Hurry Up and Burrow

Runways and ridges in the republic’s yard

Now comes word the bureaucratic left has opened up yet another front in its war against the people of the United States, an increasingly (un)civil conflict that progressives are waging against the agenda President Trump was elected to pursue.

Apart from willful disregard of presidential directives and the slow-walking of reforms, not to mention the ideological land mines being laid by the all-powerful generals, ur, judges of the district courts, this line of battle falls within the federal government itself.

It is nothing less than an invasion behind the lines, carried out by an enemy within, and now Republicans are investigating just how deep the incursion has been.

There’s nothing new about this tactic, except maybe its urgency this time around, but it is still significant. It’s call burrowing, and it’s not unlike the image that popped into your head when you just read that word—like moles, these soldiers of the progressive order dig far down into deep state hideaways, where they can work their mischief for years and years, presidential administration in and presidential administration out.

Only in this instance, what we’re talking about is a special kind of burrowing, where unclassified political hacks, I mean appointees, burrow their way into permanent civil service classified positions in the Hive, where they can live almost forever. In this kind of burrowing, political appointees don’t fade away after a presidential administration ends, they pop up in career “nonpolitical” positions, that is to say, they become part of the ever growing entrenched bureaucracy.

With burrowing, three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the reincarnation of politically progressive administration officials as “nonpartisan” experts in the civil service.

To be sure, burrowing happens after Republicans leave the White House, too, but not as much, given that most conservative policy makers don’t believe that working with hundreds of automatons every day who all look and speak and groupthink the same way is anything but a living hell.

To them, the bureaucracy is not a honied hive so much as it is a cemetery of Karens, a mausoleum of Kevins.

After Trump’s re-election, the gravediggers got busy digging even deeper holes in preparation for new burrowers, and, sure enough, according to an analysis performed by The Daily Signal and reported by Daily Signal senior editor Tyler O’Neil, the burrowers from the Biden regime were doing what burrowers do, they were burrowing in.

For the period between January 1, 2024, and January 20, 2025, approximately 40 political appointees were approved for “career” positions, with 17 approved between October 1 and January 20, O’Neil reported. During the same year before Biden’s inauguration four years earlier, 29 Trump political appointees had burrowed in, so the Biden burrowers represented a 38-percent increase over the Trump administration’s burrowers.

The same pattern was found when comparing the first, second, and third years of each president’s term. There were 17 in 2019, seven in 2018, and 15 in 2017, bringing total burrowing from the Trump administration into the bureaucracy to 68, O’Neil reported, while four years later 11 political appointees burrowed in 2023; 23, in 2022; and 33, in 2021, for a total of 107, or a 57-percent increase in burrowing during the Biden Democratic regime.

The dangers of burrowing

Of course, it may not seem like either set of numbers is very large but over time the impact is disproportionately greater.

In 2010, writing in NYU’s Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, Lauren Mendolera, then an associate with Sullivan and Cromwell, took a look at the consequences in a paper, “How to Stop a Mole: A Look at Burrowing in the Federal Civil Service” and found significant damage in the backyard of the republic.

“At the end of the Clinton administration, 158 political appointees converted to career positions,” Mendolera wrote. “During the George W. Bush administration, it is suspected that 135 people burrowed in from political to career positions.”

In addition, Mendolera continued, reports by the General Accountability Office (GAO) for the decade ending in 2010 found that the rate of improper conversions—those not allowed by statute—remained steady at around 15 to 20 percent of all political to career conversions.

“Although the GAO has not reported burrowing statistics since 2006, if one assumes a fifteen to twenty percent rate of improper burrowing, the average rate reported in the previous decade, one may assume that nearly sixty civil servants illegally burrowed into career positions the last two times the executive changed political parties.”

That’s expensive for taxpayers, Mendolera wrote. In 2010, she estimated that burrowing was costing taxpayers some $4.5 million a year.

But the money and the actual number of burrowers are less important than the outcomes, for those numbers don’t have to be large to be significant. Chief among those dangers, Mendolera wrote, was that improper burrowing leads to unqualified civil servants.

“The GAO, in its burrowing reports, outlined specific instances where less qualified individuals burrowed into career positions on the basis of their political ties,” she wrote. “For example, the GAO reported that the Department of Homeland Security chose a former non-career appointee with limited experience over a career employee with over ten years of relevant experience. The Department of Homeland Security offered no explanation for its questionable decision.”

Mendolera didn’t say it, but it also leads to steady infiltration by progressives into the federal government infrastructure.

