Humanizing the Bureaucrats

 

Photo courtesy of Flickr

You have been brainwashed to hate bureaucrats.

One of the central motifs in American political discourse is that “bureaucracy” brings to mind tedious paperwork, red tape, frustrated desk clerks, and pesky regulations. Everybody loves to groan about unnecessary bureaucracy, and every sitcom has a punchline about the DMV. The implicitly negative connotation of “bureaucracy” is everywhere in our society, universal enough to make it into a children’s movie like Zootopia. The manifestations of this bad rap range from harmless to downright dangerous. In particular, the right-wing has portrayed the bureaucracy as a nefarious shadow regime advancing an ulterior agenda suggested to be a threat to the American people. “Deep state” rhetoric is rooted in the implication and societally accepted idea that bureaucrats are faceless, impersonal, and in some way unresponsive to the needs and wants of the general public. 

There are many, many problems with “deep state” rhetoric, but perhaps its greatest fallacy is the idea that the bureaucracy is a cohesive ideological entity. In reality, the civil service is not an amorphous blob, a monolith, or a cabal of mindless soldiers propping up an ideological regime, but a collection of individuals. Just like any other group, civil servants’ priority is to provide for themselves and their families and to find fulfillment in their work.

I aim to push back on the anti-worker rhetoric that springs out of the negative societal depiction of bureaucracy, and instead to visualize the bureaucracy as a group of people that are particularly vulnerable to political whims. We don’t tend to think about bureaucrats as workers, but when politicians talk about streamlining the government and trimming down the bureaucracy, they’re talking about potentially firing hundreds of thousands of people. People, with ambitions, fears, consciences, allegiances, families to feed, bills to pay, and, for now, a very important job to do. A politically motivated disruption to these hundreds of thousands of lives would be a massive shock to both the American labor force and the fabric of our economy and society. 

In more ways than one, the livelihoods of the millions of American workers employed in the federal bureaucracy are subject to the whims and stunts of a small group of political elites. Since the Reagan Era, it has been popular to decry government as too big, as both Republicans and Democrats have called for a slimming of the federal government. Political scientist John DiIulio argues the opposite in his book Bring Back the Bureaucrats that incompetence and gridlock in the federal bureaucracy comes not from the government being too big, but from it being too small––the size of the federal civil service has lagged far behind both population growth and economic growth, saddling a set amount of workers with an increasingly untenable amount of duties. Not only are lamentations about the size of the bureaucratic state missing the point, DiIulio argues, but they ignore huge consequences for playing political games with federal employment. And with Donald J. Trump on his way back into the White House, the threats facing the labor force of bureaucrats are as relevant now as they ever have been.  

Currently, the federal government employs almost 2.3 million people, almost five times the population of Wyoming. The threats facing these 2.3 million people are exemplified by the now-infamous Project 2025, a comprehensive policy blueprint drawn up by an all-star team of Trump staffers and conservative think tank veterans (many of whom have been already awarded top positions in the incoming administration). There is a staggering amount that can and should be said about Project 2025––which was written explicitly to provide a second Trump administration with a ready-made blueprint to implement a radical, socially conservative, and Christian nationalist agenda––but in this column, I will focus specifically on the two-pronged threat it poses to the federal workforce in the form of mass layoffs and the politicization of the bureaucracy. The former has received a fair amount of mainstream attention in the 2024 election, but the latter much less so.

Here’s a crash course on the federal workforce. There are two major categories of federal employment: the competitive service and the excepted service. Roughly 70% of federal employees belong to the competitive service, which fits the classical definition of the meritocratic civil service system. Hiring is qualification-based, verified through exams, and strictly adheres to a federal hiring code. The remaining 30% of federal employees belong to the excepted service, which more closely follows a private sector hiring model, with looser hiring guidelines that vary between different agencies. This split system gives the federal bureaucracy the “best of both worlds”. The competitive service can build up the quality of its talent and retain institutional knowledge required for efficient administrative services, while the excepted service can respond to fluid political situations with flexible hiring and rotating expertise.

The debate over the extent to which the bureaucracy should be politicized has raged throughout American history. Through most of the 1800s, the federal bureaucracy was a quagmire of patronage appointments, with corruption and incompetence running rampant as incumbent presidents’ political supporters were rewarded with jobs (and then chased out of town when another administration took over). Beginning in the late 1800s, a wave of civil service reforms made the bureaucracy more apolitical and meritocratic, exemplified by the competitive service, with political protections for employees so that the government could do quality work without being subject to games of politics. The current system relies on a balance two competing but equally important principles: first, the idea that the government should be insulated from political impulses that go against the common interest, and second, the idea that whoever is elected to lead the country needs flexibility and political discretion to be able to implement the policies they were elected to pursue.

