Even if he loses, the action could sabotage a Biden administration indefinitely.
BY BESS LEVIN OCTOBER 26, 2020
Historically, when Donald Trump has signed executive orders, like to issue a travel ban against people from majority-Muslim nations or to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, he’s done so with lots of fanfare, tweeting about how they’ve made America great again, inviting camera crews to watch him scribble his Sharpie across the page, and sending his lieutenants out to brag about them on TV. But last week, the White House was relatively, strangely quiet as the president signed the esoteric-sounding “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In the Excepted Service.” And that was probably by design; because the action not only gives Trump the power to purge thousands of federal workers—the kind whose job protections have allowed them to deal in facts and stand up to presidential intimidation—and replace them with politically appointed hacks who would spend the next four years doing Trump’s bidding, but it would cripple a Biden administration for months, at a time when it will need to act fast on, among other things, COVID-19.
Of course, that’s not how the administration has summarized the EO, saying, instead that it’s all about getting rid of “poor performers.” But competence has never been of much interest to Trump, who evaluates who is the best person for any given job based on how hard they kiss his ass and pledge to do his bidding no matter what. Unfortunately, until now the president has been bedeviled by rules saying he can’t just fire civil servants for writing reports that say mask-wearing helps stop the spread of COVID-19, or coal mining is hastening climate change, or refusing to say that a hurricane was headed for Alabama when it definitely wasn’t. Thus, this new plan.
Here’s how the Independent describes it:
The order…would strip civil service protections from a broad swath of career civil servants if it is decided that they are in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions”—a description previously reserved for the political appointees who come and go with each change in administration. It does that by creating a new category for such positions that do not turn over from administration to administration and reclassifying them as part of that category.
The range of workers who could be stripped of protections and placed in this new category is vast, experts say, and could include most of the non-partisan experts—scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists—whose work to advise and inform policymakers is supposed to be done in a way that is fact-driven and devoid of politics. Trump has repeatedly clashed with such career workers on a variety of settings, ranging from his desire to present the COVID-19 pandemic as largely over, to his attempts to enable his allies to escape punishment for federal crimes, to his quixotic insistence that National Weather Service scientists back up his erroneous claim that the state of Alabama was threatened by a hurricane which was not heading in its direction.
In creating the new category, called “Schedule F,” Trump would basically take employees whose jobs are nonpolitical and are protected from, for instance, a president who doesn‘t believe science is real, and make them “at will,” while at the same time, giving political appointees the very job protection he’s stripping from civil servants. That would obviously be extremely bad under a scenario in which Trump is elected to a second term—as the Washington Post puts it, “think of the Federal Aviation Administration employee evaluating whether an airliner is safe to fly” or “the Food and Drug Administration employee evaluating the efficacy of a vaccine”—and there isn‘t a single person left in the federal government who is qualified or non-corrupt. But it would also mean, in the likely event Trump loses, he could go scorched earth and screw over Joe Biden when time is of the essence:
Creating the new category…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.
Trump appointee resigns over order removing job protections for some federal workers
Shawna Chen
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Federal Salary Council Chair Ron Sanders resigned on Monday over President Trump’s recent executive order that strips civil service protections for some federal workers.
Why he's saying: Sanders, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, said he could no longer work for the president as “a matter of conscience.”
“[I]t is clear that its stated purpose notwithstanding, the executive order is nothing more than a smokescreen 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," Sanders, a lifelong Republican, wrote in his resignation letter obtained by Politico.
“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,” he added.
Context: The executive order, signed last week, requires agencies to reclassify workers involved in "positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition" to a new category — named Schedule F — by Jan. 19.
Those workers will be exempt from some job protections.
Critics argue the order, which could affect tens of thousands of workers, will make it easier for the president to hire and fire federal workers. One prominent federal union leader told the New York Times the order was "the most profound undermining of the Civil Service in our lifetimes."
The White House says the order expedites removal of “poor performers.”
Trump’s Scorched-Earth War Against Federal Employees
His latest feint at draining the swamp could put a target on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s back.