Flash forward and the same conversions, mostly by leftists, are still going on. According to the Daily Signal report, Megan Doherty, a political appointee at USAID jumped from that Titanic to a career position at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, with her salary increasing from $126,370 annually to $200,000. And even though Trump has largely shuttered that agency, too, it appears Doherty was one of five who survived.

Her background? Well you could guess, but don’t bother. The Daily Signal reports: “Doherty spent seven years at the National Democratic Institute, an ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofit that admits to having a’“loose affiliation with the Democratic Party and has received more than $1 million from the Foundation for Open Society (part of the foundation network of Hungarian American billionaire George Soros now run by his son, Alex). She served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as director for North Africa.”

So much for nonpartisan bureaucrats working in your best interest.

This last resume gets straight to some points that Mendolera danced around or missed: Burrowing—no matter who does it—increases the politicization of the bureaucracy. In addition, the politicos who channel into the bureaucracy are not generally low-level policy makers but higher grade employees who have more impact on policy-making. What’s more, until the Trump administration, it mattered not whether the moles were coming from Democratic or Republican administrations—they were all pretty much uniparty globalists eager to serve the bureaucratic agenda, especially those coming from George W. Bush’s administration.

SOS: The SES is here

Defenders of burrowing often argue that those who burrow in can simply be reassigned within the administration to neuter their political influence—which is generally true—but that is not the case with powerful bureaucratic positions within the Senior Executive Service (SES), the Politburo of the federal bureaucracy.

Make no mistake, the SES is the stick that stirs the power drink.

Now it should go without saying that, while political appointees should be making policy, they should be doing so within their roles as representatives of the elected executive. Once they burrow into the bureaucracy, they should be implementing policy, not making it, but, of course, that’s not the reason they burrowed in in the first place.

They burrowed in to make policy, to extend the political agenda of the previous administration. We all know that agencies make policies, and the more the burrowing, the more politically shaped those policies are. In her piece, Mendolera seemed to think that, except for burrowing, the bureaucracy really was as pure as the driven snow, a true legion of nonpartisan servants of the public.

We know that to be preposterous, but she did put her finger on a particularly important problem: Burrowed bureaucrats are the most dangerous, for when agencies engage in foot-dragging or delayed litigation or misdirection or misinformation, it is nine times out of 10 the burrowed appointments leading the charge and providing the cover. Burrowing not only installs the most partisan ideologues in the most influential part of the Hive, but, because of the temporal immediacy of the previous administration, animates it with activists.

All of which is why, in late February, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, launched an investigation into the hiring-related personnel actions the Biden-Harris administration took in its waning days. Comer sent letters to 24 major federal departments and agencies saying evidence was emerging that the Biden administration deliberately and improperly embedded Democratic political appointees into career civil service positions.

“We are concerned about job postings and hiring surges not based on actual agency mission needs, but based on political goals, including a desire to ‘Trump proof’ agency staffs by placing personnel opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda,” Comer wrote. “… We are particularly concerned about reported efforts to improperly embed Biden-Harris administration political appointees into career civil service positions.”

Comer came armed with examples.

“Ms. Elizabeth Peña, a political appointee in the Biden-Harris White House and Department of Labor (DOL) and a staffer on the Kamala Harris transition team, was just recently hired back by DOL as a non-political ‘term’ position in the Bureau of International Labor Affairs that will carry over into the Trump administration,” Comer wrote. “Term status enabled DOL to avoid the disclosure of a political appointee hired into a civil service job—a practice known as ‘burrowing in.’ The job Ms. Peña was recently hired for is not one that has historically been advertised as a ‘term’ position. We believe this may not be the only instance in which the outgoing administration has attempted to exploit loopholes in federal personnel law to embed partisans in civil service positions.”

And just what was Pena’s job? Let’s let her explain it, as The Daily Wire posted her Linked In announcement: “I’m thrilled to announce that I have returned to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) as an International Relations Officer! This new role marks a continuation of my journey to protect and promote labor rights globally. Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of working on issues that matter deeply to me and at ILAB, I look forward to collaborating with partners at home and abroad to uphold the principles of dignity, equity, and justice in the workplace.”

Her job, to put it another way, was to unite workers of the world into a global force for equity and social justice, code words for woke and institutionalized discrimination to benefit the elite.

Thankfully, nine days later, after the Trump administration came into power, Peña was fired.

The real solution to burrowing

Still, not every case of burrowing can be, uh, ferreted out, as is apparently the case with Doherty. In fact, most of them can’t because they represent years of accumulated burrowing, each layer exponentially politicizing the bureaucracy ever more.

