Trump’s war on the Washington bureaucracy

Such long goodbyes have proved so arduous and frustrating that many managers just give up, essentially resigning their ability to manage their staff. But they are about to become much less common, as President Trump signed three executive orders last month gutting rules that allow bad workers to prevent legitimate firings, and ending lucrative perks for the labor unions that helped put them in place.

Trump’s sweeping reforms target union power. He is curbing subsidized work hours and free office space unions. This is the biggest splash yet in his promised effort to obliterate bureaucratic obstacles that have made the government in Washington a warehouse for many lazy and incompetent workers.

[Also read: Unions praise Trump on steel tariffs]

And Trump is eager to take on more and bigger reforms, members of the administration say.

“We’re not kicking the can down the road. We have a president who actually wants this sort of change so that the federal government can be the best it can be,” said Jeff Pon, who since March has led the civil service as director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Trump’s recent orders alone save an estimated $100 million a year in reduced union subsidies. They are described by officials as among the most aggressive civil service changes possible without Congress passing new laws.

Yet, big though they are, they are only a fraction of a grander vision within the Trump administration to reform and refocus the federal workforce.

Most of the work is being undertaken by the OPM, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the White House Domestic Policy Council. Each is aggressively reforming the system through administrative and legislative action to make the notoriously bloated, pampered, and costly federal bureaucracy more efficient.

“If you think of [the civil service] as a seagoing vessel, you have a lot of barnacles, and growth and crust on the hull,” said a White House official who is part of the team setting administration policy. The official asked not to be named in order to freely discuss the policy. “What we are trying to do is basically power-wash those barnacles off the side of the civil service so it can operate more efficiently.”

Administration officials speak bullishly about comprehensive system improvements, including an ambitious update to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. But, this being Washington, realism tempers the most extravagant hopes.

Margaret Weichert, Deputy Director of the OMB, is a leading proponent of root and branch reform, and stresses the importance of her mission. “Since 1978 there has been no major attention given to how we operate our civil service, and that’s despite the fact that most of the jobs that people do today almost couldn’t have been conceived of in 1978,” she said.

Agencies all across the federal bureaucracy have become battlegrounds.

In March, the Department of Education unilaterally forced through a new union contract to break a negotiating impasse. At the Department of Veteran Affairs, resignations and firings are mounting after Congress passed agency-specific legislation, which the administration sees as a template for workforce-wide reform to hasten the firing of dud staff members.

At OMB, officials are putting the finishing touches on a reorganization plan that would consolidate agencies and offices. The plan goes hand in hand with civil service changes, and together they form a comprehensive modernization blueprint that would include such things as cross-agency sharing of workers.

“We are solving systems-level problems,” Weichert said. “All of these modernizing government activities necessarily have connections to each other — Venn diagrams, if you will. Civil service reform has some very big overlaps with the reform plan.”

Pon, unique among recent OPM directors with his background in human resources, says data provides a crucial support to the overall reforms. He ordered a new live-data dashboard loaded with demographic and performance statistics from federal agencies, which he hopes will guide changes small and large.

“Certain people and reporters…have commented, ‘Maybe Director Pon is taking on too much.’ Actually, what we’re trying to do is take on a lot and…not leave any rock unturned,” Pon said. “On our watch we are going to lead and author, versus follow and check the box.”

A $100 million opening shot

As sweeping as Trump’s orders were to make federal firings faster, the president didn’t make much of a show of signing them.

Officials shared few details about the document-signing itself, other than announcing that it had happened. There was no public ceremony and the announcement was embargoed until 4:30 p.m. on the Friday before Memorial Day. Reporters were told in an email that the orders were signed.

“The orders were ready to be signed and the president wanted to sign them,” said the White House official involved in the process. “There was no reason to delay. They were ready to sign.” Why the lack of fanfare? The official did not know, and knew of no complex strategic explanation for the lack of pomp and ceremony.

