Dem
47
GOP
53
In his first term, Donald Trump hatched a plan (well, OK, Russell Vought hatched a plan) to implement something they called Schedule F. It would exempt something like 50,000 civil servants covered by the Pendleton Act and suddenly make them political appointees subject to being fired on a presidential whim. On his first day in office, Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F.
Now Trump has renamed it Schedule Policy/Career and is pushing it through, despite the Pendleton Act, which makes it difficult for the president to fire civil servants except for cause. Their disagreeing with his policies and refusing to do things that violate the law is not "cause." The 255-page schedule also removes protections for whistleblowers and does much more to give the president additional powers. Like Schedule F, it would turn 50,000 civil servants into political appointees. Currently, about 4,000 government employees are political appointees. This is already one or two orders of magnitude more than any other democracy, where typically everyone below the cabinet and subcabinet are permanent civil service employees who do not change when a new administration comes in.
The move was very unpopular the first time around and still is. The Pendleton Act was passed in the first place to end the spoils system and make working in the civil service be based on competence, not being a crony of the president. There will be lawsuits, of course. Democracy Forward has already filed one, in fact. Its president, Skye Perryman, said: "This is a deliberate attempt to do through regulation what the law does not allow—strip public servants of their rights and make it easier to fire them for political reasons and harm the American people through doing so." The American Federation of Government Employees called it a "direct assault" on the civil service. Its president, Everett Kelley, said: "When people see turmoil and controversy in Washington, they don't ask for more politics in government, they ask for competence and professionalism. OPM [Office of Personnel Management] is doing the opposite. They're rebranding career public servants as 'policy' employees, silencing whistleblowers, and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power."
The new rule does not spell out which specific positions have been moved from protected civil service positions to the newly reestablished patronage system. It leaves that decision up to the president, so any time a civil servant does something the president doesn't like, the president can reclassify the position and then fire the employee. The Pendleton Act was intended to stop precisely that. Trump likes the patronage system better and OPM has now obliged with its new rule.
Trump, of course, is an ignoramus when it comes to both history and civics. And the people around him (like Vought) aren't much better, by all appearances. It was the various presidents of the Gilded Age, starting with Rutherford B. Hayes, who pushed for this legislation, because there were some pretty big benefits in it for them. Most obviously, it's a real pain to find hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people who are even baseline-level competent, and then to get them up-to-speed and able to do their jobs. Even if a president sacrifices some amount of loyalty by having pros on the job, he gains enormously in terms of ability to get things done.
Another issue is that the more patronage there is to hand out, well, the more hands that are out. If you have a few thousand people who would really like to be considered for, say, a thousand high-level jobs, that's easier to manage than if you have 100,000 people who would really like to be considered for 50,000 jobs. This is a logistical issue, but it's also an issue of angering those for whom the answer is "no." A thousand or so disappointed office-seekers are less likely to do damage to a president than fifty thousand disappointed office-seekers are. Indeed, the thing that pushed the Pendleton Act over the line was when a disappointed office-seeker assassinated James Garfield. Trump probably doesn't risk assassination, but angry people could lobby their communities against Trump, or they could spill any dirt they might have to the press, or they could mount primary challenges to Trumpy candidates, or they could become anti-Trump pundits, or a whole slew of other thorn-in-the-side things.
Undoubtedly, Trump/Vought think that they will be able to use people's desire to keep their jobs as a way to intimidate them into doing the administration's bidding. Good luck with that; bureaucrats are very good at slow-walking things, so that they aren't exactly defying orders, but they aren't getting things done, either. And if Trump does fire some large swathe of the federal bureaucracy, does anyone really think he'll be able to fill those jobs anytime soon? He and his people are pretty good at finding fawning lackeys. But they aren't too good at finding fawning lackeys who are competent (even a few of them, much less 5,000). Think about what a train wreck Kristi Noem has been, or Ed Martin, or Alina Habba. Then multiply that by a thousand.
In any case, it's yet another bit of drama to add to the pile. In the end, like everything else in the country, this will land on John Roberts' plate and he and his band of merry men (and woman) will get to decide whether law and precedent actually mean anything. (V & Z)