Trump is targeting civil servants

I spent 35 non-partisan years in my career at NASA Johnson Space Center. My boss gave me an interesting description of a management training session. The seminar leader asked how many of those super visors had fired an an employee. Several hands went up. “How many of you have fired two?” No hands went up. It was easier to shuffle an underperforming employee to a sideline job than to fire him.

There is an inefficiency almost built into the civil ser vice, but it has a purpose. The Hatch Act provides a protected class of employees that will not be swept aside in a change of administration. Those wholesale changes used to occur, losing the not only the stability you want in a government structure, but also the corporate knowledge of those fired. The trade was that those protected civil ser vants would not indulge in partisan politics as part of their job.

In what seems to me to be a doomsday mechanism, Trump is setting up a job reclassification ability to fire anyone in a position to undermine him in the public’s eye, and further to leave

Biden bereft of their expertise. There have been political commissars installed previously (e.g. the Shrub’s stifling of Dr. James Hansen at NASA/ GISS on climate change). That was somewhat different in that Hansen could not be fired, only that his publications had to be vetted — and edited! — by a political commissar. Trump is aiming lower into the cadre of true experts whose seasoned opinions don’t line up with his uneducated lies and imaginings. The medical experts Redfield and Fauci, and our accomplished climate scientists of course, come immediately to mind.

I hope Biden will assure federal employees that he will hire back, and un-reclassify the positions of, those experts whom Trump might fire.