That was a very fascinating story of simultaneous ineptitude and dangerous intentions.
Not only reminiscent of Boris and Natasha at work, but also of a Russian Maxwell Smart teamed up with Inspector Clouseau.

In real life, it is also reminiscent of Natan Sharansky’s encounters with his KGB “team” once he came out as a refusenik and was denied approval to immigrate to Israel. Some of his stories about harassing them, in his autobiography “Fear No Evil,” are hilarious, and yet those Russian agents were just as dangerous as the ones that Christo Grozev describes.

For those not familiar with Mr. Sharansky:
https://www.genesisprize.org › honorees › laureate-2020 › biography
Natan Sharansky’s Biography | The Genesis Prize
Natan Sharansky was born in Donetsk, Ukraine. He was a spokesman for the human rights movement, a Prisoner of Zion and leader in the struggle for the right of Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. Subsequent to his request to make aliya, Mr. Sharansky was arrested on trumped up charges of treason and espionage. He was convicted in a Soviet court …

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org › natan-anatoly-sharansky
Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky – Jewish Virtual Library
Natan Sharansky is one of the most famous former Soviet refusniks and an Israeli politician, author and human rights activist.. Sharansky (born January 20, 1948) was born and raised in the Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), and graduated with a degree in mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.. Early on, Sharansky got associated with the human rights movement …

https://www.genesisprize.org › about › leadership › natan-sharansky
Natan Sharansky was born in 1948 in Donetzk, Ukraine. Mr. Sharansky graduated from the Physical Technical Institute in Moscow with a degree in computer science. After graduating, he became active in the human rights movement led by Andrei Sahkharov and very quickly became internationally known as the spokesperson

https://www.bbc.com › news › magazine-25560162
Natan Sharansky: How chess kept one man sane – BBC News
Chess kept Russian human rights activist Natan Sharansky sane throughout his imprisonment by the Soviets, writes David Edmonds. “Don’t disturb me, I’m playing chess.”

(AF: He was playing both sides in his mind; I can barely manage with a board and a real opponent!)

https://www.jewishagency.org › natan-sharansky
Natan Sharansky soon became an unofficial spokesperson for both movements. In 1977, a Soviet newspaper alleged that Mr. Sharansky was collaborating with the CIA. Despite denials from every level of the U.S. Government, Mr. Sharansky was found guilty and sentenced to thirteen years in prison,

(AF: He was later released, under pressure from the United States organized by his wife, and made aliya to Israel, which is what he had wanted to do from the beginning.)

https://www.myjewishlearning.com › article › natan-sharansky
Sharansky’s first years in Israel were momentous. His first child, Rachel, was born within a year of his arrival. In 1988, Random House published his memoir, Fear No Evil, its title taken from a verse in Psalm 23. Sharansky also quickly emerged as a leader of a Russian-speaking community that had ballooned after the fall of the Soviet Union.

https://jewishjournal.com › cover_story › 321127 › new-memoir-reveals-natan-sharanskys-life-as-a-jewish-activist
Sharansky is an idealist and a pragmatist, a paradox that shines on every page. “I no longer had the dissident’s purity,” he writes of his life in Israel. “I had to be a politician.”

https://www.jpost.com › israel-news › article-740016
Israel Independence Day: Celebrating 75 years with Natan Sharansky
Apr 26, 2023It is difficult to think of an individual who better embodies the arc of Jewish history over the past 75 years than Natan Sharansky.. Born on January 20, 1948, in a Jewish home in Ukraine in which …

https://www.jpost.com › international › article-700972
The Ukrainian crisis according to Natan Sharasnky
MARCH 10, 2022 20:53 Updated: MARCH 11, 2022
DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS: Natan Sharansky is a Ukrainian native who spent his formative years in Russian prisons.

(AF: It was interesting to see what Sharansky thought 3 years ago to the day; he supported Ukraine personally, and advocated that Israel do the same, with a realistic perspective:)

That Ukrainian history drips with Jewish blood should in no way impact the support and sympathy Israel and the Jewish people offer to and feel today toward Ukrainians fighting Russia, says former Prisoner of Zion and Ukrainian native Natan Sharansky.