Donald Trump’s re-election threatens to upset this balance. During his first term, Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, a new category of jobs in the excepted service. Positions classified under Schedule F would be stripped of civil service protections, meaning that Schedule F employees were subject to at-will hiring and firing on political grounds. Trump’s goal was to reclassify more than 50,000 policy-related positions into Schedule F in order to give himself absolute power over these positions and their occupants. However, the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic brought this restructuring to a halt, and when Joe Biden took office in early 2021, he issued his own executive order eliminating Schedule F. However, Project 2025 contains plans to revive Schedule F in order to increase the politicization of the bureaucracy, and now President-elect Trump is in position to finish what he started in his first term. 

I return now to the two prongs of Project 2025’s designs on bureaucratic politicization: mass layoffs and the removal of political protections. According to Project 2025, the Trump administration would carry out mass layoffs at the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Justice, and Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In total, these departments and agencies employ a combined 447,000 people. Even more government agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs (which employs over 486,000 people), would be privatized, while still others would be dismantled in a piecemeal fashion. In other words, almost a million people stand to lose their jobs as a result of these layoffs. 

Project 2025 would also place several independent government bodies under intense political discretion. Agencies like the Federal Reserve, the Postal Service, Amtrak, NASA, the National Labor Relations Board, the FTC, the FCC, the SEC, and the Federal Election Commission are meant to be independent from the shifting currents of political administrations. They are not represented by Senate-confirmed cabinet secretaries, and they are not subject to the authority of the Executive Office of the President. These agencies are supposed to be able to go about their work without worrying about political blowback from the executive branch, but putting them under political discretion would inhibit (if not unilaterally undo) the work of hundreds of thousands of civil servants. Many of these agencies are somewhat small, but the Postal Service alone employs over 640,000 people. That’s a staggering amount of people to be effectively put under a political muzzle, notwithstanding the fact that they are responsible for circulating crucial information, packages, and ballots throughout the country.

In case there was any question about Trump’s intentions with the “independence” of these agencies, another provision of Project 2025 is the creation of a loyalty-based personnel database, in which prospective employees must complete a questionnaire to demonstrate their compatibility with the Trump agenda and their personal fealty to the president. The vast expansion of Schedule F, the removal of political protections for federal employees, and the implementation of a loyalty test all point towards a mass politicization of the federal bureaucracy under Trump. This would be nothing short of an ideological purge.

The labor perspective is crucial here, as with Trump’s re-election, two million Americans are at risk of losing their jobs, their access to health benefits, and their pensions. As noted by the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for civilian employees, Project 2025 would replace federal pay scales with a system that incentivizes following presidential orders and sharply reduces retirement benefits, including Social Security payments. Trump’s website also states that upon Trump taking office, “up to 100,000 government positions could be moved out of Washington.” All of this amounts to a major upheaval in the lives of even those federal employees whose departments are not gutted or politicized.

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 due to its political unpopularity, but he has appointed its authors and contributors to head the Office of Management and Budget, the FCC, the CIA, and more. 

And the threat of bureaucratic politicization existed prior to the creation of Project 2025. We know that in his first term, Trump already tried to reclassify tens of thousands of jobs into Schedule F so that he could hire political loyalists and fire anybody who challenged his agenda. Meanwhile, in 2022, Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida), one of the leaders of the Senate’s conservative wing, proposed the Public Service Reform Act, which would eliminate all job protections and allow the president to hire and fire all 2 million federal employees. Trump’s policy platform promises to reissue Schedule F for the purposes of “restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats” immediately upon taking office. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both far-right conspiracy theorists and wealthy patrons of Trump’s campaign, were tapped to lead a new government commission aimed at purging what they call the “unelected and unconstitutional Federal bureaucracy.” Trump and his allies have made it abundantly clear that they have their eyes on a political purge of the federal government, and millions of Americans’ livelihoods are at stake.

Trump’s re-election portends a return to the age of blatant political patronage, an Andrew Jackson for the 21st century. This is not only a direct threat to the government’s ability to do apolitical work aimed at providing the best quality to its constituents, but also an existential threat to the livelihoods of more than two million Americans who have already been consistently demonized as members of an evil “deep state.” The ramifications of this type of bureaucratic politicization on the American workforce are themselves deep, and with Trump returning to office in January, they are growing more and more plausible.

Simon Panfilio (CC ’25) is a columnist majoring in political science and minoring in history. He is from Denver, Colorado, and is interested in American elections, the American presidency, and the politics of bureaucracy and infrastructure.

 
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