The once and future president, Donald Trump, has already begun the gargantuan task of selecting staff for his incoming administration, but he should also keep an eye out for specific woke bureaucrats to fire as soon as he enters office on Jan. 20, 2025.
Trump didn’t just win the Electoral College on Nov. 5; he won the popular vote. He has a clear mandate to take charge of the federal government and root out the woke elites who pull the strings in Washington, D.C.
My research for my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” highlights four key bureaucrats to whom Trump will likely deliver his iconic line from “The Apprentice”: “YOU’RE FIRED!”
“The Woketopus” exposes how a vast network of left-wing donors props up a system of woke nonprofits that staff and advise federal agencies, championing leftist policies in the administrative state. Each of these bureaucrats has ties to this massive influence campaign.
If Trump wants to undermine the deep state and bring sanity back to the federal government, he will prepare the pink slips for these bureaucrats:
1. Kristen Clarke
Kristen Clarke heads up the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights, and she’s the force behind the DOJ’s disproportionate charges against pro-life protesters outside abortion clinics.
Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Association opinion overturning the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade, vandals have attacked at least 95 pro-life pregnancy centers and 303 Catholic churches. Yet in all of 2022, the Justice Department did not charge a single person with any attacks, and it only charged four people with violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for such vandalism in 2023.
According to the Justice Department, the FACE Act protects access to both abortion clinics and pro-life pregnancy centers, but the Civil Rights Division charged 26 pro-lifers with FACE Act violations in 2022. By contrast, the DOJ only charged four people with FACE Act violations in 2021 and even fewer in the years before that. Clarke, as assistant attorney general for civil rights since May 2021, leads the division in charge of FACE Act prosecutions.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who held Clarke’s job during the Obama administration, said in December 2022 that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work, including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
A former DOJ official told The Daily Signal that the department appears to be “using the FACE Act to intimidate the pro-life population of the country.”
Clarke served as president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a left-wing activist group. She also worked for five years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a leftist group that ties abortion to “racial justice.” Both groups have frequently accessed the Biden White House and received large cash infusions from the Left’s dark money network.
This bureaucrat’s social media history suggests a bias against pro-lifers and Christians. She cited the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center in condemning Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit pro-life and religious freedom law firm, as a “hate group.”
She said that those protesting Dr. Anthony Fauci, the controversial COVID-19 czar and former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, should be “publicly identified and named, barred from treatment at any public hospital if/when they fall ill and denied coverage under their insurance.”
As my former colleague Mary Margaret Olohan exclusively reported for The Daily Signal, Clarke had been arrested for attacking her then-husband, Reginald Avery, with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone in 2006. The pair finalized their divorce in 2009. Clarke had the arrest expunged from her record, and during her Senate confirmation, she denied ever having been arrested or having been accused of committing a violent crime. Clarke admitted to her failure to disclose this arrest, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called for her to resign.
2. Julie Su
President Joe Biden vowed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” and so long as we’re talking about the union bosses and infrastructure, he fulfilled that pledge in spades. Not only did he appoint the first former union leader to head the Department of Labor, but his second leader at the department crafted a regulation that will force more Americans out of contract work and toward jobs that are easier to unionize.
Julie Su, the acting secretary of Labor, has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate in that role. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., refused to support her confirmation in part due to her “progressive background.” Senate Republicans pressed her on her history as California labor commissioner, a role in which she failed to prevent unemployment insurance fraud and urged staff not to collaborate with federal immigration authorities.
Su also championed AB5, a controversial California law that forcibly reclassifies independent contractors in the state as W-2 employees, restricting the relationship between employer and employee. She said she would support a similar policy as secretary of labor, and she indeed carried out that threat.
The Labor Department finalized a rule on independent contractors on March 11. This rule inserted federal bureaucracy between Americans who seek more flexible work and employers who are willing to offer it.
You may think of independent contractors as Uber drivers, accountants, and freelance writers, but according to a December 2023 Upwork study, 64 million Americans performed freelance work in 2023, representing 38% of the U.S. workforce. As Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Rachel Greszler explained, contractors include many workers you may not expect, including IT consultants, makeup artists, musicians, interpreters, fitness instructors, copy editors, and truck drivers.
