The “relentless GOP attack” on the federal bureaucracy “amounts to an assault on the very idea of professional government,” Dan Zegart writes in The Nation (subscription required) after an eight-month investigation. “It would alter a cornerstone belief of American governance, dating to the Pendleton Act of 1883, that it is essential to insulate public servants from partisan influence.”

Zegart documents “an unprecedented attempt by the Bush team to extend direct political control deep into operational areas throughout the executive bureaucracy, especially at agencies where the Administration has strong policy interests such as the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and the Interior Department.”

“[T]the executive branch is undergoing a brain transplant,” Zegart says. “An entire culture of civil service professionals loyal to their agency’s mission is being systematically replaced with a conservative cadre accountable to the White House. While every President appoints his own ‘politicals’ to run the departments, the Bush team has broken new ground, attempting to realign the executive branch permanently by junking a 100-year-old system of merit-based hiring for career bureaucrats.”

I’m calling attention to Zegart’s article in The Nation’s Nov. 20 issue–”The Gutting of the Civil Service” –for several reasons. One is that the article is far and away the most comprehensive report I’ve seen on an issue of supreme importance to the lives, safety, health, and pocketbooks of Americans and to the environment. Another is that Congressional Democrats have pretty much looked the other way.

“They’ve done little to oppose Bush’s politicization of the bureaucracy,” Zegat writes. “‘It’s not sexy,’ commented one Congressional staffer.”

Here are a few highlights of the article:

• In public, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr., a close friend of George W. Bush at Yale and a fellow member of Skull & Bones, backed the government’s multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the tobacco industry, “which Bush disparaged in his 2000 campaign.” Career Justice Department lawyer Sharon Eubanks directed the tobacco team and “reported directly to Daniel Meron, a principal deputy assistant attorney general who…had been a conservative TV commentator during the Florida recount in 2000.

“As the trial wore on, Eubanks said, the political interference increased. As closing arguments approached, McCallum tried to persuade her to scale back the government’s demand for an industry-funded, twenty-five-year, $130 billion package of smoking cessation and other anti-cigarette programs. Eubanks refused. Late on the night of June 6, 2005, with summations only hours away, McCallum pressured the team to reduce that number drastically, losing his temper and shouting, according to Eubanks, who walked out of the meeting….

“The next morning, minutes before Court, McCallum sent an e-mail …shrinking the number to $10 billion over five years,….Six months later, Eubanks took early retirement after twenty-two years at the Justice Department and six years on the tobacco suit.”

• “‘They’ve put people in charge of many offices who simply don’t believe in the mission of the office,’ said William Yeomans, a twenty-four-year veteran of the Justice Department’s civil rights division who quit last year after being inexplicably transferred to the criminal unit. ‘And they are there to insure that those offices will never return to carrying out the policies or enforcing the law in the way that they used to. And they’re going to do that by changing the people who are in the bureaucracy.’”

• “Joe Rich and others at the civil rights division of the Justice Department claim there has been a deliberate effort to replace pro-enforcement careers with Bush loyalists. Rich served for thirty-seven years under regimes as different as those of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. He left civil rights because of the growing chasm between career lawyers like himself, who believe in the aggressive enforcement that had been the unit’s hallmark, and Bush political appointees hostile to that tradition….

“By April 2005, when Rich retired, almost all the senior managers in the civil rights division–charged with enforcing laws against employment, voting and housing discrimination–were gone. In fiscal year 2005 alone, 20 percent of the division’s litigators quit. Unlike those departing, the new arrivals were not necessarily graduates of elite law schools, and their résumés often failed to demonstrate any interest in attacking civil rights abuses. What they did have in common, said Rich, were dependable hard-right sympathies….

“‘In all the Bush years, there wasn’t one case brought on behalf of African-Americans,’ said Rich of his experience at the voting section.”

• “Former FDA officials estimate that between fifty and a hundred senior managers have quit, retired or been demoted, fired or transferred over the past five years, although no one knows the precise number, and the agency refused to provide any figures or comment for this article.”

Also see Princeton University Professor David E. Lewis’s article for NiemanWatchdog.org, “Michael Brown as wake-up call to journalists,” and Paul Krugman’s New York Times opinion column, “All the President’s Friends,” both from September 2005.