The Administration's War on Civil Service Protections Is Continuing Unabated in a Bid to Stack Executive Agencies with Trump Puppets

One of the triumphs of late 19th-century politics was the reform of the civil service to eliminate the politicized “spoils system” and establish standards of competence and professional integrity. Trump is against both of those goals and wants total, personal control of everything, so he is working to roll back the entire system.

The New York Times describes the pattern:

The Justice Department is accelerating its efforts to undo decades of civil service protections intended to insulate the work of law enforcement officials from political interference, according to current and former officials, ramping up a wave of firings in recent days.

A new batch of more than 20 career employees at the department and its component agencies were fired on Friday, including the attorney general’s own ethics adviser, Joseph W. Tirrell. Others who were dismissed included a handful of senior officials at the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as prosecutors and support staff who once worked for Jack Smith when he was a special counsel prosecuting Donald J. Trump. …

Employment law experts say such letters are at odds with decades of case law, as well as the decisions of an obscure part of the federal government called the Merit Systems Protection Board. Taken together, both have stood for the principle that career civil servants can be fired only for cause.

In recent cases, however, the Trump administration has pushed the idea that such protections no longer exist for federal workers, including at the Justice Department. …

“They are openly defying longstanding laws and specific directions of the presiding judge,” [fire Justice Department attorney Elizabeth G.] Oyer said in a statement. “They are working to sabotage the protections in place for nonpolitical civil servants,” part of what she called a broader effort “to install political puppets in place of nonpartisan experts throughout the Department of Justice.”

The president, she added, “is building a team of loyalists who will use their official positions to carry out his revenge agenda, and he is clearing out people of principle who may stand in his way.”

Note that Oyer was fired after complaining about an attempt to use pardon powers on behalf of the actor Mel Gibson, a friend and supporter of Trump. This tells you why civil service rules are being torn down: to turn the federal government into a favor factory for Trump’s supporters and an instrument or retaliation against his enemies.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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