The data on government workers suggest that lower skilled
positions are better compensated in government service than in the private
economy. On the other hand, positions
requiring considerable skill, training, or educational attainment are less well
paid than similar positions in private industry. Pay and benefits for public employees are
closely associated with policies first implemented in the economically healthier
postwar years. Unions were more common
then and they played a role in establishing floors on wages. Those more egalitarian times also worked to
keep wages at the top end of the spectrum at modest levels, a practice long
forgotten in the private sector. Private
companies have many mechanisms by which they can diminish wage and benefit
levels for their non-union employees.
Governments, however, can’t declare bankruptcy or go out of business and
reconstitute themselves, consequently they are much more constrained by past
practices. Conservative politicians have
been much less successful in destroying the union movement in the public sector
than in the private, further providing stability in compensation for public
employees. It seems that as voters,
government workers are able to exert leverage on employment policies at least
at state and local levels.
The manner in which this situation, and government
workers in general, are viewed seems to be determined mostly by political
viewpoint. Liberals will be proud of
decent benefits for all workers and respect the financial sacrifices made by
modestly paid experts who keep the government—and society—running. Conservatives, who resent anyone they cannot
control, will view these same workers as being coddled by excessive benefits
and wages, and view the government’s experts as lazy incompetents who would be
unable to find a real job in the private sector. Given this divergence of perspectives, one
might expect that federal employees would experience changes in the work
environment when a new administration takes control in Washington.
Evan Osnos has provided a startling look at what the
Trump administration has been up to since taking control. His article appeared in The New Yorker under the title Trump vs. The “Deep State.” He opens with
this lede.
“How the Administration’s
loyalists are quietly reshaping American governance.”
Osnos provides this perspective.
“Every new President disturbs
the disposition of power in Washington. Stars fade. Political appointees
arrive, assuming control of a bureaucracy that encompasses 2.8 million civilian
employees, across two hundred and fifty agencies—from Forest Service smoke
jumpers in Alaska to C.I.A. code-breakers in Virginia. “It’s like taking over
two hundred and fifty private corporations at one time,” David Lewis, the chair
of the political-science department at Vanderbilt University, told me.”
Since administrations change every four or eight years it
is necessary that the vast majority of these government employees be protected
from major upheavals when a new president arrives in town. These workers are mostly performing the tasks
already approved by Congress and are not involved in ongoing political debates taking
place on the margins about what tasks should be eliminated or which new ones
are needed. Continuity is required for
stability. However, the leaders of these
agencies are often political appointees who may have little relevant expertise yet
can exercise considerable influence over technical and personnel policies. The number of political appointees has been
growing over time. This has the dual
effect of providing a president with the potential for more power in
implementing an agenda, but it also makes it more difficult to assemble a team
with unassailable competence—a fact Trump has already learned.
“Trump’s struggle to attract
competent people reflects a broader problem. For decades, Presidents and
Congress have created a steadily increasing number of political appointees.
Kennedy submitted two hundred and eighty-six appointments for Senate approval;
Trump is allotted more than twelve hundred. Stier [of Partnership for Public
Service] said, ‘The system we have now is crazy. It’s unique among democracies.
There is an entourage of these special assistants, special counsels,
confidential assistants, and others. To insure that the President’s policy is
carried out, the number of appointees could be in the dozens or the hundreds.’
He added, ‘We have a resurgent spoils system. It is the breaking of an
organization that was already under stress. It is unmanageable and dangerous in
a world when crises are happening in the blink of an eye’.”
Trump is in a poor position to personally evaluate people
for positions because he has so little experience in governing and no
particular philosophy of governance. His
major criterion for a candidate is that he/she be absolutely loyal to him personally.
“….Trump has elevated loyalty to
the primary consideration. Since he has no fixed ideology, the White House
cannot screen for ideas, so it seeks a more personal form of devotion.
Kellyanne Conway, one of his most dedicated attendants, refers reverently to
the “October 8th coalition,” the campaign stalwarts who remained at Trump’s
side while the world listened to a recording of him boasting about grabbing
women by the genitals.”
However, loyalty as a substitute for competence can be
extremely dangerous.
“A culture of fealty compounds
itself; conformists thrive, and dissenters depart or refuse to join. By May,
the President was surrounded by advisers in name only, who competed to be the
most explicitly quiescent. Peter Navarro, the head of the White House National
Trade Council, told an interviewer, ‘My function, really, as an economist is to
try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his
intuition is always right in these matters’.”
