(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Just days before the election and with everything perpetually on fire, the Trump administration snuck in a little-noticed broadside against the civil service this week. In an Executive Order issued late Wednesday evening, the president converted hundreds of thousands of nonpartisan bureaucrats, hired for their subject matter expertise, into political appointees, who can be hired or fired at the pleasure of the president.
Because what’s plaguing the CDC is too many employees who can’t be booted out for refusing to endorse the latest quack COVID treatment the MyPillow guy convinces the president to get behind, right?
Remember when Donald Trump insisted that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama and even took a Sharpie to a weather map to “prove” himself right? Under this new order, the National Weather Service employees who dared to contradict him with actual meteorological projections could be fired for it.
Rationalizing the move as necessary to restore good governance and allow poor performers to be weeded out without all those pesky civil service and union protections, the order reclassifies huge swathes of the federal bureaucracy as “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions,” language heretofore used to describe political appointees.
And it tasks the Office of Personnel Management with compiling a list of government employees to be recategorized by January 19, 2021, i.e. the day before the inauguration.
As Richard Loeb, senior policy counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, told the Washington Post, if Trump loses in November, he could expedite this “declaration of war on the civil service” by firing thousand of workers he’s long referred to as the “Deep State.” The loss of competent experts would cripple an incoming Biden administration.
Worse still, a lame duck President Trump could use the order to “burrow in” his own political appointees by reclassifying them as career bureaucrats, making it difficult for an incoming Biden administration to get rid of them, as former government ethics chief Walter Shaub explained to The Independent.
Creating the new category — known as “Schedule F” — and moving current civil servants into it could allow a lame-duck President Trump to cripple his successor’s administration by firing any career federal employees who’ve been included on the list. It also could allow Trump administration officials to skirt prohibitions against “burrowing in” — the heavily restricted practice of converting political appointees (known as “Schedule C” employees) into career civil servants — by hiring them under the new category for positions which would not end with Trump’s term. Another provision orders agencies to take steps to prohibit removing “Schedule F” appointees from their jobs on the grounds of “political affiliation,” which could potentially prevent a future administration from firing unqualified appointees because of their association with President Trump.
“It’s a two-pronged attack — a Hail Mary pass to enable them to do some burrowing in if they lose the election,” said Walter Shaub, who ran the US Office of Government Ethics during the last four years of the Obama administration and first six months of the Trump administration. “But if they win the election, then anything goes for the destruction of the civil service… [This could] take us back to the spoils system and all the corruption that comes with it.”
Can’t take your eyes off these f***ers for a minute!
So, who will Trump be replacing Dr. Anthony Fauci with on November 4? Dr. Oz? Dr. Phil? Dr. Pepper?
Can’t hardly wait.
Trump issues sweeping order for tens of thousands of career federal employees to lose civil service protections [WaPo]
Trump just quietly passed an executive order that could destroy a future Biden administration [Independent]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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