It’s no secret that Donald Trump, in his first term as President, felt stymied by cabinet secretaries and other political appointees who occasionally disagreed with his whims. Consequently, that first term saw a parade of high level appointees, including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously shown the door.
Determined to eliminate these human guardrails his second time around, Trump has ramped up his insistence on absolute loyalty—often to the exclusion of other qualities like merit, experience, honesty, and accountability. Think Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense (or War, as he prefers), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kash Patel as Director of the FBI, to name a few.
The President’s obsession with stacking the deck with loyalists now extends even to agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve Board—all, as The New York Times put it, “long seen as above politics.”
It’s one thing to require loyalty from cabinet secretaries and other political appointees, of which there are more than 4,000 in the federal government, far more than in most countries. These jobs are held at the pleasure of the sitting President, and end when that President’s term is up. But Trump has no intention of stopping there.
He insists the nearly 8,000 members of the Senior Executive Service, which the government says constitute “the major link between [political] appointees and the rest of the federal workforce,” must serve at his pleasure, judged on loyalty over merit.
Indeed, if he has his way, Trump’s power to purge will also extend to “Schedule Policy/Career” employees—a category of mid-level employees who offer opinions but answer to superiors who actually make the decisions. Estimated to number at least 50,000, they too would be screened for fidelity to Trump, if pending lawsuits fail to block the Executive Order authorizing the change.
Moreover, the Trump Administration in May declared that all applicants for federal career positions at the GS-5 level ($34,454) and above, such as administrative support staff, will be asked to respond to a series of questions, including how they would “help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities.”
Following a challenge by employee groups to what one union official called a “political loyalty test,” the administration hedged, saying that answering such questions is optional. But in August, an official of the Office of Personnel Management told federal human resources officials that “this is a very specific priority for this administration to have this information, prior to making a final offer.” In other words, if you want to land even a rank-and-file career job with the federal government, you’d be wise to convincingly declare support for Trump’s sweeping agenda.
I served as a U.S. Labor Department career employee for almost four decades, spanning Democratic and Republican presidencies from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump’s first term, including eight years in the Senior Executive Service. Never was hiring of any civil service career employee predicated on allegiance to the agenda of any given President. Nor, for obvious reasons, should it have been.
By definition, career employees serve not just one, but successive presidents, each with their own policies, priorities, and strategies. Hiring and retaining career civil servants based, in whole or in part, on their fealty to the President threatens to pollute a merit-based system with a politicized litmus test favoring the ideology of the President in power.
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, posted on X the bizarre claim that government workers, among others, “have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized system of indoctrination.” This is the apparent pretext under which the President and his allies hope to convert the federal career workforce into a cadre loyal not to their mission as prescribed by Congressional authorization, but only to Trump and his enablers’ vision for America, whatever it might be.
That’s not how our system of government, imperfect as it is, is supposed to work.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.