Federal Employees Don’t Get to Defy the President

Imagine that a longtime employee—say, a self-regarding TV journalist unhappy with his network’s new direction—berates and insults his new boss in a staff meeting. That employee can and should get fired for insubordination. A TV network is beholden to its viewers, its advertisers and, most of all, its shareholders. It has a responsibility to remove obstacles, including underperforming or insubordinate employees, to deliver value to each of those groups as best it can. That’s the reality for three-quarters of U.S. workers—even our most pompous newsmen.

That is not the case for the government. Our local, state and federal governments have stakeholders: the taxpayers who fund them and the voters who decide their direction. After elections emerge two kinds of federal workers. There are the political appointees, chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. These individuals serve at the president’s pleasure and only during his term of office. Then there are the permanent and supposedly nonpolitical career employees. Until recently, civil service protections made firing career federal workers nearly impossible and extremely time-consuming, with every decision subject to red tape and appeals. Thankfully, that story is changing for some government employees.

In early June, President Trump issued an executive order turning about 8,000 bureaucrats in “senior policy-influencing positions” into at-will employees who can be more readily removed.

Why those employees? The White House cited a poll in which “a plurality of senior federal employees in Washington, D.C. said they would ignore a lawful order from President Trump that they considered bad policy.” The previous Trump administration had already experienced career employees refusing “to assist on policy matters like prosecuting racial discrimination in higher education or drafting rules regarding Title IX reform because of their personal policy disagreements.”

In response to such recalcitrance, President Trump issued a similar order during his first term. President Biden revoked it when he took office.

These bureaucrats are paid with our tax dollars. They work for the American people and serve the president, whoever he is and whichever party he belongs to. Voters send the president to Washington with the expectation that he will manage the executive branch as he sees fit.

Career employees are there to execute the policies of the sitting president. Those who won’t or can’t should go. And they most assuredly should not be free to slow-walk issues or tie up policy changes they politically disagree with in red tape while trying to wait out the current administration.

Being in a job over the long term while watching new administrations with varying priorities come and go must create a temptation to feel superior to political appointees. Career employees have informed opinions on policy and understand the mechanisms by which it is implemented or thwarted. The fact is that many career bureaucrats are politically or ideologically opposed to President Trump, his agenda and his party. As Americans, they have every right to hold those beliefs. But they don’t have the right to use their positions in the United States government to stymie the president’s policies and protect those they personally favor.

Making it easier to fire some career bureaucrats makes sense from a productivity standpoint as well. Large organizations tend to harbor personnel redundancies, timeservers and incompetents. The federal government is bloated, even post-DOGE, and at-will employment is a necessary corrective to wheel-spinning and waste.

Certainly, most senior career federal employees are conscientious and patriotic and will never be affected by their at-will status. But there are always a few, like our gaseous hypothetical network journalist, who think they know better than the American people.