Trump’s plan to drain the swamp

Public sector unions worry they may lose grip on government

By Editorial Board – The Washington Times – Friday, March 22, 2024

Swamp Creatures in Biden White House Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times

Former President Donald Trump learned many lessons from his four years in the White House. Perhaps none hits home harder than discovering the chief executive of the United States isn’t actually in charge of the federal government.

At every step of the way, Mr. Trump’s initiatives were thwarted by minor functionaries in his administration, egged on by corporate-owned media outlets lionizing members of “the resistance.”

On the eve of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to do something about it. He created Schedule F, a novel classification for critical policymaking posts in the federal government subject to streamlined rules that say key employees serve at the will of the president.

The order would have made it possible to replace the partisan, unelected mandarins who spend their day in the office (or more likely now, their day at home) plotting to ensure their personal will — not the will of the voters — is executed. Schedule F positions were to be distinct from the political appointees who come and go with each change of administration.
Within the excepted service, intelligence, national security and foreign service positions would have been the most affected had the plan gone into effect. Unfortunately, we won’t know for certain, since President Biden capitulated to public sector union demands and canceled the order before it was implemented.

The National Treasury Employees Union has been filing Freedom of Information Act requests for more details about what the former president had in mind. The group expressed shock that jobs with “substantive participation in the development or drafting of regulations and guidance” would qualify. In some cases, this meant reaching down to the GS-12 level, where pay now tops out at $129,000 a year.

Mr. Trump pledges to revive his plan to diminish the influence of partisans entrenched in the bureaucracy if he is reelected. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state,” he told the audience at a rally in South Carolina last month. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists.”

Such activists don’t deserve the absurdly elevated protections the civil service offers. It used to require sacrifice to enter the civil service. Those days are long gone. From the federal to the local level, government provides overly generous benefits to its employees. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported total compensation for public employees outpaced that of the private sector by 40%.

Fearing Mr. Trump might upset the cushy bargains they’ve struck, the National Treasury Employees Union and the rest of the Federal Workers Alliance are doing everything they can to thwart the possibility of his return to the Oval Office. The groups are also pushing legislation to head off another executive order, further insulating the civil service so it’s even less accountable than it already is.

If voters ever want to change the direction in which the country is headed — and two-thirds of Americans say they do, according to polls — it must be possible to curtail lifetime sinecures. Otherwise, no matter who the people elect, the outcome will always be the same.