To her credit, Mendolera did understand that dramatic reform was needed, and that it wouldn’t be easy:

“Each step down the civil service road, from the applicable laws to the oversight agencies, contains dramatic room for improvement. Improper burrowing, unlike other civil service transgressions, has the disadvantage of only appearing in the newspapers and the blogosphere when the executive changes political parties, at a minimum every four years. Such timing removes urgency from the issue; after all, we have four more years to create a solution. And even then, the complicated nature of the civil service system placates the public from demanding substantial changes to the system.”

It becomes a vicious circle, she wrote:

“By then, no one in the executive remains motivated to institute change in agencies to prevent burrowing, because when they leave office, they may need to exploit the same loopholes. Such inadequacies in the civil service lead to unqualified personnel and a lack of accountability to the public.”

Therefore, she concluded, the push for reform must come from Congress.

She was right about that but wrong about the reforms needed. Mendolera thought criminal charges, likely misdemeanors, and stronger termination provisions for improper burrowing would at least curb the excesses of burrowing. Back in 2010, that might have been a reasonable conclusion but it would turn out to be naïve: The malignancy of bureaucratic power would jump those guardrails in a flash.

Indeed, every attempt to reform the civil service to prevent burrowing has failed, especially the most significant reform in 2009 to increase oversight of the conversion process. As Mendolera herself recognized: “While the 2009 OPM policy changes close an important loophole in the civil service laws, the new policy may have little practical effect on burrowing.”

At the end of the day, that’s the result of all efforts to “reform” the bureaucracy, including burrowing. They have no practical effect. As Vivek Ramaswamy says, the bureaucracy simply can’t be reformed.

As such, there’s only one practical reform to end the practice of political burrowing into the civil service: End the civil service itself.

Move to at-will employment. When the entire bureaucracy serves the elected representatives of the people, burrowing become an irrelevant exercise. Indeed, looked at through the lens of the forest rather than of the trees, bureaucratic burrowing represents nothing less than the tunneling of an extra-constitutional and often unconstitutional bureaucracy into the republic, where it has no foundational standing.

The essence of a burrowed bureaucracy

All of which brings us to Wisconsin. Burrowing is also happening in the Badger state, but it’s of a different persuasion. Here, the burrowing isn’t so much moving from unclassified political positions to classified permanent ones—though there’s have been some flaps—it’s about the raw political power of the bureaucracy itself.

In Wisconsin, the conversion of a few political appointees matters less that the colossal power of the state’s collectivist bureaucracy, which as a whole doesn’t so much burrow into our constitutional schema as it does bully and slap about its underlings in the legislature. It is the mostly unimpeded burrowing of the entire bureaucracy that is the most pressing issue, if only our state GOP lawmakers will see it.

The bureaucracy in progressive Wisconsin has found a way to defeat virtually every attempt to corral its power. Curb its formal rule-making reach and they will make law through guidance documents. Pass a REINS Act to give the legislature more active oversight, and they’ll challenge its foundations in liberal courts.

As of today, and this especially so because Tony Evers is governor, most agencies continue to act in disdain of the legislature, and of the people those legislators represent, and it continues to grow, no matter what.

Over the years, even during the years Scott Walker was governor, the core bureaucracy was burrowed in and protected by a civil service system that wouldn’t let Walker and the Republicans bring the exterminators in.

For example, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was completely out of control, an agency gone rogue. Lives were ruined, bureaucrats rewrote laws on a whim, and hypocrisy was the gold standard of the day. The agency’s arrogance was breathtaking, as was its determination to foreclose northern Wisconsin to as much human habitation as possible.

Much of that plan was derailed once Walker and the Republicans came to power in 2010. They curbed the agency’s massive land-buying schemes. They shelved lakebed determinations that transformed private wetlands into public lakebeds. They overturned the most burdensome and unreasonable shoreland zoning standards, as well as prevented counties from being more restrictive than those reasonable standards.

Put bluntly, when voters put the GOP in control of state government, the DNR bureaucrats retreated into their little cubicles and warrens with little to do.

And yet, as they usually do, the bureaucrats are having the last laugh. Because Wisconsin state government does not have at-will civil service employment, bureaucrats live forever. The people elect their officials to implement the policies they want, but the state’s civil service structure prevents those elected officials from hiring the agency personnel needed to implement that agenda, or to get rid of those who don’t like the agenda and refuse to help implement it.

And so it was that after Walker and the Republicans in the legislature were elected, they found they could take property rights reforms only so far: They could stick those bureaucrats in a corner but they couldn’t fire them. And because they couldn’t fire them, they couldn’t hire their own people on the ground.

