Next up in my side-eye analysis of Project 2025: “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy,” pp 69-85 (begins at page 102 of the PDF doc).
As I said last time, the section on the Executive Office contains many suggestions for adding new personnel answerable directly to the President. Will we finally get some concrete suggestions for reducing, rather than inflating, the size of government? Let’s see.
The discussion begins with identifying the four major personnel agencies involved in staffing the Federal government, then summarizes the function of each, with a mention of Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which lays out “the rules, regulations, and laws governing the civil service.” This all falls under the heading of good information. Then we get to the analysis and recommendations.
“The civil service was devised to replace the amateurism and presumed corruption of the old spoils system, wherein government jobs rewarded loyal partisans who might or might not have professional backgrounds (p. 71).”
Great! But wait! Isn’t that exactly what P25 itself just told us the president should do – reward loyal partisans by giving them jobs in his new administration?
Pardon me while I shake off this whiplash.
Astonishingly, also on p. 71, President Jimmy Carter is congratulated for taking steps to revamp the civil service performance appraisal system … reforms which fizzled under Reagan. The legitimate complaint here is that it’s almost impossible to fire a civil servant, and difficult to apply rigorous competency standards for new hires. President Obama introduced a new hiring examination in 2015 (p. 72) … which fizzled under DJT … who issued an executive order (No. 13839) concerning disciplinary action for poorly performing civil servants … which was overturned by Biden (p. 73).
Look, to me it seems obvious that there should indeed be rigorous competency standards and that we should indeed be able to unload unsatisfactory employees. The difficulty is the appearance, or the fact, of discrimination. A white supremacist administration will do its damnedest to get rid of employees of color. A Christian Nationalist administration can be counted on to shed as many women and LGBTQ+ employees as possible. Every questionable disciplinary action or firing could end up in court, taking years and costing a fortune. And if they try to accomplish this by attrition (i.e. by failing to fill vacated positions and/or by making working conditions so horrible that people simply quit), the process will take too long for them to call it a policy victory. Especially since people who quit will not be signing any arbitration agreements with nondisclosure clauses, meaning the world will quickly know why so many people don’t want to work for that administration.
Returning to the document, with discussion of compensation, employment appeals, etc. Some troubling statistics on page 75: “The MSPB [Merit Systems Protection Board] … faces a backlog of an estimated 3,000 cases of people who were potentially wrongfully terminated or disciplined as far back as 2013. … as of January 2023, the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] had a backlog of 42,000 cases.” P25 recommends juggling some of the cases and investigatory functions to process things faster, which sounds reasonable.
On page 76, we get to pay and benefits, including retirement, then move briefly to Landlord and Contractor Management (p. 77), then to Reductions-in-Force (p. 78). “ … there are 2 million federal employees, but since budgets have exploded, so has the total number of personnel with nearly 10 times more federal contractors than federal employees. … cutting functions, levels, funds, and grants is much more important than setting simple employment size.” Cannot disagree.
True efficiency is achieved when you have the correct people in the correct positions with the correct resources executing the correct plans.
On page 79: “The GAO [Government Accountability Office] has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effectiveness across 37 areas … . It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities … to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.”
Progressives: that sounds like the perfect place to take control of the public conversation, doesn’t it? Especially right in this moment. Here is a document that DJT’s team did not prepare. The summary is only fourteen pages; the full report, only 129. Pick it up and start talking about it in real and substantive ways. Get the public engaged and involved; find out where we can clearly agree that change would be beneficial; get voter support for these changes; initiate legislation.
Show that we are part of the solution.
Then point out that wasting government time and money nitpicking who can use which bathroom, which genitalia a soldier should have, or who can have which medical procedure is the exact opposite of efficiency and effectiveness, not to mention blatant discrimination.
Where there is blatant discrimination, it’s fair to talk about the motivation for that discrimination. But we can’t spend so much of our time and energy blaming people for beliefs we disagree with. That doesn’t win us elections, and it doesn’t do much to help the people we’re trying to protect.
The discussion continues, with page 80 going into detail about political appointees vs careerists. This is mostly good wonky stuff plus a brief history of policy, going on to working with unions before returning to a core P25 agenda item: the desirability of stuffing the civil service with political appointees.
Takeaway: P25 doesn’t actually offer any fresh suggestions in this personnel discussion, only some more of that Yay Dictatorship subtext.
Next time I’ll look at Section Two, The Common Defense (beginning at page 87 of the text, p. 120 of the PDF doc if you’re reading along).