By We may be seeing why American foreign policy appeared to begin falling apart the moment that Joe Biden became president.
It’s apparently filled with fragile bureaucrats who can’t meet failure like adults.
In response to Donald Trump’s recent election victory, the Biden-Harris State Department held an in-house therapy session for employees on Friday, aiming to address heightened stress and emotions among staff. According to an internal memo viewed by The Washington Free Beacon, the session, titled “Managing Stress During Change,” was designed to help employees process their reactions to the election and navigate the uncertainty it introduced.
Change is a constant in our lives, but it can often bring about stress and uncertainty,” the email said. “Join us for an insightful webinar where we delve into effective stress management techniques to help you navigate these challenging times. This session will provide tips and practical strategies for managing stress and maintaining your well being.”
The session was led by a licensed clinical provider. A second one is scheduled for Nov. 13, according to the email notice.
One source described the meeting as a “cry session” over Trump’s victory, which is likely to usher in wholesale change at Foggy Bottom. Officials in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs have been working for months to sanction the Jewish government and withhold critical arms shipments, alleging Israel is not doing enough to provide humanitarian aid in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. They are said to have discussed the difficulty of Trump’s victory and urged employees to share their feelings in private settings.
“For four years, within the rank and file, there has been an over emphasis on people’s feelings, often with a college campus-like fervor, rather than the work of advancing America’s interests,” one U.S. official with knowledge of the meetings told the Free Beacon.
“This meeting was hopefully the last gasp of that,” the source said, adding that there is “lots to unf—k” at the State Department after four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
A different source told the newspaper that “the State Department is filled with partisan Democrats who are unwilling or unable to faithfully serve in the Trump administration.”
The State Department isn’t the only federal department where the bureaucrats plan to attack the sitting president or flea their positions, according to Politico.
The outlet “spoke with more than a dozen civil servants, political appointees under President Joe Biden and recently departed Biden administration staffers in the days since the presidential election was called for Trump, who were granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic and the risk to their jobs. Many are bracing for a wave of departures from key federal agencies in the coming months, amid fears that the next president will gut their budgets, reverse their policy agendas and target them individually if they do not show sufficient loyalty. The result is likely to be a sizable brain drain from the federal workforce — something Trump may welcome.
The former president and his allies are deeply distrustful of the executive branch bureaucracy and the more than 2 million civil servants who staff it — blaming a federal “deep state” for trying to undermine him in his first term and driving the impeachment efforts against him. As president, Trump named political appointees to various agencies with the purpose of cleaning house — and will again have the chance to nominate people for roughly 4,000 political jobs throughout the administration. In 2021, his White House launched an effort to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with political appointees, something he is expected to restart when he returns in January. He’s also threatened to move thousands of federal jobs outside D.C.
‘There’s a lot of anxiety among Biden appointees, like myself, who need to find new jobs — and also among career staff who are worried about Trump trying to remove career civil servants who had a policymaking role,’ a DOT official told POLITICO.
A number of officials, however, are wrestling with the conflicting desire to stay in government and defend the mission of the agencies they work for.”
One bureaucrat spoke plainly about the plan to simply undermine the sitting president. “We do our best to make sure either administration does what’s legal,” said a Department of Homeland Security staffer in a legal office. “If I leave, I’d be replaced with an enabler.”
The comments reflect something most of the country has come to see clearly: all the talk of “defending democracy” really mean “defending liberal power.”
[Read More: Harris Raising Funds For Recount]