Trump’s orders did many things. One of the most notable is that it required unionized workers to spend at least 75 percent of their work hours on government business, rather than the government paying them essentially to work for their union, which is what has often happened during the past 40 years.

The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act requires the government to pay its workers for time they spend working for their union. Trump administration officials say his has led to absurd situations. At the VA, for example, 472 federal workers, including 74 supposedly full-time nurses, have actually been spending 100 percent of their time on union work.

From now on, unions will have to pay for office space in federal buildings that has hitherto been given them free by taxpayers. They will also lose several perks of a kind rarely enjoyed by workers in the private sector, including reimbursed travel and parking spaces. Unions won’t be paid for time used appealing worker firings or lobbying Congress. The order also abolishes an Obama-era policy that said leniency for a single employee would be treated as a binding precedent for other workers.

These perks show just how much ground taxpayers have lost to union power in the past three generations. Even FDR, darling of labor, opposed allowing federal workers to be unionized, seeing the obvious conflict of interest between employees and ordinary citizens. Over the past three quarters of a century, federal workers not only unionized, but secured big advantages, including near guaranteed employment, that are unheard of in the private sector.

Trump’s orders instruct the OPM director to publish agency collective bargaining agreements “as soon as practicable” and encourage renegotiation of deals to reduce the amount of time workers spend on subsidized union work. This moves the government toward the fraction of overall employee hours already used by the Defense Department, Interior Department, and State Department: About one hour for each bargaining unit employee, a third of the federal average.

Faster firings

Other reforms will take time to implement, notably the streamlined process for employee dismissals. The new plan calls for a government-wide 30-day performance review period, with termination no longer stalled indefinitely pending appeals. This effort is slowed by the fact that union contracts in many cases are still in effect.

The White House acknowledges it will take time to rework the contracts. The executive orders are estimated initially to save $100 million a year by reducing the $210 million in annual subsidies for union activity. Once all agency contracts are renegotiated, savings are projected to be near $140 million.

Most union contracts run three to four years, the White House official says. But many default to automatic one-year renewals. Because the Obama administration gave unions “some pretty sweet deals,” many agencies have contracts defaulting to automatic renewals that can be forcibly renegotiated within the year, the White House official said.

The union contract for the Veterans Administration is being negotiated right now, and major contracts are on deck soon for the Social Security Administration, Labor Department, and Department of Health and Human Services. A notable outlier is the Internal Revenue Service, which has a contract running through late 2021.

Valdez, the former government manager who fired just two people in his 20-year career, says he approves of Trump’s executive orders, but cautions that unions have “less than zero” motivation to make the transition easy or swift.

He now leads the Senior Executives Association, representing non-unionized managers in the federal workforce, and said, “the executive order on official time and changes to collective bargaining agreements will have a fairly impactful change on union practices.”

Once the new employee discipline procedures are implemented, “you give someone notice that their performance is unsatisfactory, and if they do not respond, you can remove them within 30 days,” he added.

In the case of the employee who survived Valdez’s attempt at firing for eight years, he recalled, “it got conflated with other issues that delayed the dismissal.”

“A federal employee who is removed from public service for performance issues has a right to appeal not only the performance issues but the other issues he or she believes are associated with that … even to federal courts,” he said. “What this [new] process does is say if you’re removed from federal service for poor performance, and if you wish to adjudicate this, go ahead, but you’re not going to do this while you’re put on administrative leave.”

“What tends to happen is most appeals are ruled in the agency’s favor,” Valdez added, particularly from the Merit Systems Protection Board.

“We’re streamlining the process,” Pon said, “so that there is one process, one streamlined process, versus you open the door at any given organization and if you don’t like it go through another one and it keeps on going for months if not years.”

What’s next

Trump administration leaders who spoke with the Washington Examiner described four “buckets” into which they place reform priorities: executive orders, agency administrative action, budgetary language, and legislation.

