A long time ago, patronage determined who worked in the U.S. government. Jobs were awarded based not on merit and expertise but on a person’s political connections to the sitting president or his party. The result was “rampant incompetence and cronyism,” so Congress reformed the system in 1883 by creating a professional, merit-based civil service system.
More than 2 million civilians work in the federal government today. Donald Trump believes that many are “rogue bureaucrats” in a mythical deep state. “They’ve got to be held accountable,” Trump has said. “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people. They’re dishonest people.”
The former president plans to revive the spoils system by firing as many as 50,000 careerists and replacing them with loyalists. He also plans to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington, D.C. Forced relocations in the past resulted in many workers choosing to leave federal service rather than uproot their families.
The plan is spelled out in Project 2025 (which Trump says he has “nothing to do with,” despite his ties to many of the project’s authors) and a bill in the House of Representatives, the Public Service Reform Act. It would allow the president or his appointees to fire any federal worker “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” Employees would have no right to appeal, even if fired because they refused to break a law or execute an unethical order.
The plan has nothing to do with making government work better. The return to cronyism is part of Trump’s strategy to suppress government work that contradicts his often unrealistic and dangerous views.
Of course, the Republican presidential contender undoubtedly would like unfettered control of the nation’s largest employer and its $4.5 trillion budget (2023), including programs and services that affect virtually every American.
Two examples from Trump’s “war on science” illustrate how extreme and damaging this was — and would be again.
A study in Science Direct documents how “The Trump administration regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment.” The Columbia Law School’s Sabine Center for Climate Change Law lists 176 actions Trump and Congress took to weaken or eliminate federal efforts to help Americans mitigate or adapt to climate change. The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, with a particular focus on climate change.
The Sabine Center also gives 543 examples of how the federal government and conservatives in state governments have tried to silence climate science. By January 2020, the Washington Post reported that hundreds of federal scientists had been “forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office. The exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital.”
However, nothing compares to the misery Trump caused during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump downplayed the seriousness of COVID, comparing it to the flu, adlibbing dangerous cures and saying, “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
It didn’t, and it hasn’t. By his final day in office, 400,000 Americans had died from the virus, including the most ever recorded by any nation in a 24-hour period. Last year, it was still the 10th leading cause of fatalities, responsible for 76,446 deaths in the U.S. By the end of August this year, the virus had killed nearly 1.2 million Americans.
In 2020, a congressional committee documented 47 cases where the Trump administration sidelined, ignored or altered the advice of government scientists during COVID-19. In 2021, Congress released evidence that U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts “were pressured by Trump administration officials to alter scientific guidance and prevented from communicating directly with the public” about the pandemic. And in 2022, an Elsevier study concluded, “The Trump administration regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment.”
While Trump says federal employees “must be held accountable,” he routinely takes steps to make sure he will not be, denigrating courts, judges, juries, prosecutors and the press. But he developed a particular animus for the FBI, the Justice Department and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he forced out of office after Sessions recused himself rather than interfering with the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In 2020, Trump even fired five officials charged with ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in government. One was the inspector general charged with monitoring spending from the $2 trillion stimulus package during the pandemic.
Government careerists include Democrats, Republicans and everything in between. Each has taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
“One purpose of the Oath of Office is to remind federal workers that they do not swear allegiance to a supervisor, an agency, a political appointee, or even to the President,” according to Jeff Neal, a former chief human capital officer in the federal government. “The oath is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and faithfully execute your duties. The intent is to protect the public from a government that might fall victim to political whims and to provide a North Star — the Constitution — as a source of direction.”
Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney and many others from the two political parties say it’s time to put our country and the Constitution above partisanship. The same is true for federal careerists. For the sake of good government and the American people, they should vote on Nov. 5 to save our merit-based civil service.
William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.