President Donald Trump has been purging qualified federal workers from their roles and replacing them with loyalists — and his efforts have not received a lot of attention.
“The board’s decision has no direct bearing on cases that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this week, which could establish how far the president’s power over the civil service extends,” reported The New York Times’ Jonah E. Bromwich, Michael S. Schmidt and Rebecca Davis O’Brien on Sunday. The journalists were referring to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which Trump pressured behind the scenes to rule that he had the right to dismiss officials without due process simply because they differed from him on policy issues. “But it defanged the most effective method for federal workers to challenge their dismissals, and if upheld on appeal could undercut protections for broad swaths of the civil service.”
By removing those protections, the White House made it possible to penalize and remove officials who historically have been protected by civil service rules so that they can do their jobs without worrying about political pressure.
“It came after the Trump administration leveled a concerted pressure campaign on the board in public and private, according to people with knowledge of the process,” Bromwich, Schmidt and O’Brien wrote. “The private push — little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule — was led by a White House aide who for years has been intently focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers.”
They added, “The story of how the ruling came about illustrates the intense effort by the Trump White House to advance its theory of the unitary executive, the belief among many conservatives that the president has sweeping authority over the entire executive branch, and can direct the actions of employees, including federal prosecutors and immigration judges, who handle sensitive matters of law.”
Among the people targeted by Trump in this way were Merit Systems Protection Board's Cathy Harris and Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, wife of former FBI Director James Comey.
“Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law,” Nicholas Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota who studies the federal civil service, told The Times. This “reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service.”
White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster defended the practice arguing that “there can constitutionally be no independent executive branch agencies because independence from the president would mean independence from the voters who elected him.”
In addition to making it easier for Trump to make sure government employees are all loyal to him, democracy advocates are concerned that Trump’s purges could help him rig elections and stay in power indefinitely.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
