WISE ADVICE FOR TRUMPERS FROM A REAGAN VETERAN: Donald Devine served for more than four years as “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

That’s the federal agency that manages the career civil service. It’s not a cabinet-level position, but OPM can be among the two or three most powerful tools for a president intent on fixing things rather than merely talking about them.

Devine led the team of Reagan appointees at OPM (of which, yes, I was proudly one) that eliminated more than 100,000 unnecessary government jobs, reduced the cost of civil service health benefits while expanding the choices available, made pay dependent upon job performance for career workers, increased accountability among career senior executives, and changed federal retirement from a defined benefit program with an unfunded liability of more than $560 billion to a defined contribution program.

Achieving those goals required daily hand-to-hand political combat with the Mainstream Media, Democrats who controlled Congress and federal employee unions and professional associations. But Devine had Reagan’s support, he stood fast and fought the hard fights, and won most of them. The first major steps toward fundamental reform of the workforce were accomplished.

These matters are even more central in the Washington about to enter the second Trump era. The career bureaucracy is the foundation of the Administrative State that has been weaponized by the Left and turned the federal government into a sprawling behemoth the Founders would instantly recognize as an enemy of individual liberty and republican governance. Trump didn’t appreciate how important personnel was in his first term. There are signs today that Trump learned some hard lessons in that regard and is proceeding accordingly.

The incoming Chief Executive, his White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles (with whom I worked for a time in the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign), and all of his principal assistants would do well to sit down and carefully read Devine’s latest contribution to The American Spectator, “Controversial Appointees, Clay Pigeons, and Successful Government Politics.”

And Wiles and Stephen Miller in particular will find much wise insight and practical smarts about how to manage political bureaucracies at every level of the federal establishment in Devine’s other book of note in these matters – “Political Management of the Bureaucracy: A Guide to Reform and Control.”