Wake up with the Washington Examiner: Trump tries to drain the swamp again and Democrats go to Biden with hat in hand

President-elect Donald Trump rode to victory eight years ago on a promise that he, an outsider, could row into Washington and sweep up the streets. It’s hard for him to make that same case now. He is an established member of the political class as a former president and perennial campaigner.

However, his promise to drain D.C. still stands, and the Washington Examiner is taking a look at how Trump’s return to the White House will affect the district.

In our first installment, Breaking News Reporter Jack Birle looked back at a laundry list of promises Trump made in March 2023 that previewed his plans to pull the plug on benefits for federal workers who, ostensibly, live and work in D.C.

Whether the thousands of federal workers who staff the myriad agencies headquartered in Washington are living or spending any time in the district is a primary focus of the Trump administration. It’s also one item on which Trump and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser are likely to find common ground.

Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency and run point on much of his swamp-draining agenda. The pair have promised to prioritize ensuring that federal workers break their COVID-19-era habits and return to their workplaces — or lose their jobs.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), chairwoman of the Senate DOGE Caucus and a crusader against government waste and abuse, lambasted government employees who have been working remotely for years and netting huge benefits from it that have nothing to do with their taxpayer-funded careers.

“Bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers’ time,” Ernst wrote. “Members of President Biden’s own cabinet claimed to be on the clock while being out of office and unreachable.”

Getting people to come downtown again has been a priority for Bowser for years. She and Trump have little in common, and their interests in returning workers to their offices might come from different base desires, but she will be a key ally if he succeeds in a major plank of his D.C.-centric platform.

Then again, it’s not clear at this stage whether Trump will have the authority to fire employees who refuse to return to the office. This is why he is promising to reimplement the mechanisms he put in place at the end of his first term, which made it easier to fire government employees.

He has promised to reinstitute Schedule F, a classification he imposed via executive order that removed protections for federal workers and made it easier to fire them. President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order and added new protections for those same employees, which will create an additional knot for Trump’s team to untie.

Click here to read more about what Trump wants to do with Washington.

Democratic demands for Biden

Democrats can’t seem to make up their mind what they want from Biden. On the one hand, he has been a scapegoat for the brutal loss to Trump and Republicans last month. On the other, he is still in the White House and has all of the power and trappings that come with being the president.

He showed he was not opposed to flexing that power when he pardoned his son for a decade’s worth of crimes known and unknown. So, Democrats figure that if he is willing to keep himself in the fight for his family, maybe he can be pressured to do a few more favors for his party before he fades into retirement.

White House Reporter Haisten Willis has run through a few of the items Democrats have on their wish list this holiday season, including more pardons, a few tools to fight Trump, and yet another attempt to work around the Supreme Court and cancel swaths of student loans.

The pardon power is a sweeping system that gives the president huge leeway to alter people’s lives, typically on his way out of the White House. Now that Biden has thrown up barriers around his son to protect him and the family from persecution, Democrats are asking the president to do the same for his allies and for the people who are more commonly granted pardons — convicted criminals who have served time in jail or prison and are petitioning for an opportunity to return to society.

In particular, Democrats want to see Biden offer clemency for several death row inmates before Trump returns to office.

“If Biden does not take action on this front, up to 40 federal death row inmates would be eligible for execution once Trump regains power,” Willis wrote.

“Among the defendants are the Boston marathon bomber and the gunmen responsible for killing nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church and 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania,” he continued.

By giving death row inmates a reprieve, Biden could wash the bad taste of the familial pardon out of the public’s mouths, Andrew Fleischman, an Atlanta-based defense lawyer, told the Washington Examiner.

There have also been pushes for Biden to forgive lower-level offenders. The left wing of the Democratic Party wants Biden to “use [his] clemency authority to rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” according to a letter sent by Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Jim Clyburn (D-SC) to the president.

Biden’s left flank is also asking him to try to skirt the Supreme Court once again and cancel more student loans. Biden’s tug-of-war with the high court has been a running theme of his presidency. After his most sweeping cancellation plan was slapped down by the justices, he has returned to smaller, more targeted programs to make good on his promise to wipe out billions of dollars in student debt.

The latest plan would focus on borrowers “who attended institutions with documented histories of predatory practices; and processing any outstanding borrower defense applications.”

There’s a fine line for Democrats to walk as they try to squeeze as much out of Biden as they can before he’s gone and they find themselves in the minority.

Click here to read more about the long list of things Democrats want Biden to do before he leaves office.