Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Trump’s latest Soviet-style order aims to create loyalty through fear

Trump

Alex Brandon / AP

In this Oct. 10, 2020 photo, President Donald Trump speaks from the Blue Room Balcony of the White House to a crowd of supporters in Washington.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order with implications so dark it could have come straight out of the Iron Curtain.

The order would remove longstanding job protections for tens of thousands of federal government employees, a move that would allow the presidential administration to hire and fire those employees based on their political views. In other words, it would allow Trump to remove any employee he deems as being opposed to him and replace that person with a Trump loyalist.

That would not only allow Trump to create a Soviet-style regime in which party ties are the main requirement for government positions, but it would jeopardize the health and well-being of every American.

The positions in question include public policy employees whose work protects Americans across a huge swath of our lives — ensuring our food and pharmaceuticals are safe to consume, maintaining safety standards for aircraft and passenger vehicles, providing adequate health and safety regulations in the workplace, cleaning up our air and water, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and much more.

Currently, those employees have a legal right to work without fear of being fired or reprimanded for anything other than their work conduct and job performance. That’s for very good reason: The firewall from politics gives the employees the freedom to serve the people first and foremost, and when necessary to speak to power without fear of political reprisal.

That allows the public servants to voice concerns or objections to policies that could be harmful to the interests of the public, and to meet their objective of protecting their fellow Americans.

Administrations have broad latitude in hiring and firing at the top, but in government departments, career professionals are afforded civil service protections to ensure that staff can’t be fired for political reasons. Want an example of one person afforded civil service protection and thus able to speak his mind freely irrespective of politics? Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Protections shielding career professionals from political retaliation protect the American people.

Think about this. Let’s say you’re getting on a flight or taking a new kind of medication a year from now, and Trump has been reelected. Wouldn’t you feel safer knowing that the government employees responsible for airline safety and drug testing were in place because of their professional qualifications and experience, and were free to advocate for your safety without facing retribution?

Trump’s order would destroy that trust. It would replace dedicated public servants with party hacks, kicking the door wide open to Tammany Hall-level patronage and corruption while creating a government dedicated to working for Trump and not the American people at large.

The order would convert the federal workers in question to “at will” employment, which would allow the administration to remove them without the opportunity for the employees to contest the decision or obtain union representation. It would make it easier to hire new employees outside of the competitive process, creating the possibility of bringing on recruits with little or no experience.

No doubt, the change would create an environment where bad news doesn’t travel upward, which is highly dangerous. For just one example, think about Chernobyl, where a fear-driven failure to address concerns — from the design process to construction to the handling of the meltdown — led to catastrophe.

“Good decisions are not going to be made if people are afraid of raising things that they think their bosses don’t want to hear,” said Max Stier, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, in an interview in the Washingtonian.

Then there’s the intrinsic unfairness of Trump’s order for the employees themselves. These are dedicated public servants who go to work day after day with one objective in mind: to protect their fellow Americans. Allowing them to be cast aside because of their political beliefs is unconscionable.

Even a Trump appointee reacted to the order with disgust. Ronald Sanders resigned his position as the head of the Federal Salary Council, a presidential advisory group on the civil service, over the action. Sanders called it “nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the president, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.”

Sanders went on: “I simply cannot be part of an administration that seeks ... to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law ... not to be loyal to a particular president or administration.”

The good news for Americans is that Trump’s order would go into effect Jan. 19, the day before the next inauguration. Democratic candidate Joe Biden would undoubtedly rescind it, so a vote for Biden is a vote to cut it drastically short should it be implemented.

Trump simply must be stopped in his takeover of the American government. He’s already gone much too far, whether by turning the Justice Department into his legal defense firm, forcing out untold numbers of government experts in science and other fields, flooding the courts with extremist Republican judges, and more.

Now, he’s out to politicize — and, given his propensities, weaponize — an even bigger part of the government. Although it’s generally agreed that the number of employees affected by the order is in the six figures, some experts say hundreds of thousands of positions may be involved.

We can stop him. With voting in its final days, we can remove him from office, stop his march toward authoritarianism and protect the people who protect us.