A recent Napolitan Institute poll found that 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal bureaucrats who voted for Kamala Harris for president said they would not follow a lawful order from President Donald Trump if they considered it bad policy.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., won’t stand for it.
“The American people spoke when they voted President Trump into office,” Paul told The Daily Signal in a statement on the poll. “Any bureaucrat who does not follow the law because they consider it bad policy should be fired for cause—immediately.”
The poll, which RMG Research conducted on behalf of the Napolitan Institute and released earlier this month, revealed that 42% of what the survey characterizes as “federal government managers”—federal employees who live in the National Capital Region around Washington and earn at least $75,000 annually—plan to politically oppose the new administration.
Nearly two-thirds of those federal government managers who voted for Harris said they would ignore a lawful order from Trump if they regarded it to be bad policy. Only 17% of the Harris voters in the federal bureaucracy surveyed said they would follow Trump’s order.
Paul joined other Republican senators in condemning this deep state effort against Trump.
“Bureaucracy is the real threat to democracy,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, previously told The Daily Signal. Ernst leads the Senate DOGE Caucus, an effort to help the Department of Government Efficiency to cut federal waste and abuse. While the original DOGE was a nongovernmental panel led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump recently announced he would be giving it a role inside the government, replacing the U.S. Digital Service.
Conservatives often warn that insulating federal bureaucrats from Congress and the president weakens the voters’ ability to have a say in their government.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, noted other efforts bureaucrats are taking to tie the new president’s hands.
“Entrenched bureaucrats are already subverting President Trump’s agenda and working to box in the incoming administration and Republican Congress, including and especially on foreign policy,” Cruz previously told The Daily Signal. “President Trump and administration officials are going to have to focus immediately on ensuring such bureaucrats are fired.”
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., condemned the deep state effort as “shameful” and endorsed some policies to combat it.
“This polling data is shameful—civil servants must serve our nation, not their political party,” she told The Daily Signal. “The administrative state is a huge problem that demands serious reforms.”
The poll also found that Republicans who work in Washington federal offices are more likely to support Trump. Republican federal government managers proved more likely (74%) to say a bureaucrat should be fired for refusing a presidential order, while only 23% of Democratic managers agreed.
RMG Research surveyed 500 federal government managers between Dec. 9 and Dec. 23. The margin of error for this poll is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
