Donald Trump\u2019s plan to make thousands of federal employees more like at-will political appointees poses a particular risk to the prime duty of government \u2014 national security.<\/p>\n
That was the message from a Senate hearing last week into the Republican presidential nominee\u2019s intention to undercut the federal civil service by reinstating a new category of federal employment, known as Schedule F. It would remove job protections from certain employees that prevent them from being fired for political or other inappropriate reasons.<\/p>\n
Trump imposed Schedule F near the end of his presidency, without time to implement it. Then, two days after President Joe Biden took office, he reversed Trump\u2019 executive order, saying it \u201cundermined the foundations of the civil service and its merit system principles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curiously, no Republican at the hearing spoke or defended Trump\u2019s proposal, which is item No. 1 on his \u201cPlan to Dismantle the Deep State.\u201d Republicans on the committee did not respond to questions. The Trump campaign did not respond directly to questions about the hearing but pointed to the plan on his Agenda47 platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President\u2019s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,\u201d he said in a platform video. \u201cAnd I will wield that power very aggressively.\u201d<\/p>\n
That plan and comments by Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee, would hit civil service protections for many in the 2.2 million federal civilian workforce. When Vance first ran for the Senate in 2021, he described his personnel management policy as \u201cfire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The potential impact of replacing civil servants with \u201cour people,\u201d partisan loyalists, would disproportionally strike national security agencies that employ about 70 percent of federal employees.<\/p>\n
A federal regulation issued in April, however, prevents an exception designed for political appointees to federal employment rules \u201cfrom being misapplied to career civil servants,\u201d according to the Office of Personnel Management. Yet, a second Trump administration could revoke that regulation if it reinstated Schedule F, though that\u2019s a complicated process.<\/p>\n
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told the hearing that Trump\u2019s plan \u201cto replace at least 50,000 nonpartisan career civil servants with appointees\u201d beholden to him \u201cwould weaken our national security and make us vulnerable to serious threats that continually face our nation. More than 70 percent of the federal workforce serves in defense and national security agencies.\u201d Trump\u2019s plan, Peters added, \u201cwould hit hardest where the stakes are the highest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump seems to agree on that last point.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,\u201d he said in the video. \u201cThe departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left\u2019s political enemies, which they\u2019re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The civil service protections his proposal would damage were designed to root out political patronage corruption. The protections prevent politicians from firing federal employees for political reasons, such as perceived disloyalty to a political party or president. While civil servants are charged with carrying out the policies of elected officials, they are required to do so equitably for everyone, on a nonpartisan basis.<\/p>\n
While Trump\u2019s platform says \u201cfiring underperforming employees \u2026 is often completely impossible,\u201d and other nonpartisan experts advocate a more efficient, less time-consuming system, the main beneficiaries of civil service protections are not individual workers. It is the public that primarily benefits from the impartial provision of public services, instead of a system biased in favor of partisan supporters.<\/p>\n
Also, as Peters and witnesses noted, the federal government already is overrun with political appointees. Almost no one thinks more is better, except Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cIncreasing the number of appointments by the president or the president\u2019s political leaders isn\u2019t even in the best interest of the political party in power, at that time,\u201d Peters argued. \u201cModern presidential administrations, they already struggle to fill nearly 4,000 appointments across the government, each term. And increasing that number by 50,000 employees would hinder any president\u2019s agenda even further and, likely, lead to vacant jobs and disruptions to government services for much of that administration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Furthermore, hearing witness Jenny Mattingley, a vice president of the good-government group Partnership for Public Service, said \u201cmany new administrations face significant national security challenges, early into their first year in office. Having nonpartisan career professionals who serve across administrations in place ready to provide the expertise and deal with these challenges is necessary to our country\u2019s safety and security, particularly when a president doesn\u2019t yet have a political team in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another consideration is Schedule F\u2019s potential impact on federal whistleblowers. They now have tools to fight retaliation against them from supervisors for disclosing government waste, fraud and abuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cSchedule F would turn the Whistleblower Protection Act into a bad joke,\u201d said Tom Devine, legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project.<\/p>\n
Rather than spending time and money creating Schedule F, \u201clet\u2019s use that same effort to systemically fix hiring and performance management in the federal workforce,\u201d suggested Elaine C. Duke, former deputy acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Trump\u2019s plan, she said, \u201cdoes not add anything to performance management except at-will termination.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s plan to make thousands of federal employees more like at-will political appointees poses a particular risk to the prime duty of government \u2014 national security. That was the message from a Senate hearing last week into the Republican presidential nominee\u2019s intention to undercut the federal civil service by reinstating a new category of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}