We were halfway through the lamb when Eliza brought it up — the executive order, the new schedule, the letter she said her brother had received that morning informing him his position had been “designated for review.” The bipartisan lobbyist set down his fork. Not in alarm. In appreciation. He said the timing was excellent.
I have been writing about Washington for thirty years, and I have learned to recognize when a room has decided not to mind something. Monday’s executive order — which reclassifies what the press release called “policy-influencing positions” and what the rest of us would call most of the federal workforce — has been described all week as expected. Anticipated. Long-telegraphed. Three different words for we are not going to be upset by this.
It is the same trick they ran in 2020 with Schedule F, except now the letter is different and the rationale is different and the lawyers are different and the outcome, we are assured, will also be different. My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent twenty-six years at the National Archives, called me Tuesday morning to ask whether her position counted as policy-influencing. I told her I did not know. She said neither did her supervisor. She said neither did her supervisor’s supervisor. She said the only person in the building who seemed to know was a twenty-six-year-old named Brent.
Brent, I should note, started in November.
At dinner, the bipartisan lobbyist explained that the order was actually a moderation — a softer version of what the more aggressive voices had wanted. He said this the way one says a soup has been thoughtfully reduced. Eliza asked who the more aggressive voices were. He examined his cufflink. The conversation moved to a Greek island someone had rented in September.
I want to be careful here, because I am told constantly that the danger of writing about this administration is overreaction, and I have spent thirty years being told the danger is overreaction, and somehow the things I was warned not to overreact to are now described, in retrospect, as having been worth reacting to all along. Forgive me if my pattern recognition is firing.
The order, as best as anyone at the table could parse, allows the administration to redesignate roughly two hundred thousand career positions as something other than career — at which point the protections that distinguish a civil servant from an employee at, say, a podcast network, simply fall away. Judy’s supervisor’s supervisor has been at the Archives since 1994. By Friday she may be there as a guest.
I asked the bipartisan lobbyist whether this concerned him. He said it depended on implementation. He has said it depended on implementation every January for nine years. It is the closest thing he has to a personality.
Eliza, to her credit, asked the question I have been waiting to hear someone at one of these dinners ask, which is what we plan to do about it. Her husband, a man who used to chair a subcommittee on something, suggested we wait and see what the courts say. Someone else mentioned a Brookings event next month. Someone else mentioned that the lamb was extraordinary.
It was. I will admit that. Rosemary, garlic, something with anchovy I could not place. We called it the lamb course. We asked for the recipe. We did not, in any organized way, discuss what to do about the two hundred thousand people whose jobs were being quietly moved into a different filing cabinet on Monday afternoon.
I drove home wondering, as I sometimes do, whether the function of these dinners is to metabolize the news on behalf of everyone who didn’t get invited. To convert it, by the time the dessert plates arrive, into something one can live alongside. To make the unacceptable a topic, rather than a problem.
The order took effect this morning. Judy is at work. Brent is, presumably, also at work. The recipe, when it arrived in my inbox Wednesday, called for the lamb to be cooked low and slow, until the resistance is gone.