The deluge of probationary personnel firings, en masse relegations to administrative leave, and impending reductions in force amount to an attempt to dismantle the non-partisan professional civil service upon which all Americans rely for basic services, stability and security. Unless the administration reverses course immediately, we will all be worse off as a result.
In Monday’s Cabinet meeting, President Trump said that he plans to complete his “overhaul” of the federal workforce within the next three months. The news comes a week after the administration announced layoffs of more than 1,300 Department of Education personnel (and only a few days after an order to dismantle the Department altogether). As of this writing, 76,000 workers are slated to be fired from the Department of Veterans Affairs, alongside 1,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the president has floated a 65% cut of the Environmental Protection Agency workforce. This all follows on the heels of attempted firings of an estimated 30,000 probationary employees and roughly 75,000 workers that accepted the dubious “deferred resignation” offer engineered by Elon Musk.
Our modern-day civil service (the body of government employees who are hired based on professional merit rather than political appointment) was developed in response to the disastrous patronage system that dominated our country’s first hundred years. Until the late 1800s, government jobs were doled out on the basis of personal and party loyalty. After President James Garfield’s assassination by an enraged office seeker who believed he was unfairly passed up to be consul to France, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. The Act created a merit-based system under which hiring and promotions are based on demonstrated skills and qualifications. The subsequent Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 sought to further modernize the system by promoting efficiency, accountability and greater performance.
Merit-based civil service has proven unquestionably beneficial for government and citizens alike. As the responsibilities tasked to government become increasingly complex and demanding, professional civil servants are able to leverage deep technical expertise that elected political officials lack, delivering a high “return on investment” compared to alternatives.
A systematic review of almost 100 peer-reviewed empirical research studies shows that civil service systems like those found in the U.S. federal government — characterized by skills-based hiring and promotion, political neutrality, and professionalism — outperform more “politicized” ones, displaying less corruption, increased efficiency, higher worker motivation and greater public trust. Professionalization does not mean that civil servants are unaccountable; rather, they are shielded from the more corrupting influences of political influence.
In the words of Professor Kohei Suzuki, who has studied civil service systems across the globe, “the effective functioning of democratic governance thus depends on a careful balance: elected officials provide policy direction while professional bureaucrats handle technical implementation.”
As Don Moynihan of the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy points out, if the assault on the federal civil service is really about efficiency and cost cutting (as President Trump and Elon Musk repeatedly claim), it is bound to backfire. Federal government employees make up about 1.5% of the U.S. population, and their payroll amounts to roughly 6% of the federal budget. Even if the Trump administration is successful in eliminating large segments of the federal workforce, history suggests that the functions they perform are popular (if not necessary) and will almost inevitably be filled by private companies contracted to perform tasks that were previously the purview of government — likely adding the cost of contract management to service provision price tags.
To be sure, any serious observer of the U.S. government will readily recognize that aspects of the federal bureaucracy are in desperate need of overhaul. Cumbersome hiring practices, bureaucratic fragmentation and silos and inter-agency red tape plague federal public service professionals’ best efforts. But the answer to these problems is an investment in administrative capacity, rather than the chaotic slashing of it.
The effective delivery of core services that everyday Americans rely on, from national defense to public lands management, is at stake. At the speed that the administration is moving, I fear that we’ll not realize the extent of the loss until it is too late.