And so those DNR bureaucrats, as all bureaucrats do, burrowed deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and laid in wait for the next Democratic governor. Then along came Tony Evers, who unleashed the anti-democratic bureaucrats among us again. If they were not always specifically the same people, they were nonetheless their ideological relatives, molded and trained and brainwashed in agency groupthink.

And so now the state is back to shutting down northern Wisconsin as fast as it can. This time around the bid for complete state control of land is through purchasing easements instead of land, with the same result—locking up that land forever from development—and the old encrusted and entrusted bureaucrats live on to carry out the mission Walker interrupted.

Here’s a prime example of what a burrowed agency can and will do: During deliberations on the state’s plan to forever close off 70,000 acres in the Pelican River Forest with a conservation easement, the DNR hid the fact that there was major public opposition, including a resolution from the town at ground zero of the project. DNR staff had it in hand but the Natural Resources Board never heard about it before they approved funding for the project. Put simply, the DNR staff misled the Natural Resources Board (NRB) about supposedly unanimous public support for the acquisition. Instead, before they voted, the NRB was treated to an enthusiastic and even gushing performance by DNR staff who proclaimed that in all their years they had never seen such overwhelming support for a project. An impressive list of groups was rattled off to make the point. The thing is, all of those supporters were special interest groups.

What was missing were the voices of the people, the communities that would be most affected. When that omission was discovered, DNR officials claimed they were merely incompetent. It won’t happen again!

Or what about four years ago, when the DNR decided that certain parts of Oneida County’s shoreland ordinance were not compliant and the ordinance needed to be rewritten. The county’s zoning committee invited the DNR to a public meeting to explain why the ordinance was not compliant, given that neither state law nor administrative code had changed since the DNR certified the ordinance.

Ah yes, a different governor and a different interpretation. But, the DNR refused to meet with the elected officials, opting instead to communicate through county bureaucrats and local special interest groups. That’s right, the Orwellian bureaucracy refused to meet with the people’s elected representatives. The arrogance was breathtaking.

That is, in a nutshell, the essence of a burrowed bureaucracy.

End the civil service

Meanwhile, that bureaucracy continues to grow. Last year, in my series on the state bureaucracy, I sketched out the reality of that growth with the permanent civil service, and now it’s time for an update. No one should be surprised to see government getting bigger and bigger.

Last year, using state Department of Administration statistics, I pointed out just how stable the permanent classified workforce (PCW) had been during the pandemic years. In 2012, for instance, there were 28,014 full-time equivalent workers in the PCW; in 2020, when aggregate state employment numbers were imploding, the number of PCWs stood at 28,808.

In 2022, the PCW did drop to 27,105, but that was driven by a huge drop in one agency, the

Department of Corrections, which lost more than 1,100 filled positions since 2020, accounting for more than two-thirds of the drop in PCW filled positions.

So what has happened since? Well, in 2024, the number of full-time equivalent workers in the PCW grew again, robustly, to 28,912, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Government bureaucracy always grows, and always comes back from even temporary setbacks. Or look at it this way, in 2022 the state was hiring 13.1 new employees per day on average. In 2024, the state was hiring 14.2 people a day to make up for lost time. And make up for lost time they did.

Those are filled positions, of course, but the same trend is for total budgeted positions. In 2022 the number of budgeted positions had risen to 32,567 compared to only 31,493 10 years earlier. In 2024, the number of budgeted positions rose to 33,709. So not only did the number of core

bureaucrats actually on the job remain stable over the decade and is now increasing again, the number of budgeted positions actually rose. And, in government, what’s budgeted will sooner or later be filled.

The bottom line is, just as on the federal level, there’s just no reforming this mess. The state needs at-will employment in the civil service ranks to ensure accountability to public officials. Bureaucrats will snub their noses at elected officials a lot less when elected officials have the ability to get rid of them.

Then, too, as I have written before, the leaders in the Legislature need to take seriously former justice Dan Kelly’s advice to exercise its oversight powers aggressively. The legislature needs to use its power to convene oversight hearings, to compel agency participation by using subpoena power, and to use those hearings as a bully pulpit to shine a relentless light on what the agency is doing to the people of this state.

That might not make an impression on the bureaucrats, but it could make a big impression on the governor who is in charge of the agency. It’s time to hold him accountable for this agency’s rogue ways once more.

Years ago, Laura Mendolera wondered how to stop a mole. She thought it could just be contained, given rules to live by, while a watchful eye was kept. She was wrong.

Turns out, there’s only one way to stop a mole, and we all know what it is.