Trump plan: ‘Hire the best and fire the worst’

President seeks overhaul of nation’s civil service

“While to some people those are code words, they’re very clear to us. Basically it wipes out due process rights for employees.”

J. David Cox President of the American Federation of Government Employees

WASHINGTON – President Trump will seek to “hire the best and fire the worst” federal government employees under the most ambitious proposal to overhaul the civil service in 40 years, officials said.

The measures will be outlined in the budget plan Trump will send to Congress on Monday, said four Office of Management and Budget officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget hasn’t been released.

Trump foreshadowed the proposal in a line in his State of the Union address last week: “Tonight, I call on Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” he said.

Trump is using the VA Accountability Act, which gave the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs greater authority to fire and discipline workers, as a model. The White House says that law resulted in the dismissal of 1,470 employees, the suspension of 443 and demotions for 83 others last year.

“While to some people those are code words, they’re very clear to us,” said American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox, who represents about 700,000 workers for the federal government and District of Columbia. “Basically it wipes out due process rights for employees.”

Another pillar of the proposal would reduce automatic pay increases and instead use that money for a performance bonus pool.

Under the current system, federal employees get a review every one to three years. Employees whose performance is “fully successful” — as 99.7% are — get a within-grade “step” increase in addition to annual cost-of-living increases.

Trump’s plan would stretch out the amount of time it takes to go from the first step to the 10th from 18 years to 27 years, saving $10 billion over the next decade, officials said. That money would then go to high-performing employees either as merit raises or as one-time bonuses.

Federal employee unions fear the pay-per-performance plan would be used to reward loyalists and discriminate against women and minorities.

“He seems to be interested in political revenge by firing people,” Cox said. “The government is not a family business that you get to be in total control of.”

Trump’s efforts to wrangle the bureaucracy fulfill a key campaign promise of the businessman president, who pledged a hiring freeze to shrink the cost of government and reduce regulation.

But even champions of reform are skeptical it will happen.

Since President Carter signed the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978, every president has tried — to some degree — to promote greater efficiency in the federal workforce.

And every president has largely failed, running up against an entrenched culture in the bureaucracy, opposition from labor unions and a fickle Congress, said Donald Devine, who was President Reagan’s civil service director. Reagan tried implementing Carter’s reform law but ran into resistance from Congress.