What Trump’s Been Doing In The Shadows — Halloween Edition!
By: Eric J Scholl
Tags: Politics, Joe Biden, Leadership, Donald Trump, Election 2020

What Trump’s Been Doing In The Shadows — Halloween Edition!

Veiled by election hubbub, the President’s set the stage for carnage among civil servants, should he be re-elected. Among other things…

In any kind of normal time, our first item today would be a huge gigantic story. Now, it’s been totally overshadowed and engulfed by an unprecedentedly insane campaign, and COVID-19.

And that’s President Trump signing an Executive Order making it far, far easier for him to fire career civil servants. What he’s talking about is people who work for various federal agencies who don’t tend to change even when the President does, and instead stay through all kinds of administrations and faithfully execute their duties, which in most cases are not very political anyway. Because it would be very damaging to the operation of the federal government if new people got plopped into every single job potentially every 4 years. As even Trump puts it in his EO: “The Federal Government benefits from career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition”.

But in that same EO Trump talks about how “Separating employees who cannot or will not meet required performance standards is important”. Which sounds reasonable, maybe, as long as you don’t define “required performance standards”. And we don’t think it’s unreasonable, under Trump, for that definition to include unwavering loyalty to Trump, even if that’s not really central to the execution of your job.

Trump unloads with several major revisions to civil service that could be interpreted in a lot of ways depending on your objective and inclination. For instance, he asserts that agency heads “need…additional flexibility to assess” potential hires. (Loyalty test?) And he throws around phrases like:

“Conditions of good administration make necessary an exception to the competitive hiring rules.”

And of course firing too. The President saying agency heads (who he would be appointing) should have more freedom to take:

“Adverse action procedures.”

That’s a fancy way for saying giving someone the axe.

Also, why would Trump be issuing such an EO, at this particular point in time, if he wasn’t planning on a figurative massacre of many of these long-serving civil servants?

Trump goes to great pains of making it seem like his real objective is to make it easier to get rid of federal government employees who are just coasting: underperformers.

But that’s not fooling anybody. The move was too much for at least one person who Trump himself appointed to stomach. Ronald Sanders’ work involved determining appropriate salaries for civil servants. He resigned in protest, explaining Trump’s EO:

“[I]s nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process….I simply cannot be part of an Administration that seeks…to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance.”

This happened a little over a week ago.