President Donald Trump just reclassified thousands of government workers with the stroke of a pen that would allow him to fully politicize the federal workforce, and one of his former aides highlighted a "revealing detail" that underlines his intentions.
The 79-year-old president signed an executive order on Wednesday to convert about 8,000 senior career officials into employees whom the chief executive can fire for any reason, and former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor wrote on his Defiance website about the significance of that move.
"His executive order would, in effect, triple the number of people inside of government who he can personally toss out on a whim, as easily as his own top henchmen," Taylor wrote. "It’s a breathtaking takeover of the machinery of state. And if it’s not challenged in the courts, it will make it easier for Trump to weaponize almost every agency under his purview."
Presidents typically appoint about 4,000 ideologically aligned officials throughout the executive branch who can be hired and fired at will, but Trump's order undermines the protections enjoyed by many of the 2 million civil servants who make the government function regardless of who's in charge.
"Trump just took 8,000 of those highest-ranking career officials and effectively turned them into potential shock troops," Taylor wrote. "They are no longer protected workforce. The office directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisers, and people who draft regulations and decide who receives federal grants have been stripped of their protections, which means Trump can dispose of them whenever he wants and for whatever reason."
"Add that to the 4,000 appointees he already controls, and the universe of executive-branch officials who now serve entirely at his pleasure has, in functional terms, roughly tripled," the former DHS appointee added.
The order is "almost certainly illegal," Taylor wrote, but the White House added language seemingly intended to skirt the merit-based system established by Congress.
"Upon reading it, I found the most revealing detail to be how the order was seemingly written to escape scrutiny," Taylor wrote. "A rule this consequential would normally have to go through what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring a period of public comment, a reasoned justification, and review by a court that can strike it down as arbitrary, if needed. But Trump didn’t want that. He wanted to wave his wand."
"So the White House performed a quiet bit of engineering," he added. "They wrote the rule to make the president himself (not the Office of Personnel Management) the official who formally moves positions into this new category because the president, unlike an agency, is not technically bound by that Act. They might as well have admitted their goal was to break the law."
