Trump’s war on the civil service
The president feels threatened by career nonpartisan federal employees who just want to do their job.
America should celebrate federal workers. They make sure your child can go to a clean national park, you can take a safe flight and your mother gets her Social Security payments. And they used to celebrate their jobs, taking pride in declaring that they work for the United States.
But the new people in charge of the U.S. government have declared war on its 2.3 million actual workers. The Trump administration’s stream of dismissals, furloughs, threatened firings and constant disparagements of federal workers is causing chaos and removing highly qualified people from important jobs. Trump and his aides are undermining the very concept of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service.
Why do we need a nonpartisan civil service? First of all and most importantly, it helps ensure we have great workers doing important jobs. The idea of working for their country appeals to many scientists, engineers, lawyers and others who could probably make much more money in the private sector. And because federal jobs haven’t previously been tied to election results or partisanship, very motivated people often choose to spend decades in government, accruing valuable skills.
“Modern government administration requires professional expertise and institutional knowledge that is bigger than any single administration. Effective administration requires coordination and knowledge and professional relationships that cannot be built overnight — this is what nonpartisan career civil servants offer,” Lee Drutman, a political scientist in New America’s Political Reform program, told me.
I doubt Trump wants cancer researchers at the National Institutes of Health or air traffic controllers to quit their jobs. But in treating federal workers so terribly in the early weeks of his administration and offering a buyout that implies they are worthless and replaceable, the president is making it less likely that people with lots of job options will choose government roles in the future.
And though Trump might view federal workers who specialize in diversity and equity and the prosecutors who investigated him as simply liberal Democratic partisans, that’s not the reality. Diversity and criminal prosecutions are areas of expertise, too. I would assume the people whom the administration is firing are quite skilled at their jobs. (The federal hiring process is very competitive.) What Trump should be doing (and other presidents from both parties did) is directing federal workers to use their skills in service of a new administration’s goals, not dismissing them based on prior actions he doesn’t agree with.
Secondly, nonpartisan civil servants are an important policy check on presidents — and not just Republican presidents or Trump. In a country of 50 states, thousands of cities and more than 340 million people, Congress can’t write laws that exactly specify what should happen in any given situation. So the implementation of laws is always contested. Civil servants aren’t explicitly tied to a particular party or president. So though I don’t think civil servants (or anyone else) are fully objective, career government employees often have more useful biases than political appointees. For example, State Department career officials are more likely to prioritize whether a policy decision will prevent civilians from dying and less likely to prioritize if a decision will help the president win Wisconsin or appeal to a particular part of his base.
Trump and allies suggest that the resistance he received from federal workers in his first term was simply because he is a Republican or a conservative. That’s not true. Civil servants have often objected to the way Democratic presidents interpreted laws and regulations. During the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency, career officials at the State Department were sources for numerous stories in The Post, ProPublica and other outlets blasting the administration for continuing to provide military aid to Israel, which the bureaucrats argued violated laws banning U.S. support to countries that are blocking humanitarian aid.
Lina Khan, who ran the Federal Trade Commission under Biden, received pushback from career employees who felt she was too left-wing and antibusiness.
This kind of internal debate and friction is good. The career employees often have the most expertise and institutional memory, but ultimately, political appointees are in charge. So there is a real push and pull from both sides that likely results in better decisions.
The third virtue of nonpartisan civil servants is that they can be a check on a president who breaks with core democratic values and norms. That’s not a partisan issue, but it does single out Trump. CIA career staffers didn’t have to challenge George W. Bush for asking a foreign government to investigate Bill Clinton’s family in 1992 — that never happened. Trump and his aides acted in unethical, undemocratic ways (such as urging the Ukrainian government to investigate the Biden family) that previous administrations of both parties had not. I’m glad civil servants resisted that kind of behavior and hope they do so again in his second term.
The civil service is not perfect. I’ve had friends who served as career officials in government and complained that the strong protections against civil servants being fired meant some of their colleagues didn’t work hard enough.
And there is an ideological conflict between the federal workforce and the Republican Party. In a 2021 study, researchers found that about 50 percent of federal workers were registered Democrats between 1997 and 2019, compared with about 30 percent Republicans. (In their study, among all Americans, about 40 percent were Democrats and 30 percent Republicans.) I would guess career employees who are Democrats can serve at the Commerce Department without much angst in a Republican presidential administration. But the two parties are so different on education and the environment in particular that some left-leaning employees at the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency might feel uncomfortable implementing a Republican president’s policies.
But the solution to that tension is for Team Trump to respect the expertise of federal workers while making clear that the political appointees ultimately chose the policy — not trying to fire workers two weeks into the administration. Bureaucrats are not all-powerful. Trump accomplished many of his goals in his first term because federal workers ultimately implemented his policies because that was their job, even if they didn’t agree with him.
Trump’s hatred of the civil service isn’t just ideological. His selection of extremely unqualified people for major Cabinet posts showed that he prefers loyalty over expertise and competence. And he doesn’t want anyone constraining his power — whether on policy, democratic or ethical grounds.
“When countries have political appointees all the way down they tend to be corrupt and the government dysfunctional,” Susan Hyde, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me.
With his autocratic impulses, Trump is right to see civil servants as a threat. He is going to keep on trying to fire or marginalize them — even if all most of them want to do is continue their normal, nonpartisan and at times kind of boring jobs that still help every single American.