Trump’s crony meritocracy could shatter US civil service
Think about this: The next time you take a road trip with your family, do you want the person in charge of highway safety to have gone to school and passed a test, or do you want them to have the job because they helped President Trump sell his famous Trump Steaks?
What about the air traffic controller who’s supposed to make sure your family arrives safely at grandma’s house? Would you feel assured knowing they hold the position because they dutifully breached the Capitol on Jan. 6 at Trump’s behest?
That could be the future we’re facing, because of the president’s blistering hostility toward the federal workforce and determination to upend the civil service. On his first day, he moved to reinstate a plan he originally issued in October 2020 , Schedule F, to end job protections for thousands of federal workers.
Schedule F wouldn’t just make it easier to fire these workers — it would also make it easier to hire new ones, because it would “exempt some positions across the federal workforce from competitive hiring procedures.”
That’s head-spinning, coming from the people who claim they want a “meritocracy” in government.
If you’ve ever applied for a federal government job, you know that these jobs aren’t easy to get. Many require you to pass a civil service exam. There are intricate questionnaires asking for detailed examples of your relevant experience. Federal employee resumes can be 10 pages long.
In other words, what the Trump folks want is to replace an existing meritocracy with the kind of spoils system that turns civil service into a sewer.
We will not only end up with unqualified people in charge of highways and airways but a whole host of other patronage appointments, too: Justice Department attorneys picked because they can’t wait to prosecute Trump’s enemies, Defense Department employees who won’t blow the whistle if the secretary is drunk at work.
Those aren’t even the most sinister possibilities. Civil service protection against politically motivated firings is a defense against the kind of terrifying oppression that exists right now in too many autocratic regimes.
Do we really want to be a nation where a federal employee can be fired if someone at the White House reviews a tape of Trump’s last speech and notices you didn’t clap hard enough?
We must not turn into North Korea, where officials keep track of who cheers at Kim Jong Un’s events, and where — as one defector put it — you “clap because you don’t want to die.”
Yes, that’s an extreme example of the devaluation of human life in an authoritarian regime.
But let’s not forget that our current president reportedly said former Vice President Mike Pence deserved to be hanged by an angry mob for refusing to overturn the 2020 election.
And that Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget and a mastermind of the federal employee purge, openly talked about wanting workers to be “in trauma.”
Seriously, what kind of person thinks that way? I fear that anyone who makes a suggestion like this might carry personal trauma so deeply wounding and unresolved that they should seek therapy, not high government office.
And if you don’t really believe mass firings could happen across the government, remember this: Trump’s first purges of federal workers have already come with lightning speed.
Last Tuesday, Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management issued an order: All federal government staff in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) roles had to be placed on leave and their email accounts suspended, by 5 pm the next day. At the same time, all web content related to DEI had to be scrubbed. It happened so fast that State Department IT folks apparently had trouble figuring out how to delete an entire page.
For a while, their page with the header “Leadership — Office of Diversity and Inclusion” stayed up, but its content was replaced with a list of State Department staff killed in the line of duty. (It now displays “archived content.”)
The effect was surreal. It was a chilling demonstration of just how quickly and completely the official erasure of personae non grata can happen under an autocratic regime.
The (sort of) good news is that there will be a strong and swift legal response to Schedule F. One union sued immediately. Other legal actions may follow. Hopefully, this will become one of many rash moves by Trump that will be endlessly tied up in court.
Ultimately, I hope that we, as a nation, won’t stand for these attacks on our friends and neighbors. The overwhelming majority of our federal workers are hardworking, middle-class Americans trying to serve their country. They deserve to have our compassion and support, not to be abused and discarded by thugs who despise them.
It’s on us to say so.
Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.