Local opinion: Political corruption of the federal Civil Service

In a May 29 memo, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced radical hiring and retention changes following one of his January orders, which essentially eliminated former civil service employee protections. The essence of those radical changes were buried and camouflaged in multiple pages of complex and long-winded bureaucratic jargon and doublespeak. I have excerpted and pasted below the relatively few key words from that overlong and complicated multi-page memo:

MEMORANDUM

TO: Heads and Acting Heads of Departments and Agencies

FROM: Vince Haley, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy

Charles Ezell, Acting Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management

DATE: May 29, 2025

RE: Merit Hiring Plan

President Trump stated that this Merit Hiring Plan must achieve seven goals: ...

2. Prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;

... Going forward, to implement Executive Order 14170, all Federal job vacancy announcements graded at GS-05 or above will include four short, free-response essay questions: ...

3. How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?

... and will have candidates on USAJobs fill out short essays about how they plan to support the administration’s priorities when applying for jobs.

Those phrases above represent an unprecedented political move to corrupt jobs that, for many decades, had been apolitical and essential for the reliable, effective and efficient continuing operations of our federal government, regardless of who sat in the Oval Office.

This corrupt Trump move reminds me of when I was being considered in the early 1980s for my “political appointment” to a Medicare administrative law judge job in the Reagan administration. I was forced to prove that I was a loyal Republican in order to be eligible. That had never been a federal prerequisite before. I knew because I had been chosen for the same job by the Carter administration. I was never asked about my political bona fides. A friend connected with the Reagan administration, who was sponsoring my appointment, apologized to me for that political corruption and explained that it had never been a requirement in earlier administrations.

I had rejected that Carter administration job because rules prevented them from paying my moving expenses. Later, I rode in on the tail of a very loyal Reaganite being appointed to the same five-person Medicare board as me. The other guy had a friend in the government who arranged an exception to the rules to pay for his moving expenses. That established a precedent that enabled them to cover my moving expenses too.

Who you know has always made a difference.

I worked in Albany in the mid to late 1970s. I had become disappointed in the Democratic Party because it seemed to me that the Democrats, in this case NY Governor Hugh Carey, solely tried to solve problems by throwing money at them. I mistakenly believed the Republican conservative BS, which has never been true, and I became a dues-paying Republican. A good Albany friend, who happened to be chairman of the county Republican Party, vouched for my “loyalty” to the Reagan operatives. That was the politicized period when Reagan flooded the federal government with white born-again Christian ideologues of the Pat Robertson “family values” ilk.

Those white Christian conservative ideologues managed to change federal policies for the worse during the Reagan spendthrift years, when he gifted lower taxes to his rich pals and pardoned his lawbreaking cronies. Reagan did some good things, but he was not a good president. Trump now is using similar tactics to polarize and to politicize what long had been an apolitical civil service that was the envy of the world in its competence — cruel jokes aside. That corruption should come to a screeching halt.