President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday, making it easier for federal managers to fire employees for poor performance. Declaring that “employees should be separated who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required standards,” the president’s order streamlined the process for firing the under-performers.
Perhaps most significantly, the order restricts most “performance improvement plans,” where employees are given the opportunity to demonstrate they can change their ways, to 30 days, “except when the agency determines in its sole and exclusive discretion that a longer period is necessary to provide sufficient time to evaluate an employee’s performance.” These plans have typically lasted between 60 and 210 days depending on the agency, according to Government Executive magazine.
Last year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, conducted by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and mentioned in the president’s order, uncovered a little cognitive dissonance in the federal workplace. Although 83 percent of the respondents thought they were “held accountable for achieving results,” other answers showed that really isn’t the case. Only 42 percent of the respondents thought that in their own offices, “steps are taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve,” while only 31 percent thought that awards were based on “how well employees perform their job.”
Clearly, even federal employees think something isn’t right with the way the government deals with under-performers. But is Trump’s approach the right one?
J. David Cox, Sr., national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest labor union for federal workers, doesn’t think so. Cox blasted the order, as well as two others dealing with federal employment issues, calling the president’s action “a direct assault on the legal rights and protections that Congress has specifically guaranteed” to federal employees.
One suspects that yet another lawsuit challenging a Trump executive order is coming rather soon.
This really isn’t anything new
Federal workers have always been somewhat of a political football. Most people who passed high school U.S. history remember that the Supreme Court ruling establishing the Court’s ability to rule a law unconstitutional was Marbury vs. Madison. Fewer remember that the case, decided in 1803, stemmed from Secretary of State James Madison’s refusal to deliver a commission to William Marbury, who the previous president, John Adams, had appointed a justice of the peace.
After the election of 1828 brought the populist Andrew Johnson into the White House (a president whom Trump admires), he removed more federal employees than any previous president. Johnson followed the practice gaining popularity in the states of exchanging political patronage for electoral support. New York Sen. William Marcy famously, and somewhat defiantly, said “to the victor belong the spoils.”
The “spoils system” ruled federal hiring practices until a Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled but ineffective supporter, thought President James Garfield owed him a job. In 1881 after not getting appointed to the government, Guiteau assassinated Garfield. He killed the president, and he also killed the patronage system.
The movement to reform the government’s hiring practices began in New York, where in 1883, Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt, who had served as a member of the state’s Civil Service Reform Association, helped pass the nation’s first true civil service law. Later that year, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which established the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Candidates for government employment were thereafter to be judged on their merit and not their political connections.
Roosevelt served as the Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895, working tirelessly to establish the independence of federal workers from any particular administration. Of course, Roosevelt himself would later become president following another assassination — that of William McKinley in 1901.
Every time someone talks about modifying the Civil Service system, someone else acts as though the government is about to declare open season on federal workers, with no size restrictions and no bag limit. But the plain fact of the matter is that the difficulties in firing federal workers (not to mention the ridiculously difficult process of hiring one in the first place), government managers increasingly turn to contractors for most things that are not “inherently governmental functions,” and even a few things that are (when no one is looking).
They do so because it’s easier.
Contractors are usually more expensive in the short term than federal employees, but contracts can be, and are, regularly modified “for the convenience of the government” to adjust the number of contractors on the job to meet current requirements. And when a government “technical monitor” or contracting officer’s representative is unhappy with an individual contractor’s performance, they need only tell the program manager that they want that contractor replaced immediately.
So while contractors admire federal employees for their stability, “govvies” admire contractors for their paychecks. One half of that equation is about to become unbalanced. But we’ll see how that works out.