Under Su, the Labor Department crafted a rule that is not only complicated and vague, but subject to interpretation.
Why limit Americans’ flexibility in work? The lead sponsor of California’s AB5 provided an answer.
“We won’t accept employee misclassification or a third classification of employment,” California Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez wrote in 2019 on X, then known as Twitter. “No sub-standard workers in CA,” she added with the hashtag “#AB5ForAUnion.”
When a Twitter user asked, “What does your hashtag mean?” Gonzalez replied, “It means we get AB5—then we organize workers into a union.”
Woke bureaucrats support unions in part because large labor unions contribute heavily to the Democratic Party. In fact, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees also funnel money to leftist activist groups that pressure the federal government on various policies, including cracking down on oil and gas, turning federal agencies into voter registration offices, and demonizing conservatives as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Unions form both part of the Woketopus’ influence arm and part of the dark money network funding this behemoth.
3. John Podesta
To call John Podesta a mover and shaker in Democratic politics would be an understatement. Not only did he serve as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and the chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, but he advised Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden on green energy policies and launched the Center for American Progress, which Politico has described as “the most influential think tank of the Biden era.”
CAP has fed more than 60 officials into the Biden administration and helped shape Biden’s legislative initiatives and executive actions. Neera Tanden, CAP’s president and CEO from 2011 to 2021, currently serves as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
Podesta currently directs the $369 billion in climate spending approved in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed in August 2022.
Despite its name, the law has arguably worsened inflation, and Biden touts it not as the solution to rising prices, but as “the largest climate investment in history.”
CAP checks off all the boxes for woke ideology: promoting critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist in favor of whites and against blacks), upholding transgender orthodoxy, supporting technocratic government, and pushing climate alarmism.
The center also advocates subsidies for wind and solar, even though fossil fuels and nuclear energy are far more reliable. While many on the Left claim that man-made climate change threatens to destroy our civilization, climate doom predictions have stubbornly refused to come true since the 1970s, and the Left’s purported solutions to this exaggerated crisis make life harder and more expensive for Americans and others around the world.
Trump will likely move to cut the head off the snake by terminating Podesta on Day One, and turning his attention to the bureaucrats who formerly worked at the Center for American Progress.
4. Rachel Levine
Few bureaucrats exemplify the dangers of transgender orthodoxy more than Rachel Levine, assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services.
A male who identifies as female, Levine has admitted that he is glad he didn’t “transition” until later in life because otherwise he would not have had the joys of fatherhood. Yet he boldly advocates for “treatments” that will remove the later possibility of parenthood from young boys and girls who are confused about their gender in the here and now.
Levine has even enlisted doctors to preach the virtues of gender ideology, as if good doctors should be “ambassadors” for the idea that it is healthy for gender-confused children to take drugs that will stunt their growth and make them resemble members of the opposite sex.
In November 2020, the Victory Institute, an LGBTQ activist group, partnered with the prominent LGBTQ activist group the Human Rights Campaign and others to compile a list of qualified candidates for federal positions who identify as LGBTQ. Levine featured prominently on that list.
On the same day, the Human Rights Campaign released a “Blueprint for Positive Change,” recommending specific policies for Biden to implement. According to my analysis, Biden implemented more than 75% of those recommendations.
The Human Rights Campaign acts as a kind of LGBTQ mafia, blackmailing companies into supporting its causes by publishing a “Corporate Equality Score” that investors in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement use to rate firms. The HRC has used this clout to achieve policy wins in the Biden administration, and Trump will likely reverse many of those policies.
Among many other things, HRC urged Biden to hire more LGBTQ people in his administration—likely leading the bureaucracy to hire less qualified staff in order to reach a woke quota.
Levine’s transgender identity made him extremely visible in the administration, and his advocacy for “gender-affirming care” should make him persona non grata in the next administration.
These bureaucrats support woke policies and will work to undermine Trump from within if he does not root them out.
