"It creates bubbles around policymakers," he says. "If you were a career civil servant and there is bad news that you want to share with the president, you're less likely to do so if you think, 'The minute I share that bad news, I'm going to get fired.'"
Moynihan says this is not an abstract idea. He points to what's happened with political appointees — who lack civil service protections — who raise the president's ire: The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was fired after the agency issued a preliminary report last year contradicting Trump's assessment that U.S. airstrikes had "completely and totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. The commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who had previously served as a career economist in the government for more than two decades, was ridiculed and then replaced by Trump after a disappointing jobs report…