“If we say we are not going to send our hospitals [to help the Ukrainians], because their great-grandfathers raped our great-grandmothers, then we will have to stop our diplomatic relations with most of the world and think about how to build our past, not how to build our futures,” he said.
…
None of that, he said, “should undermine for even a second our sympathy for the Ukrainians who are fighting at this moment – and paying with their lives – exactly for the things that are very important for us.

“We go to Europe, to France and Spain, and love to visit all those places for medieval history, and they [the locals] are proud to show various crusader castles, and you understand that every square meter there is full of Jewish blood from the most horrible pogroms. But you don’t say, ‘Okay, they deserve what happened to them under the Nazis.’ If that would be our approach, then we would simply be obsessed with how to destroy the world, because we were victims practically everywhere.”

That, according to Sharansky, cannot be the Jewish approach. Instead, he said that Israel must stand firmly with the Ukrainians.

Agreed – which is why they (Trump’s department heads) do sometimes throw out the babies with the bathwater, and why they are hiring some of them back, once the dead branch is cut off the tree.

How can Trump let go tens of thousands of civil servants as has been done?

I think it has to do with “realigning,” downsizing, or eliminating an organization, as opposed to firing individual civil servants.

A political appointee can be fired at the pleasure of the President, but–as things stand now–firing a career Federal Civil Servant is a much more difficult process.

Firing a career Federal Civil Servant requires a very specific, quite a long, involved, multi-step, document intensive, and arduous process–in some cases (I’ve seen some) taking years to accomplish, with the required meetings, counseling sessions, and documenting paperwork consuming almost the entire day–every day–of the supervisor trying to fire the employee.

I’ve seen a frustrated supervisor, doing a good job in a position/career she loved, quit the Federal Civil Service in frustration at having to go through this process, which almost wrecked her mental health, destroyed her. And, yes, in the end, the problem employee was never fired and, thereafter, he was “immune,” did whatever he wanted because, given this example, no one wanted to go through the hell it would take to fire him.

So, an outgoing presidential Administration can convert some of it’s political appointees into career civil service positions, these former political appointees “burrowing” into the bureaucracy, like a Tick.

You could also view them as the old Administration’s “stay behind forces,” there to cause as much resistance, obstruction, and havoc as they can for the new Administration.

What you have to understand is that the President is limited to appointing around 8,000 of his people, political appointees, to run all of the Departments, Agencies, Commissions, and other organizations which, taken together, comprise our Federal government, and to see that the president’s orders, initiatives, plans, and programs are faithfully and fully carried out.

However, the Federal bureaucracy–which is overwhelmingly Left in orientation–consists of more than two million employees, and each one of these various parts of the government can be counted on to—to one degree or the other –“resist” the orders, plans, programs, and document requests of any President who is not on the Left–orders can be deliberately “misunderstood,” “slow rolled, ” only partially, or very slooowly carried out, “stonewalled,” or simply be ignored.

This because of the attitude of this permanent bureaucracy, which has been summed up by the saying, “Presidents come and go, but we remain at our desks”–the bureaucracy can wait a President—in power for only 4 or 8 years—out.

So, for instance, it has been said that the State Department–supposedly under the control of the Chief Executive, the President, and his political appointee, the Secretary of State—”has it’s own foreign policy,” which is often not the foreign policy of the President who is in office.

Given this situation, I’d imagine that President Trump’s political appointees—a couple of people for each organization, sitting atop a pyramid of Federal employees which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands—are having to, first, identify employees who they can trust and, then, to fight their way through a lot of “resistance,” passive aggression, malicious compliance, or even outright sabotage–to get any of what the president wants done carried out fully and in a timely manner.

His geeky computer stuff is probably genuine, but there were a lot of inconsistencies in his personal and political positions, and a definite aura of trying to precipitate some extremist responses that he just didn’t get.
So he finally gave up.