Scott Tibbs
Forget Trump. Civil service reform makes sense.
By Scott Tibbs, August 10, 2022
Vanity Fair claimed that Donald Trump's proposed civil service reforms should "scare the ever-loving shit out of everyone in this country," but the alarmism and personal hatred of the former President (the Orange Man is very Bad, after all) should not short-circuit a resonable discussion of civil service reform and how best to serve the taxpayers who pay for the slary and benefits of those employees. Also, using obscenities in your article demonstrates a lack of professionalism.
Civil service is a tricky business. We do want to have "best practices" in place to ensure employees are treated fairly. This protects employees, of course, but also protects taxpayers by ensuring that hiring and firing decisions are made on the basis of merit and performance instead of by partisan loyalty and patronage. But if those protections are too strong, it becomes too difficult to remove employees who are either incompetent or habitually guilty of insubordination.
This is not exactly new. This was an issue in George W. Bush's first term as President, and Republicans have been talking about it for a long time. Had Trump never ran for President, this would be an issue. Of course, Trump being Trump and his most devoted followers being who they are, civil service reform is often tied to conspiracy theories. But do some in the bureaucracy try to sabotage a President's agenda? An anonymous editorial in the
New York Times on September 5, 2018 confesses that very thing. The President is the one who was elected, not the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy should implement his agenda.
Obviously, the real debate of the proposal is in the details. We should seek to make it easier to remove bad employees, while making sure a professional workforce is serving the American taxpayers. But alarmist language does not solve anything or contribute to the debate. Raising the temperature could result in either a watered-down "reform" that does nothing or a hastily-drafted piece of legislation that creates more problems than it solves. We should seek to avoid both outcomes.
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