President curbs the protections for federal workers and unions
Rules decried as an ‘assault on democracy’
President Donald Trump on Friday signed a series of executive orders making it easier to fire federal government workers and to curb the workplace role of unions that represent them.
Andrew Bremberg, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the president was “fulfilling his promise to promote more efficient government by reforming our civil service rules.”
But the push also reflects conservatives’ longrunning suspicion of the federal bureaucracy, one reflected in pronouncements by the president’s advisers. Shortly after Trump took office, Stephen K. Bannon, then his chief strategist, called for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Unions representing government workers were quick to denounce the actions, calling them an “assault on democracy,” in the words of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, which represents 700,000 workers.
“This is more than union busting. It's democracy busting,” said J. David Cox Sr., the union's national president. “These executive orders are a direct assault on the legal rights and protections that Congress has specifically guaranteed to the 2 million public-sector employees across the country who work for the federal government.”
Experts on the civil service said the moves represented the next stage of an effort that Republican politicians and conservative activists had led in states like Wisconsin and Michigan throughout this decade.
“This is very clearly an administration trying to do all it can to weaken the role of public employee unions as part of a far broader strategy that in many ways has been bubbling up from the states to turn the civil service into at-will employment,” said Donald F. Kettl, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, who is based in Washington.
“For many people involved in this debate from administration, that is the ultimate goal,” Kettl said.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who has been an informal adviser to the White House on civil service issues, said in an interview last year, when the administration was considering action, that a major impetus was the federal bureaucracy’s ideological opposition to the Trump agenda.
“When you learned that 97 percent of Justice Department donations went to Hillary Clinton, 99 percent of State Department donations went to Hillary, there are some reasons to believe a substantial number of people don’t want Trump to succeed,” Gingrich said. “Should the elected president of the United States have the ability to control the bureaucracy that actively opposed him?”
Bremberg, the White House domestic policy official, said the moves would make good on the president’s call to “empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and remove those that undermine the public trust or fail the American people.”