Merit, Not Trauma, Should Drive The Civil Service
A message to the architects of Schedule Policy/Career.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it.
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At the end of the first Trump administration, the White House issued Executive Order 13957 creating a so-called “Schedule F,” a category of government employees who could be fired at will. This EO was immediately reversed by the incoming Biden administration, but firing large numbers of civil servants was incorporated into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 prior to last November’s election. Conservatives have long seen firing large numbers of bureaucrats as a way of undermining the “deep state.” Trump’s OMB has just re-issued and updated Schedule F as “Schedule Policy/Career,” which revives the old Schedule F. They have posted the rule for notice-and-comment, and after 90 days will move forward to implement the order. Don Kettl, one of the nation’s leading experts on public administration, drafted a comment, a version of which we publish here.
—Francis Fukuyama
When we lived in Annapolis, one of the most popular t-shirts in the tourist shops featured a pirate who snarled, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” That motto is at the core of the Trump administration’s civil service strategy. After all, OMB Director Russell Vought pledged to “put them in trauma.”
If there’s anything we know about managing people, it’s that it’s impossible to fire your way to success. So when it comes to improving the performance of government, the proposed new civil service Schedule Policy/Career (or Schedule PC) is doomed to failure.
But that’s not what is at issue here. This is the first administration in more than 140 years that has had the explicit goal of weakening the civil service to the point that it cannot improve government’s performance—or, indeed, perform government’s work. With the battle over Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” we’ve seen how hard it is for Congress to agree on cutting anything, let alone on the scale that the administration has in mind. So the administration is trying to cut off the administrative body’s arms and legs—and more. No skeleton can stand on its own.
The Schedule PC proposal tries to build the administration’s case, but that’s a shaky skeleton as well.
The case begins with the bromide that it’s too hard to fire poor performers. In part, of course, that’s on purpose, because the system has built-in safeguards to protect employees from capricious supervisors. In part, that’s because of a widely-held belief that firing poor performers is easier in the private sector.
There simply are no good numbers for comparing dismissal for cause across the public and private sectors. There are good numbers for the federal government in FedScope, but there’s nothing comparable for private employers. The best estimate for private sector dismissal for cause is about 0.9% of all employees in 2023. That guess, however, covers the entire private sector. For industries more akin in function to the federal government—industries like finance and health care and social assistance—the rate was probably more like 0.7%. For the federal government in that year, FedScope says that the rate of dismissal for cause was 0.57%.
So more people get fired in the private sector—but not by an amount that really matters.
But then everyone knows that the federal government’s appeals processes “are time-consuming and difficult, and removals are not infrequently subject to a protracted appeal process with an uncertain outcome,” as the Schedule PC proposed rule puts it. Except that’s not true either.
For five years, the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals of “adverse actions” affecting federal employees, didn’t have a quorum. But once it was back to full strength in 2022, it quickly whittled down its backlog of 3,793 cases to almost nothing by the end of 2024. The average time to process an initial appeal was 130 days, or just over four months. The government won 78% of the time in MSPB decisions and, for cases that employees appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court upheld the MSPB’s decision 94% of the time. Federal supervisors prevail in the vast majority of cases decided by the MSPB, and the government’s position is almost never reversed on an ultimate appeal to the federal court.
Justice in the MSPB appeals process is swift. So what’s the source of the conventional wisdom about endless delays and uncertainty? That comes in cases appealed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The odds that an employee will win a case there are tiny—just 2.4% in 2023—but the time to get a decision often stretches out to a year or more.
And here’s a case where the private sector is no better off. Any private employees who believe they have been fired through discrimination can appeal to the EEOC as well. The biggest delays in the appeals process have nothing to do with the rights afforded federal government employees—and the proposed Schedule PC would leave the EEOC appeals in place.
The Proposed Schedule PC, moreover, tries to establish a case that it’s simply going back to the time when there was a merit system but when employees were at-will. However, since the passage of the bill creating the civil service system in 1883, the Pendleton Act, there never was such a time. The 1883 act focused principally on wiping out patronage in hiring by setting standards for merit. It forbade dismissal for political reasons. Not until the 1912 Lloyd-LaFollette Act did Congress explicitly create more protections from dismissal. In the meantime, though, Massachusetts Republican Senator George F. Hoar called “improper removals” a step that was “improper, cruel, and unjust.”
The Lloyd-LaFollette Act clearly established that federal civil servants could not be removed at all. Supporters of the bill saw it as ratifying their presumption established with the Pendleton Act.
The Proposed Schedule PC thus does not take the civil service system back to a time when civil servants could be removed at-will. It would take the country back to a time before the creation of the civil service, when the spoils system dictated the hiring and firing of federal employees.
In a 1876 speech on the spoils system, Mark Twain called the existing system “so idiotic, so contemptible, so grotesque,” that it would make “the very gods of solemnity laugh.” He went on, “We will not hire a school teacher who does not know the alphabet,” but “when you come to our civil service, we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses.” Twain concluded his argument for the creation of a nonpartisan, professionally oriented civil service, “We hope to make worth and capacity the sole requirements of the civil service.”
As with almost everything else he said, Twain was right. We shouldn’t aspire to return to the time in which he spoke. We should seek to make merit the sole requirement of the civil service. This doesn’t mean that civil servants should be independent operators, unaccountable to elected leaders. But they serve those leaders best by putting the whole force of their expertise behind the policies those leaders choose.
Now, of course, the counterargument from supporters of Schedule PC is that civil servants too often are not accountable. There undoubtedly are anecdotes about when civil servants have not followed the path of merit, just as there are tales of bureaucratic sabotage within private-sector companies and your neighborhood grocery store. (I used to work at one, and I have a lot of tales.)
But the data point to the real story. It’s not much harder in government to fire poor performers than it is in the private sector (and, to the degree it’s tougher, it’s by design, to provide the protections that Twain and others argued for). The appeals process works pretty smoothly and the government wins most of the time. The real delays come from EEOC appeals, which is something private sector managers have to deal with as well and which Schedule PC wouldn’t eliminate. And there’s no going back in time to a point where there was a merit system but when there was at-will firing.
And that takes us back to the t-shirt. We have to see the proposed Schedule PC for what it is: an effort to bring to yet another new life Vought’s pledge to put civil servants in trauma—and it does a pretty good job at it. It’s also a not-well-disguised effort to unwind and weaken some federal policy without asking Congress to repeal it.
If we want more accountability in the system, the executive branch should not try to undo by subterfuge what the people’s house—Congress—has created. And if we want government to perform better—and we can come up with an endless list of federal programs we expect to run right—we ought to focus instead on the little-noticed executive order of January 20 that called for “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” starting with a new federal hiring plan within 120 days.
That’s Tuesday, June 20. The goal of the executive order is a plan that “brings to the Federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.” That’s the goal at which everyone should be aiming.
Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is the author, with William D. Eggers, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.
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