Timothy Birdnow

I disagree with the author here; this will simply be another policy that will be overturned as soon as Trump is gone.

Schedule F is just a rule change and even if it survives the court challenges to come the next Democrat President will simply reverse it - or the next Democratic Congress. Until the law itself is changed this will be of limited use.

Scheule F would allow the President to reclassify bureaucrats who make policy (as opposed to career workers who simply do their jobs) as "at will" workers who can be terminated at any time. This is the way it used to be done before the reforms that made government employees unfireable. (The thinking behind that was to avoid the spoils system and keep continuity in the bureaucracies. It was actually an anti-corruption measure. Instead it lead to even more corruption.) Prior to 1881 the patronage system or spoils system was the established method; a new administration came in and new people came with them. But the expansion of the U.S. after the Civil War led to a lot of new government positions and then in 1881 Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker, shot and killed James Garfield. The response was the Pendleton Act, which ended the patronage system and imposed a permanent bureaucratic class on America. It's only gotten worse over time, especially with the unionization of bureaucrats and their having permanent lifetime tenure.

So now Trump wants to eliminate some of the dead weight with Schedule F. But when a Democrat gets in office he will simply rehire the fired people and fire the people hired under Trump. Without a legal mechanism that cannot be altered on a whim this will be far more limited in scope. I doubt it will make it through the court system before Trump leaves office.

Maybe my skepticism is misplaced. At least Trump is trying.

Hide Comments | Add Comment