The federal workforce needs reform, but Trump can’t do it

Matthew Yglesias, Tribune News Service

The federal civil service, which has many virtues, is also a bit of a mess. This is not only my view but that of almost every former Democratic administration official I know, going back to President Barack Obama’s first term. So I was fully prepared to concede President Donald Trump some points on this score and urge Democrats to at least try to work toward some good-faith reforms. Then came his first two weeks in office. While Trump certainly has a well-defined sense of grievance about the civil service, he has no program for reform at all. Instead, there is an effort to get lots of people to quit their jobs. The Trump administration is ordering everyone back to the office five days a week with no exceptions, a policy much stricter than what private-sector employers have generally adopted — overcorrecting for Biden’s excessive leniency. It is pairing this with a “buyout” offer (spoiler alert: it’s not really a buyout) to get rid of civil servants who don’t want to comply. It has fired senior people in legally dubious ways and reassigned others in an effort to get them to resign. And the less said about the president’s use of a fatal airline accident as an opportunity to criticize federal hiring practices, the better.

It’s clear that Trump’s goal is not to make the civil service better or more responsive or to enact any kind of systemic change. This is a reckless effort to reduce headcount or, failing that, to create vacancies the new administration can fill. It is also setting civil servants up for demoralizing lose-lose situations. It works like this: The administration is issuing scores of broadly worded memos and executive orders. When they are implemented in ways that strike the public as outrageous overreach — like the Air Force removing the Tuskegee Airmen from a training video — conservatives accuse them of “malicious compliance.”

Civil servants who fail to act, meanwhile, or react with insufficient alacrity, are accused of perpetrating “Deep State” sabotage. And those who ask for further clarification are accused of dragging their feet. Amid the chaos, it’s easy to forget that civil-service reform is a legitimate and time-honored subject of political debate.

For decades, federal employment was driven by a highly politicized spoils system in which each incoming president would dole out jobs according to whim. This changed with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, expanded in 1885. These created the idea of a federal employee, as distinct from a political appointee. The Hatch Acts, passed in 1939 and 1940, limit the political activities of government officials. The most recent major reform was the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which created today’s Office of Personnel Management, the Merit System Protection Board, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

In general, and given the circumstances of the times, these were constructive reforms. But it has been almost half a century. From a management standpoint, today’s civil service is rigid and inflexible, and for many employees, the appeal of a government job is not the work itself but generous parental leave and a good retirement program.

But the bigger problem for the federal government is not how difficult it is to fire people, but how hard it is to hire them. Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and a former deputy chief technology officer under Obama, likes to tell the story of how the Pentagon was unable to hire the programmer who won its hacking competition because he didn’t know the secret to “hacking” the federal hiring process: To make the first cut for a competitive job, you need to maximize the number of keyword matches between your resume and the job listing (i.e., copy and paste) and then you need to rate yourself as having top-level skill (i.e., lie) in every area.

In other words, the overcorrection against politicized hiring has created a bureaucratic system that is hostile to applicants and undermines managerial discretion.

Which is not to say that nothing could be done on the firing front. The America First Policy Institute has a pretty persuasive roundup of evidence that employment protections for civil servants are excessive. But it’s also worth saying that hiring and firing are two sides of the same coin: It’s often not worth removing civil servants because it’s so hard to fill vacancies with someone better. Meanwhile, as the Congressional Budget Office has documented, civil service jobs tend to pay a premium at the low end while offering uncompetitive pay for the most skilled professionals.

This all suggests the possibility of a grand bargain featuring a less compressed pay scale, more flexibility in hiring and firing, while retaining some kind of guardrails against pure patronage. The challenge for Democrats would be to acknowledge that the federal workforce should be managed in the public interest, not for the sake of the workers. The challenge for Republicans would be to acknowledge the costs of underinvesting in the personnel who actually run the government. Capacity-building and competence matter more than trying to save money.

But Trump isn’t doing any of this. He’s not proposing something that would invite a counteroffer; he’s not proposing anything at all. He’s just imposing an arbitrary hiring freeze, trying to make the government a less desirable employer, and hoping to induce as many people as he can to quit. Is this all an evil scheme to stock the government with cronies? Is it based on a misconception that there are big fiscal benefits to reducing headcount? Or is it just a scattered attempt from a man who loves drama to exact revenge on a “Deep State” that exists mostly in his head? I have no idea. But executive orders are no way to build a legacy, and unilateralism makes constructive engagement impossible. It seems absurd to end with an earnest plea for someone in the administration to take governing seriously — but they really should consider trying.