Dem
47
GOP
53
Long-term, the efforts by Co-Presidents Elon Musk and Donald Trump to terminate hundreds of thousands of federal workers will not stand up to legal scrutiny. The Pendleton Act is a real thing, collectively bargained contracts are a real thing, and Musk's claim to power is NOT a real thing. But, in the end, their "plan" surely isn't to win the lawsuits. It's to do the same thing Trump has done a million times before: use the courts to make it so onerous to fight back that people throw in the towel. Even if a bunch of judges, months or years from now, order every terminated employee to be reinstated, Musk and Trump still win if 50,000 of them or 100,000 of them or 200,000 of them have moved on to new employment, and aren't interested in once again putting their future in the hands of an unreliable employer.
We write this as prelude to two more stories yesterday about the Trump administration trying to cut the legs out from under federal workers. The first is that, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a person who earned everything he has in life and undoubtedly never benefited from things like familial wealth or a famous name, HHS plans to dramatically overhaul its organization chart, and to eliminate 10,000 employees. This will not only leave those folks (and anyone else who depends on their salaries) high and dry, it will also mean that the services rendered by HHS will be less accessible, or inaccessible. It's like Kennedy is determined to make sure that Trump averages one major pandemic per presidency.
It is not a secret to anyone who works for the federal government (or anyone who works at a university for that matter) that large-scale organizations suffer from administrative bloat over time. So, there is some value in a careful pruning of the workforce, from time to time. But if this was a serious effort to reform HHS, it would be handled in accordance with existing law and policy, would be implemented in phases over the course of several years, and would likely involve (mostly) leaving posts unfilled when they are vacated by retirement or resignation. These kinds of mass firings speak to a desire for PR, and a desire to undercut the agency, not a desire to engage in serious reform.
The second story, meanwhile, is that Trump issued an executive order yesterday in which he decreed that federal workers can no longer unionize, and that the government will no longer participate in collective bargaining. His basis for this is a reading of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that is... novel, shall we say. So novel that even the notoriously anti-union Ronald Reagan would never have tried it. Essentially, the law says that employees cannot interfere with the basic functions of government (for example, Secret Service officers could not go on strike and leave the president unprotected in an effort to create leverage). Whoever is creating fairy-tale law for Trump decided that any union activity whatsoever—organizing, collective bargaining, striking—automatically interferes with the basic functions of government, so all of it is a violation of the Civil Service Reform Act. It's creative, we'll give them that.
With the HHS reorganization, the administration can at least argue it's about efficiency and saving money, even if such claims do not stand up to scrutiny. The new XO, by contrast, is a baldfaced attempt to weaken federal employees and, more broadly, unions. Undercutting unions, in particular, has been a part of the Republican political project at least as far back as The Gipper. One wonders if all those union workers who voted for Trump, like Teamsters leader Sean O'Brien, will eventually take notice. (Z)