The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President makes it easier to fire federal employees
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.
AndrewBremberg,thehead 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’ long-running suspicion of the federal bureaucracy, one reflected in pronouncements by the president’s advisers. Shortly after Trump took office, Stephen 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.
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 Kettl, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, who is based in Washington.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who has been an informal adviser to the White House on Civil Service issues, said in an interview that a major impetus was the federal bureaucracy’s ideological opposition to the Trump agenda.
Trump signed three executive orders. The first makes it easier to fire and discipline federal employees, which a senior administration official argued had become a much too lengthy and difficult process. The administration said it could take six months to a year to dismiss an employee for poor performance, followed by an average of eight months to work through appeals.
The second executive order directs federal agencies to renegotiate contracts with unions representing government employees to reduce waste. The administration official expressed hope that agencies could stop having to pay expenses of both sides when unions undertake appeals on behalf of fired workers.
The third order aims to cut down on what is known as “official time,” in which government workers who have roles in the union, like helping colleagues file grievances, are allowed to perform those roles during normal working hours.