Burrowing In D.C.

To make up for losing the recent referendum for change in the nation's governance, the losers have come up with a snappy comeback: a coup.

Well, sort of a coup. The outgoing Bush administration is spiking the bureaucracy with political appointees who, through the miracle of executive fiat, have suddenly been transformed into civil servants.

As political operatives in the government's sundry bureaus, agencies and whatnot, they could have been chucked unceremoniously, and no doubt would have been, by the Obama administration. With the shape-shifters covered by Civil Service job protections, removing them will be as tough, and just about as much fun, as digging out ingrown toenails.

This process is not unknown. It has been around long enough to earn its own nickname - burrowing. But in the past it has been used mainly as a patronage hustle, a way to reward loyalists, not to thwart an incoming administration by confronting it with in-house opponents to the very policies on which the new president campaigned.

The Washington Post, which has been keeping track, has found high-level switches in the Labor and Interior departments, in the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, often involving personnel with records of overriding professional judgments with ideological purposes.

The burrowing is part of the Bush administration's high-energy effort to use executive orders and other preemptive instruments to get in last-minute policy licks, especially against environmental protection. Typical winner: mountaintop strip mining. Typical loser: endangered species.

President Bush is getting high marks for the grace and openness with which he is greeting President-elect Obama, and rightly so. But once again, we find that Bush is just a covering glad hand for the strong-arm administration behind it.