“personnel is policy.” If a person is more interested in a Human Resource department than Church, then he deserves to be deceived by the HR department.
I think you misunderstand the saying.
When the Reagan administration crowd… Then known as movement conservatives… Used the term, “personnel is policy…”
What they meant was that they fully understood that it’s not enough to issue a regulation; you need staffers to implement it, who are true believers in the constitution.
The Reagan administration, for the most part, understood that bureaucrats are not going to be vigorous enforcers of a limited government policy. Even if it’s their job, they won’t do it.
So you need to appoint true patriots to every office you possibly can.
They knew, 40 years ago, that the best conservatives didn’t really want to get jobs in government. But they also know that we needed the best conservatives to take those jobs. Because if we just issued solid conservative regulations, and left it to leftist bureaucrats to enforce them… Nothing would get done, and then, when the Democrats took the White house again, our window would have been closed with nothing to show for the years in between.
“Personnel is policy” means that no matter how good the policy is, do you need people you can trust to implement it.
JFD