Trump starts bringing Washington bureaucrats to heel
Lost amid the barbecues, parades, and misleading reporting over Memorial Day weekend was good news from the federal capital. On Friday, President Trump signed three executive orders that will improve the federal bureaucracy and ensure government staff are accountable in the way all other workers must be.
The three orders make it easier for bad employees to be fired, limit how much they are paid to do union work, and direct agencies to negotiate better deals against unions. When determining layoffs, federal agencies will also now be allowed to take performance into account, rather than solely basing them on seniority. Plus, unions will be charged for the space they’ve been using for free in federal buildings.
It would seem to any reasonable person that the most amazing thing in all this is that these reasonable arrangements have not always been in place. But actually, more amazing than that is that an administration is at last taking action to end absurd boondoggles and abuses.
In a bureaucracy of 2 million employees, you’re bound to have a few bad eggs. Whether it’s the employee who just can’t seem to show up to work on time, the one who fudged their resume and is vastly unqualified, or the hundreds of federal employees caught watching porn on the job for hours a day, some people deserve to be fired. And public-sector labor unions (which even progressive hero President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed) have made sure the federal firing process does not suffer from a quick trigger finger, to put it no more strongly.
You might expect liberals to support such measures, to make big government seem more attractive, but labor unions and the liberals who depend on organized labor to run their election campaigns were not happy about any of this.
Instead, the American Federation of Government Employees accused Trump of “attempting to silence the voice of veterans, law enforcement officers, and other frontline federal workers.” Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat who represents thousands of federal employees in Northern Virginia, said, “Trump divides us once again with an attack on Feds, including veterans, law enforcement, and those who serve and protect us.”
We should honor hardworking public servants, not demean them.
Weakening civil service protections will weaken the civil service. The administration is placing ideology above good government and making it harder for the government to hire and retain best and brightest.
— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) May 25, 2018
It’s disgusting that both the AFGE and Beyer immediately jumped to the false conclusion that Trump was attacking veterans, when it’s veterans who have been failed so disastrously by the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs. If anything, that department, more than any other, needs the ability to fire staff at will for documented evasions of responsibility, malfeasance, and even theft.
Beyer foolishly added, “The administration is placing ideology above good government and making it harder for the government to hire and retain best and brightest.” Trust us, the best and brightest workers in the public and private sector want to work with colleagues who share their passion and talent, not dolts and ne’er-do-wells who hold them back.
Surely, Beyer has never hired and fired people at his automotive dealerships based on first-in-last-out or compensated them irrespective of the quality of their work or protected them from firing if they stole from him. These are all practices of the federal government that Trump is trying to end.
Labor unions, which have no scruples about the quality of their members’ work, are naturally upset that their access to the federal trough will be limited. But when federal employees spend work time on union duties, they’re not just stealing time from taxpayers, they’re actively working against taxpayers in an attempt to secure more money and benefits for doing less work. In an ideal world, federal employees would be allowed no time or federal office space for union work.
We’ve expressed concern before about Trump becoming overly reliant on executive orders when legislating needs to be done by the legislative branch. But this is a clear instance of the executive legitimately wielding its wide power to shape the executive branch as it sees fit.
Whether the bureaucracy is pushing conservative policy reforms under a Republican president or liberal policies under a Democrat, civil servants should be accountable for their work performance and forced to spend more time working for taxpayers instead of unions. Trump’s executive order is a step in the right direction toward an accountable and efficient federal bureaucracy.
https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-starts-bringing-washington-bureaucrats-to-heel