Ezra has a post up about the Bush administration’s last minute reign of destruction on America, specifically the process of “burrowing”, where political appointees are moved to career positions. It doesn’t seem out of the norm for this to happen, but what’s different in this case is they’re burrowing a bunch of people who ideologically oppose the very existence of their own jobs. Firing them because they refuse to do the jobs assigned to them seems to be common sense, but the Obama administration probably best avoid that because it’ll come off as a political firing, even though the incompetence firing is indistinguishable from a political firing when your politics require you to be incompetent.
It’s not just burrowing that the Bush administration is engaging in, either. To no one’s great surprise, they’re pushing through HHS regulations that allow health care workers to do everything in their power to sabotage a woman’s contraception use in an effort to trick her into getting pregnant against her will. This, despite an unprecedented public outcry. There’s a couple of lessons to be learned from this.