For Trump, 'The state is me'

That's why his administration wants to subject government employees to loyalty tests.

By Max Stier

President Donald Trump in the past four months has dismantled and undermined the work of federal agencies and fired or pressured tens of thousands of merit-based, nonpartisan civil servants to quit. Now he is laying the groundwork to restock the government with political loyalists who will blindly follow his every whim. Make no mistake, these changes are as profound a threat to our democracy as anything that Trump is doing.

The Office of Personnel Management on May 29 released rules for a new hiring process that could take effect in July that include asking job applicants starting at the entry level to write four essays, including one about their favorite Trump executive orders or policies.

The specific question is: “How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you and explain how you would help implement them if hired.” The memo also directs agency political leaders to become deeply involved in deciding which candidates should be hired, a deviation from the longstanding practice of not involving appointees in day-to-day decisions for career federal jobs.

This requirement begins at the GS5 level, jobs that are entry-level and could involve administrative support work. Not only is it wrong to focus on loyalty, but the review of the essay questions also will further bog down an already slow hiring process.

In addition, a second OPM memo deals with changes to the selection of members of the Senior Executive Service, the top career federal leaders, by placing political appointees in charge of deciding who should be chosen to serve in these important roles. In the past, OPM ran a board staffed primarily by other career executives who conducted a final review to ensure all prospective hires were qualified and that the hiring was free from politicization.

While federal employees serve across administrations and are expected to carry out a president’s policies, their first obligation under their oath of office is to follow the Constitution and the rule of law. Trump is destroying these long-established norms, making loyalty a priority over legal and ethical considerations or concern for the public interest.

These moves follow the release of a pending administration rule that would reclassify at least tens of thousands civil servants in policy-influencing roles as “at-will” employees, meaning these individuals could be fired without the benefit of civil service protections. Trump sought this change at the end of his first term but ran out of time, and it was quickly rescinded by President Joe Biden. This plan is currently under court challenge.

Combined, the new rules represent two sides of the politicization coin: the ability to fire civil servants based on political considerations and then the ability to replace them with people hired under a newly politicized method.

These changes will take the country back to the spoils system of the 19th century, when federal jobs were for sale to political followers and employees were subject to arbitrary dismissal. This practice ended after an unsuccessful job seeker mortally wounded President James Garfield in 1881, leading to reform of the corrupt patronage system with adoption of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in January 1883 that has been updated over the years.

While some provisions in the OPM hiring directives include long overdue reforms, they contain enough poison pills to make the changes deadly. It’s much like having oatmeal for breakfast. If you put mud in it, nothing else in the bowl will taste good.

The personnel policy changes are part of a broader effort to dismantle what Trump and his allies refer to as the obstructionist “deep state,” a critical element of the president’s plan to turn the federal government into an instrument that he can use to reward allies, punish opponents and bypass all the traditional checks and balances critical to maintaining our democratic system of government.

Trump has broken all norms to punish or silence opponents, reward allies, and recklessly defy the law. Besides abolishing and withholding funding from agencies established by Congress, his administration has deported people without due process and targeted law firms, universities, and others while arbitrarily firing government employees, including Justice Department lawyers who worked on the prosecutions against him as well as those not considered sufficiently loyal.

One of the most outrageous instances occurred when Erez Reuveni, the lawyer who argued the government’s high-profile case in the deportation of immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was summarily fired for fulfilling his legal obligation to tell the truth to a federal court that the government committed an administrative error and wrongly sent Garcia to El Salvador. The firing sent an unequivocal message to all federal employees that the truth is secondary to loyalty to the president.

The administration’s determination to replace nonpartisan civil servants with political followers at all levels of the government is a blatant effort to make sure it never has to fire anyone again for telling the truth because future civil servants will either want only to please the president or be too afraid to stand up for the rule of law and our Constitution. The result will be endemic corruption, incompetence, and harm for all of us.

Max Stier is the president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization dedicated to building a better government and a stronger democracy.

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