What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy (Politico.com editorial)

[C0RI0LANUS]

The impact can linger not just for years but decades.

While it is impossible to quantify a counterfactual, the cost of the anti-communist purges of the 1950s was clearly enormous and played out not just over the subsequent years but over decades. For instance, had expertise not been purged and dissent not been punished so severely across the government during the early 1950s, wiser heads might well have raised the right objections to America’s short-sighted anti-communism in East Asia, above all its rush to intervene in Vietnam. Does the Trump administration run the same risk of short-sightedness today?

Notorious anti-communist hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy led a devastating purge of intellectuals from the US government.



Our boys coming home from Vietnam in 1965.



The thoroughly despicable, Iran-hating Islamophobe Sebastian Gorka.




Source:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/06/government-workers-purge-1950s-communism-00202336