The first place where competence is required is in the
vetting of potential appointees where Trump and his crew of loyalists have
shown little of it. With about 4,000 total jobs to fill, some of the administration’s
efforts have been cringe-worthy.
“The White House brought in an
array of outsiders, who, at times, ran into trouble. As an assistant to the
Secretary of Energy, the Administration installed Sid Bowdidge, whose recent
employment had included managing a Meineke Car Care branch in Seabrook, New
Hampshire. Bowdidge departed after it emerged that he had called Muslims ‘maggots.’
In December, Matthew Spencer Petersen, a nominee to the federal bench, became a
brief online sensation when Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana,
asked him a series of basic law-school questions, which revealed that Petersen
had never argued a motion, tried a case, or taken a deposition by himself.
Embarrassing details came out about other judicial nominees: Brett Talley, who
had never tried a case in federal court, wandered cemeteries hunting for
ghosts; Jeff Mateer had called transgender children part of ‘Satan’s plan.’ All
three nominations were withdrawn.”
Having put little thought into governance, Trump is at
the mercy of others for filling most positions.
He has little choice but to follow the guidance of Republican Party
leaders and the herd of special interest groups in alliance with them. Trump’s major contribution seems to be in
excluding anyone who didn’t support his election.
“Republican think tanks and
donors succeeded in installing preferred nominees. The earliest wave arrived
from the Heritage Foundation; subsequent ones came from Charles and David
Koch’s network of conservative advocacy groups and from the American Enterprise
Institute. But the White House maintained a virtual blockade against
Republicans who had signed letters opposing Trump’s candidacy.”
Rogue presidents have always believed that the federal
workforce should serve their political needs.
Those who would not adhere to that principle were expendable.
“Richard Nixon’s aides produced
an eighty-page manual on the removal of ‘undesirable’ careerists, which
proffered a system for grading civil servants on political ‘dependability,’
ranging from ‘L’ (for ‘Let’s watch this fellow’) to ‘O’ (for ‘Out’). To marginalize
the troublesome ones, it suggested a ‘New Activity Technique’: create an ‘apparently
meaningful, but essentially meaningless, new activity to which they are all
transferred.’ Such an activity, Nixon’s aides wrote, could serve as ‘a single
barrel into which you can dump a large number of widely located bad apples’.”
Trump’s administration has resurrected this policy. Osnos provides an example from the State
Department under Tillerson.
“….in a kind of revival of
Nixon’s New Assignment Technique, hundreds of State Department employees have
been banished to a bizarre form of bureaucratic purgatory. Last October,
Tillerson’s office announced the launch of a ‘FOIA Surge,’
a campaign to process a backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests, which
would require three hundred and fifty State Department staffers. The work was
rudimentary (‘You could do it with smart interns,’ one participant said), but
the list of those assigned to it included prominent Ambassadors and specialized
civil servants. They quickly discovered something in common: many had worked on
issues of priority to the Obama Administration.”
Post-Watergate when many of Nixon’s methods were revealed,
Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting discrimination against federal
employees based on “political affiliation, race, color, religion, national
origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition.” The State Department action should have
generated protests against these types of activities. How did the Trump administration deal with
this?
“Civil servants who think that
they have been mistreated can appeal to a semi-judicial agency called the Merit
Systems Protection Board. By law, though, the board needs two members to
function, and one left just before Trump’s Inauguration, so for sixteen months
it has issued no judgments. For a while, the staff continued to work—reading
complaints, marking them with notes—assuming that a new hire would arrive soon.
(Since 1979, the board had never been without a quorum for longer than a few
weeks.) But, as complaints kept coming in, the staff was forced to store them,
unresolved, in vacant rooms of the office, which occupies part of a commercial
building in downtown Washington.”
Between attacks on the integrity of parts of the
government, and threats to cut financial support, the moral of the workforce
has plummeted, and numerous people are either being forced out or choosing to
resign. Consider the State Department as
an example.
“….Tillerson dismantled large
parts of the department: as the White House proposed a thirty-one-per-cent
budget reduction, the department accepted the lowest number of new Foreign
Service officers in years. Sixty per cent of the highest-ranked diplomats have
departed.”
Applying data like that to multiple government agencies
whose leaders are determined to reward the faithful and punish any malcontents indicates
a veritable exodus is occurring.
“Amid a strong economy, large
numbers of employees are opting to leave the government rather than serve it.
In Trump’s first nine months, more than seventy-nine thousand full-time workers
quit or retired—a forty-two-per-cent increase over that period in Obama’s
Presidency. To Trump and his allies, the departures have been liberating, a purge
of obstructionists. ‘The President now has people around him who aren’t trying
to subvert him,’ Michael Caputo, a senior campaign adviser, told me. ‘The more
real Trump supporters who pop up in the White House phone book, the better off
our nation will be’.”
