it’s entitled to dominate daily briefings and forcefully pushing back against their political bias and habitual dishonesty.  

Perhaps most impressively as it relates to Trump’s central campaign promise to restore border security, illegal crossings at our southern border have already plummeted toward zero since he took office:  

Fewer than 600 illegal crossings were recorded at the southern border Sunday – a dramatic plummet from the thousands regularly encountered at the height of the Biden administration border crisis.  Across the entire southern border, just 582 people were caught attempting illegal crossings, with not one of the nine sectors from Texas to California seeing more than 200 people, according to Fox News.  In Texas’ Del Rio sector – which regularly saw 4,000 daily crossings when the crisis peaked in December 2023 – just 60 people were caught on Sunday.  

The numbers are a startling drop from the peaks of the border crisis when more than 6,000 people were sometimes encountered across the southern border.  

Not coincidentally, Trump is also enjoying his highest public approval ratings ever.  Additionally, a 61% to 35% majority of respondents in another poll said that they favor efforts to downsize the federal government, and a plurality favors imposing a hiring freeze across all federal agencies.  

Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2024 to disrupt longstanding norms of which American voters had tired, and these actions demonstrate that his second term won’t be a leisurely glide toward retirement.  

This man is no lame duck.  Opponents both foreign and domestic had better take notice.

Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.

Reprinted with Permission from CFIF.org – By Timothy H. Lee