MANDEL NGAN/GETTY IMAGES
Matt Ford/October 22, 2020
One advantage of a vague slogan like “drain the swamp” is that it can mean different things to different people. Does it mean ousting elected officials from their comfy seats in Washington, D.C., which is often said (and wrongly at that) to be built on a swamp? Perhaps it means cleaning up the murky influence of donors and campaign contributions in the nation’s capital. Maybe it even means washing away the toxic effects of lobbyists and well-funded interests groups in legislation and policymaking.
For President Donald Trump, however, draining the swamp appears to mean undermining the nation’s professional civil service. The White House released an unusual executive order on Wednesday night that could give the president the power to hire and fire a broad range of federal civil servants for any reason, or none at all. If fully implemented, the order would circumvent long-standing legal protections for government workers that were designed to insulate them from politicization.
This is a familiar theme over the last four years for Trump, who has complained all along that his presidency has been undermined by a “deep state” of federal employees who oppose him. His search for scapegoats for his own poor governance meshed well with the conservative movement’s disdain for civil servants in general, as well as its desire to demolish what it calls the “administrative state” of federal agencies and regulators. At risk is the hard-fought dream of a nonpartisan civil service without cronies or sycophants, and the confidence of Americans in their own government.
This latest executive order would create a new category of civil servants known as “Schedule F” and outlines how to shift a wide range of positions out of existing categories and into this new one. The White House made clear that it sought to seize greater flexibility in removing and adding federal employees who might otherwise be protected from dismissal by law. “Under the order, Federal agencies will have more flexibility to hire ‘Schedule F’ employees and will also be able to remove them without going through a lengthy appeals process,” the White House said when announcing the move.
The order itself framed the move as a good-governance measure of sorts, claiming that the problem was shoddy work on federal employees’ part. “High performance by such employees can meaningfully enhance agency operations, while poor performance can significantly hinder them,” it stated. “Senior agency officials report that poor performance by career employees in policy-relevant positions has resulted in long delays and substandard-quality work for important agency projects, such as drafting and issuing regulations.”
But the move takes place against a backdrop of Trumpian ire toward the civil service. As I noted in August, Trump and his allies see no difference between his personal political interests and the policy goals that drive the federal government. That worldview has led the president to dismiss officials like former FBI Director James Comey, who resisted pressure to drop a criminal case against one of Trump’s top allies in 2017, and purge nearly a dozen inspectors general earlier this year from their watchdog posts after the Senate acquitted him of abuse of power. More recently, Trump has hinted that he would fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Bill Barr after the election if they don’t make politically charged arrests before November 3 to help him win.
Trump’s move against civil service protections is a dramatic escalation of this well-established trend. The order drew immediate criticism from union leaders who represent federal workers. “This is the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Thursday. “The president has doubled down on his effort to politicize and corrupt the professional service. 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.”
Lawmakers, however, took relatively little notice of the White House maneuver. The imminent presidential debate on Thursday may have drawn attention on Capitol Hill away from what could be a sea change in the executive branch. An exception was Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who connected the move to Trump’s history of corrupt behavior. “In his obsession to twist our govt to benefit him personally, Pres. Trump is now attacking the idea of a professional Civil Service, which dates back 100 years to the time of Vermonter Pres. Chester Arthur,” Leahy wrote on Twitter. “We must stand up for Federal Employees serving America, not Trump.”
What sort of civil servants could be subject to dismissal under Trump’s plan? Perhaps the most high-profile example would be Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Trump can fire Cabinet members, agency heads, and hundreds of other political appointees at will. But Fauci is what’s known as a “Title 42 employee,” a specialized category of federal employees that’s used to fill scientific positions. Under the order’s terms, White House officials could recategorize Fauci as a Schedule F employee and then dismiss him, effectively stripping him of his ability to appeal against his own removal. The administration could then refill his reclassified position as NIAID director with far fewer hurdles than normal.
As if there wasn’t already enough at stake in the 2020 election, the dream of a professionalized civil service without cronyism or sycophancy now also appears to be on the table. In theory, Congress could try to rewrite federal civil service laws to reverse Trump’s order. But a more surefire way to undo it would be to elect a different president, who could retract it. The order lays out a 90-day timeline for federal agencies to report which positions might be subject to change. That would make the deadline January 19, 2021—one day before Inauguration Day.
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