Sending Federal Employees to a 'God-Awful Place'

To state the obvious, Rick Perry really doesn't like the federal government or the people who work for it. Here, in case you missed it, are his comments this week in New Hampshire about what he would do with federal employees who didn't get behind his agenda in a Perry Administration:

"If you have Health and Human Service[s] bureaucrats who try to block our being able to block-grant dollars back to the states . . . you all can decide how best to deliver health care in New Hampshire," Perry said. "I don't think you can fire federal bureaucrats, but you can reassign them. But reassign them to some really god-awful place."

A couple of quick thoughts about this:

• You can fire federal employees. It's arguably a more arduous process than it needs to be, but it's also slow for a rather obvious reason: to provide civil service protection against arbitrary firing for political reasons.
• In the real world, it's hard to see a scenario in which career bureaucrats would stand in the way of a legitimate policy initiative. It is their job to implement the policy agenda of the country's political leadership, and the vast majority do so with professionalism and skill. The only conveivable way in which civil servants would stand in the way of the implementation of a block grant program is if such a program was being put in place in violation of federal law or regulation. And in that case, the employees' oath to uphold the Constitution would require them to try to stop such overreach.