Administratively, Pon said he’s dusting off little-used powers to allow more fluctuation in salaries to account for market conditions, and that he’s working to broaden shared certifications and hiring registries across agencies to speed up hiring.

Legislatively, “we’re tucking language into the [National Defense Authorization Act], there’s language about student hiring and limited-term hires — two important parts of what we’re trying,” Pon said. “So that’s the next thing.” Those reforms in the authorization bill won’t affect the whole government, but passed the House last month and await action in the Senate.

In May, Pon asked Congress to reduce retirement benefits to some workers by changing how their payments are calculated. That included taking the top five highest paying years rather than the top three, eliminating cost-of-living increases, and requiring greater financial contributions from the workers themselves.

Pon pines for landmark legislation, and senses the right moment may have come.

“We are working with legislators on legislative proposals that will shape the next 40 years. And there is some appetite for bipartisan reform on that,” he said. “Some of these legislators understand the challenges we have in the federal government and really want to help us modernize some of the practices. They understand that we have a 40 year GS system that not everything fits under.”

Weichert said she also believes the time may right, though she has a preference for addressing specific problems with specific solutions in line with the broad vision outlined in this year’s President’s Management Agenda document.

“We have, not across the board, but strong elements of bipartisan support for the notion that some fundamental change is needed,” she said. “We’d be looking for those areas where we could achieve bipartisan support. That said, part of what the goal of the reform plan report that’s going to be coming out is to set a direction that’s part of dialogue over time.”

Pon’s approach toward civil service reform is scattershot because his experience as an entrepreneur showed him that plans sometimes don’t work out. “There are high highs and low lows and you can never figure out which one comes next,” he said. To maximize the likelihood of successes, “I would rather make sure we can press upon a lot of different things.”

Who isn’t on board

[Related: Trump’s approval rating declining among union workers]

Although the administration announcement came out late on the Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend, members of the 700,000-member American Federation of Government Employees weren’t going home early.

“We will see him in court, we will see him in the street, we will see him wherever we can be,” declared AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. on a hastily organized call with reporters.

His union primarily represents federal workers, and Cox called the reforms in Trump’s executive orders “a classic example of this administration’s attack and assault on women, attack and assault on minorities” and said they “clearly” were “modeled after the VA Accountability Act” that recently became law to expedite firings after scandals at the veterans agency.

The union leader says the reforms are a step toward making federal workers “at will” employees, allowing for political considerations in hiring and firing decisions. “Everyone knows President Trump has no respect for the rule of law and this is just the latest case,” Cox added.

The White House official who worked on the orders says this is false, and that the federal workforce isn’t moving to at-will employment. But staff must be liable to firing for cause, either poor performance or misconduct.

The AFGE is a powerful organization and its influence, particularly among Democratic politicians to whom it gives money, is expected to be a major force resisting Trump’s wishes.

The union, which did not provide comment for this story, is fighting on other fronts, filing a Federal Labor Relations Authority complaint contesting the new Education Department contract.

Ready for change

Decades without major civil service reform have created long wish lists among non-governmental groups.

Partnership for Public Service President Max Stier says he’d like to shorten federal hiring processes from its 100-day average and make clearer the distinction between jobs performed by career civil servants and those done by political appointees. He suggests reforming the pay system and using student interns as a way to gain new talent.

Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste President, which advocates similar reforms, said “a lot of former administrations have talked about making this a priority, but this administration is serious and the OPM director seems serious about it, and that will help.” Making the VA Accountability Act a workforce-wide piece of legislation is a no-brainer, and that the federal workforce needs younger employees, he added.

“The more information that comes out that taxpayers are aware of may push some of this through,” he said. “They are starting with some very good broad ideas.”

One senior administration official who spoke with the Washington Examiner expressed measured optimism.

“President Reagan started talking about a fundamentally different way of thinking about the size of government long before it was actually executed,” they said. “It was three administrations in sequence that actually delivered on the reform agenda that President Reagan pioneered.”