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Trump Signs Executive Order Aimed At Political Appointees Taking Over U.S. Government
You aren't the only one who missed this two weeks ago: Trump signed an Executive Order in late October 2020 that deeply undermines the professional federal civil service and sets up his cronies to burrow into permanent jobs in our US Government. While President, Trump has prioritized loyalty over competence. He has targeted career officials for demotion or removal for the crime of co-operating with Congress. Giving him the power to fire career officials would be a disaster.
Trump fired his biggest broadside yet against the federal government by issuing an executive order that would remove job security from an estimated tens of thousands of civil servants and dramatically remake the government. The directive, issued October 21, 2020, strips long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking, allowing them to be dismissed with little cause or recourse.... Federal scientists, attorneys, regulators, public health experts and many others in senior roles would lose rights to due process and in some cases, union representation, at agencies across the government.
The order would shift the affected employees from what is known as the “competitive service” — which covers the bulk of the executive branch — into the “excepted service,” which in general applies to political appointees below the level requiring Senate confirmation. The group would no longer be hired under competitive procedures....
Our civil service is the envy of the world and must be strengthened and enhanced. Without strong safeguards, the risk of hiring and firing for political reasons is high. We must firmly emphasize how dangerous this is: effectively stripping protections from civil servants and politicizing the policy apparatus of government. A civil service protected from politics is a key element underwriting our democracy. Peaceful transitions are possible because a professional class of civil servants serves across administrations regardless of politics.
....the order, coming less than two weeks before the election, represents a stunning effort to reshape large parts of the nonpartisan government, which is supposed to serve as a cadre of subject-matter experts for every administration.... would upend the foundation of the career workforce by imposing political loyalty tests.
“I am calling this a declaration of war on the civil service,” said Richard Loeb, senior policy counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers.
If Trump politicizes the civil service, American government is finished. Someone's unqualified second cousin will be making important decisions about water quality or food safety instead of a scientist. This is the first thing - the very first thing - that authoritarian leaders do when they take power: Replace all the competent people with lackeys.
Rep. Don Beyer (D), whose Northern Virginia district includes about 85,000 federal workers, said the order, if enacted, would usher in loyalty tests and further politicize agencies that have become deeply partisan workplaces under Trump. “It’s an attempt to redefine the civil service as a political arm of the presidency rather than public servants who work for the American people,” Beyer said, calling the result “open cronyism that does not benefit the country, but the president.”
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said in a statement on Thursday that the executive order is “the most profound undermining of the civil service system in our lifetimes. This executive order strips due process rights and protections from perhaps hundreds of thousands of federal employees and will enable political appointees and other officials to hire and fire these workers at will,” Kelley said.
The White House’s earlier efforts to limit the power of federal employee unions and impose faster discipline survived multiple court challenges as it created a climate of anxiety across much of the government.
It would be a profound reimagining of the career workforce, but one that may end up as a statement of purpose rather than anything else. The order fast-tracks a process that gives agencies until Jan. 19 to review potentially affected jobs. That’s a day before the next presidential inauguration. An administration under Democratic nominee Joe Biden would be unlikely to allow the changes to proceed.
This is so horrific that a Trump appointee immediately resigned over it:
The Trump administration-appointed head of a key advisory council on the civil service has resigned over an executive order to strip away protections against political interference in hiring and firing for a large portion of the career federal workforce.
“I simply cannot be part of an Administration that seeks . . . to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career Federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law . . . not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration."
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