Trusting his ample gut, Trump has surrounded himself with
an astounding cast of characters, nearly all of which have demonstrated blatant
acts of either incompetence, or ethical malfeasance, or both. Particularly troubling is the fact that Trump’s
disregard for the truth has crept into our governance.
“In one agency after another, I
encountered a pattern: on controversial issues, the Administration is often not
writing down potentially damaging information. After members of Congress
requested details on Carson’s decorating expenses, Marcus Smallwood, the
departmental-records officer at HUD,
wrote an open letter to Carson, saying, ‘I do not have confidence that HUD can truthfully provide the evidence
being requested by the House Oversight Committee because there has been a
concerted effort to stop email traffic regarding these matters.’ At the
Department of the Interior, the Inspector General’s office investigated Zinke’s
travel expenses but was stymied by ‘absent or incomplete documentation’ that
would ‘distinguish between personal, political, and official travel.’ According
to Ruch, of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, when
environmentalists filed suit to discover if industry lobbyists had influenced a
report on Superfund sites, they were told, ‘There are no minutes, no work
product, no materials.’ Ruch added, ‘The task-force report was a product of
immaculate conception.’ He believes that the Administration is ‘deliberately
avoiding creating records’.”
Osnos skewers a number of Trump’s loyalist appointees,
but none as savagely as John Bolton, the recently appointed national-security
advisor. He provides the insight of
Lawrence Wilkerson who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush
administration.
“Bolton, known in Washington as
a maximalist hawk, is arguably the most volatile addition to the Administration
since its inception—an unrepentant advocate of the Iraq War who has also argued
for regime change in Iran and in North Korea. ‘He lied repeatedly during his
time at State,’ Wilkerson told me. In 2002, when Bolton was the department’s
top arms-control official, he planned to accuse Cuba of developing a secret
biological-weapons program. When a lower-ranking intelligence official,
Christian Westermann, spoke up to say that the accusation was unsupportable,
Bolton tried to have him fired, telling his boss that he wouldn’t take orders
from a ‘mid-level munchkin’.”
“To Wilkerson, Bolton’s arrival
at the center of American national security is alarming. He recalled an
encounter in 2002, when Bolton was publicly calling for Bush to confront North
Korea. At the time, Wilkerson, who had served thirty-one years in the Army,
cautioned Bolton that an attack on Seoul would result in enormous casualties. ‘John
stops me mid-sentence and says, “Wait a minute, I don’t do casualties and
things like that. That’s your bailiwick’,” Wilkerson told me. ‘The man has no
comprehension of the young men and women that have to carry out his goddam
wars.’ He continued, ‘He thinks it’s right to shape a narrative that’s false,
so long as that narrative is leading to a “better” purpose’.”
To Wilkerson, all the talk of the “Iran menace” is
reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Osnos finishes his article by providing a
comparison between the incompetence and the self-serving misuse of facts of that
earlier era and the manufactured truths of the Trump era. He likens the Trump White House to the Green
Zone (ultimately known as the Emerald City) from which Bush loyalists
mismanaged Iraq.
“As the problems accumulated, so
did the vacant offices in the Green Zone, because people in Washington were
unwilling to join. The Administration turned, more than ever, to loyalists.
Officials screening new American prospects sometimes asked whether they had
voted for Bush and how they saw Roe v. Wade. A cohort of recent college
grads, recruited because they had applied for jobs at the Heritage Foundation,
were put in charge of Iraq’s national budget. The rebuilding of the stock
market was entrusted to a twenty-four-year-old. ‘They wanted to insure lockstep
political orientation,’ Wilkerson recalled. ‘And what we got out of that was a
lockstep-stupid political orientation’.”
“Similarly, the mistakes that
the Trump Administration has made are likely to multiply: the dismantling of
the State Department; the denigration of the civil service; the exclusion of
experts on Iran and climate change; the fictional statistics about undocumented
immigrants; and the effort to squelch dissent across the government. Absent a
radical change, the Administration has no mechanism for
self-correction. It will not get normal; it will get worse.”
Osnos ends with this assessment.
“Midway through its second year,
Trump’s White House is at war within and without, racing to banish the ‘disloyals’
and to beat back threatening information. Bit by bit, the White House is
becoming Trump’s Emerald City: isolated, fortified against nonbelievers,
entranced by its mythmaker, and constantly vulnerable to the risks of
revelation.”