Kathleen Walters was only 23 days away from qualifying for early retirement at the IRS when she decided to quit, rather than acquiesce to a Trump-administration request that she break the law and compromise millions of people’s privacy. She’s one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have left or been fired from their federal-government jobs in the past year. In this episode, host Anne Applebaum speaks with Don Moynihan, an expert in the history of public policy from the University of Michigan. He explains how the destruction of America’s civil service is part of the administration’s greater effort to create a government that derives its power through unprecedented means and fundamentally disrupts democracy as we know it. 

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