The Freedom Foundation last week submitted formal comments in support of a proposed regulation by the Trump administration to hold career bureaucrats working for the federal government more accountable to the American public and the officials they democratically elect.
The regulation would address the longstanding criticism that federal civil service laws make it inordinately difficult to hold certain employees — specifically, those who wield influence over policy matters despite being neither elected nor appointed — accountable for poor performance, misconduct and even outright “resistance” to the lawful policy directives of duly-elected presidents and their political appointees.
As has been widely reported by former officials and even broadcast by some federal career staff themselves, some members of the permanent bureaucracy actively work to undermine the policies of administrations they don’t like. Though the job of these civil servants is to carry out the will of the American people though the elected executive — and many do exactly that — some nonetheless use their positions to advance their own ideological and political biases that conflict with this basic principle of democratic self-government.
The Freedom Foundation previously exposed stunning evidence of how unelected career bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) worked to thwart the policies of the first Trump administration and instead promote an ideological view of the agency’s mission centered around promoting unionization.
Their “resistance” ultimately culminated in the dramatic inauguration day firing of the NLRB’s Trump-appointed general counsel, Peter Robb, by President Biden in 2021.
In its comment submitted to the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Freedom Foundation focused primarily on its exposé of NLRB employees’ policy resistance while also documenting how, during the Biden administration, career staff at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) abruptly shut down an ongoing investigation by the agency’s district office into the union front group Working Washington, which had been prompted by a Freedom Foundation complaint filed during the previous administration.
While maintaining the federal government’s current merit-based hiring practices that prohibit political patronage or other political considerations when hiring or firing career employees, OPM’s proposed regulation would establish a new, at-will employment category for policy-influencing career positions that would allow federal agencies to more effectively remove bureaucrats for poor performance, misconduct or attempting to intentionally subvert an administration’s policy directives.
As many others have pointed out, at-will employment was formerly the norm for the federal civil service, and a number of states successfully utilize at-will employment for their career civil servants today.
Having both documented and experienced firsthand how entrenched, pro-union activism pervades the federal bureaucracy at agencies like the NLRB and others, the Freedom Foundation was uniquely positioned to contribute its perspective in support of OPM’s proposed rule and urges OPM to advance this important reform to improve the federal government’s democratic accountability to the American people.
