The Atlantic
37m ·An executive order will convert 50,000 government employees into de facto political appointees who serve only at the president’s pleasure, Robert P. Beschel Jr. writes. https://theatln.tc/8wZ0ZXyV
The plan, known as Schedule F, was originally announced in the waning days of the first Trump administration. If it survives the inevitable court challenges, “it will mark a major step forward in a MAGA quest laid out by J. D. Vance in 2021 to ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,’ and 'replace them with our people,’” Beschel Jr. notes.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote that if “these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job.” The executive order focuses on the president’s authority to remove traditional civil-service protections from about 2 percent of the federal workforce and terminate them at his discretion.
“Civil servants swear an oath to the Constitution, and are required to apply the laws of the United States as enacted by Congress. Their salaries are paid by all U.S. taxpayers. These obligations are every bit as important as loyalty to the president: Part of their job involves speaking truth to power, even when the facts they convey may be inconvenient and the policy choices difficult,” Beschel Jr writes.
A broad consensus exists among scholars and practitioners that federal personnel policy is fundamentally broken, with too many rules and too little flexibility. But less risky ways than Schedule F could fix this problem, Beschel Jr. argues. “If far more civil servants can be summarily dismissed, they’re less likely to risk frank conversations with senior administration officials. The quality of their advice will suffer, and their chief interest will be in preserving their jobs by pleasing their political masters. To an extent, the Trump administration is responding to legitimate concerns about performance and accountability within the federal bureaucracy, but replacing tens of thousands of people with political hires is highly unlikely to fix what ails the government.”
