While President Trump’s efforts to force out tens of thousands of civilian federal workers and to dismantle entire agencies have hit legal challenges, and generating some resistance from agency heads, those efforts remain front and center on the Trump agenda.
The impact stretches beyond Washington, of course, reaching federal workers across the country including some 50,000 in New Jersey.
Trump’s “mastermind” for implementing the rout, a private citizen, Elon Musk, appears to be “a friend seeking benefits.”
The job he is doing, without transparency, decency or respect for public servants, is not a fine-tuned assessment but a wholesale immolation of the federal work force. And, by the way, not giving so much attention to contractors. Musk’s companies have many contracts after all and, with other contractors, they constitute a shadow government.
That civil service reform is needed is not in dispute, not by those in either political party, but reform requires careful scrutiny, a scalpel, if you will, assessing agency functions, stress-testing ideas including the potential for innovations in technology, and planning with a purpose–to strengthen the government’s capacity to serve its citizens efficiently–not the mindless wrecking ball that is being applied. Any effort to reform government should be about improving government not eviscerating it.
But neither Trump nor Musk have an effective government in mind and certainly not a capable civil service; they want a broken state that they can control and corrupt. They aren’t the first. And so history can prove enlightening.
Theodore Roosevelt and the Civil Service
Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century had their work cut out for them as they confronted a system in which political connection, not competence, was the primary basis for federal government appointments.
At the same time, and not unrelated, corrupt industrialists were increasing their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Regulations to ensure safety and provide security and programs to support education and create opportunities for better lives were mere dreams.
Powerful support from the industrialists, often referred to as “the trusts,” controlled the levers of political power including the appointment of political loyalists to federal jobs while industrial barons and political bosses monopolized entire industries and strangled cities.
When President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a man who did not get a job that he had been promised, the public’s outrage was immediate, generating momentum for reform of the ‘civil service.’ Under Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed. It provided for the open selection of government employees—to be administered by a Civil Service Commission–guaranteeing the right of citizens to compete for federal appointment without regard to politics, religion, race, or national origin. It provided for the selection of some government employees by competitive exams, rather than via ties to politicians or political affiliation. The act also made it illegal to fire or demote these government officials for political reasons and created the United States Civil Service Commission to enforce a merit system.
While the act covers 90% of federal employees now, at the time it only applied to about ten percent. It took a while to expand, and the force of the “bully pulpit” of Theodore Roosevelt to mobilize collective action—including intense and persistent pressure from the press that exposed the corrupt trusts, put names and faces to them, thus intensifying public support for depoliticizing and professionalizing the civil service.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” has done a masterful job recounting the challenges TR faced in his efforts at reform. She invites a fresh look at our own time.
Roosevelt had awakened to “the harsh circumstances confronting the nation’s working poor and sensitized them to the avarice and power of industrial interests. “ (Kearns, p 221) At one point, Kearns notes, TR expressed his growing disgust for the predatory rich, “the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.” (Kearns, p 232)
These words echo across time.
Here is Kearns again: “Allowing party officials to ensconce unqualified friends and kinsmen in public positions, TR argued, was not merely ‘undemocratic,’ it ensured inefficient public service that impacted the poor and vulnerable most of all. The smug axiom: To the victor belongs the spoils’ was a ‘cynical battle cry’ he denounced as ‘so nakedly vicious’ that no honorable man could condone it.”(p 137)
Goodwin argues, moreover, that progressives of both parties believed American needed a strong and active government that served the public good and protected the people from the powerful industrialists of the modern world.
That is what they got–eventually. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance.
Trump is taking us the other way.
The Civil Service Now in MAGA’s Crosshairs
While civil service reform is vital, replacing expertise with loyalty to Trump is hardly the way to do it if, of course, we want government to work. Indeed, departures of critically needed civil servants and the threats of more firings raises the specter of a massive brain drain.
The firing of young people across the government could have a long-term effect on the ability to replenish the bureaucracy with those who have the cutting-edge skills and knowledge that the Civil Service needs. Without them, moreover, leading the world in research may no longer be a position the U.S. can claim.
Competence, experience and commitment to public service are traits we value in those we count on, aren’t they? Most of us wouldn’t choose a doctor who’d never been to medical school, after all, would we? Take a look at the Pew research report that details the current makeup of the federal work force, including the education, training and expertise that are being indiscriminately slashed.
Trump is hell-bent on cloning the pre-TR spoils system–with a vengeance.
Trump says he is “returning power to the people.” What he means is that he wants to give power to his people, starting with some 50,000 or so political appointments in the Civil Service (only 4,000 have existed up to now). Trump’s so-called “loyalty appointments” are cronies, hired to function in a ruptured governance structure that barely responds to public needs.
The echo of history is powerful and it is painful. The gap between rich and poor has become wider, legislative stalemate paralyzes the country, corporations resist federal regulations, spectacular mergers produce giant companies and, of course, the influence of money and power in politics multiplies.
A Critical Role for Civil Society
The role of civil society cannot be underestimated. But it must be aroused to be consequential. Through collective action, public voices can express confidence and trust in the system that Trump is trying to destroy even as it works to undo the damage already done. What we need to do is to organize opposition, to protest, of course, and press the now supine Congress to act as the third branch of government that it is.
Look to the impact of Occupy Wall Street and the People’s March for Climate Change for awakening the public.
And, of course, to the March for Voting Rights that began on March 7, 1965, sixty years ago, aroused the nation with the bloody attack on marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Images of “Bloody Sunday” shocked the nation, and lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the same year.
More recently, both the March for Science in April 2017, attracting an estimated one million people in cities around the world, and this year, the Stand Up for Science protest, strongly suggest that scientists recognize they need to act, visibly, in the defense of science.
The American people need to be assured that crises can be averted, that problems can be managed; diseases controlled and eliminated, crime diminished, welfare provided. When the brain drain begins to have an obvious impact, then what? Without trained and tested and nonpartisan experts doing this work without fear or favor, how secure can we be?
The press—critical in TR’s success as it pressed for accountability and exposed corruption—is as essential now but it is in Trump’s crosshairs and has to contend with social media’s distortions and outright lies. Nonetheless, it has a critical role to play–and a rich tradition to support it—and needs its own affirmation and defense from civil society.
With critics of Trump and Musk muting themselves, with Congress in the hands of GOP loyalists that refuse to honor their oath of office, we have the federal courts to weigh in on the constitutionality of many of the Trump “initiatives,” and “wins” in that domain will help to empower citizens. But, civil society has its own role to play, and in can be a prominent one, which is why it, too, is a threat to autocracy. We see that when history is distorted, free expression is suppressed, and access to public space is threatened.
Oppression can strengthen what it seeks to crush.
The vigorous support of citizens was essential for Roosevelt and it is no less needed now as our democracy is under assault. We have to create our own bully pulpit and fight for right, in town halls, in public spaces, on social media—everywhere—so that our voices can be heard, and heeded.