The Politicization of Federal Hiring

A new Trump policy undermines the goal of a nonpartisan public service

Trump’s Office of Personnel Management released a new policy on federal hiring. While the policy makes many of the right noises about reforming an area with real problems, it also drives a massive hole into the merit principles that underpin the civil service. The most meaningful effect of the policy will be to make it easier to hire unqualified candidates based on their political loyalties to the Trump administration, placing them into the career civil service.

When you ask the hiring committee about the value of a nonpartisan public service (Molly Roberts/The White House)

If you are not familiar with federal hiring policy, here are some useful starting points:

• While there is a lot of focus on making it easier to fire federal civil servants, hiring is the bigger issue: the government is struggling to attract younger workers, and it’s employees are older than the private workforce.

• The hiring process is broken. It is too slow, too inflexible. It is not unusual that employers know of a person they want to hire, but getting them on board takes too long or seems impossible.

• Standard application processes can be gamed by applicants with skillful copy and pasting of language in the job posting into a resume, and self-assessments that are not grounded in reality.

• The perceived inflexibility of the system discourages innovation, but innovation is possible. A good example is the use of Subject Matter Expert Qualifying Assessments, which gives managers who will actually work with the new employee more input into evaluating their skills at the hiring stage. For example, this approach has enabled federal engineers to directly assess the tech skills of potential hires.

New hiring test: Name your favorite Trump policy

Whatever its flaws, the current system does not reward political loyalties. The new policy would. In doing so, it adds another mechanism of politicization to undermine the nonpartisan civil service. While Trump’s proposed Schedule F policy makes it easier for partisan political appointees to fire career civil servants, the new hiring policy will make it easier for partisan political appointees to hire the people they want. Political appointees will then be free to drive both hiring and firing decisions, and to exercise political favoritism as they do so.

How would this work? From the new OPM policy:

all Federal job vacancy announcements graded at GS-05 or above will include four short, free-response essay questions:

1. How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic, or personal experience.

2. In this role, how would you use your skills and experience to improve government efficiency and effectiveness? Provide specific examples where you improved processes, reduced costs, or improved outcomes.

3. How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.

4. How has a strong work ethic contributed to your professional, academic or personal achievements? Provide one or two specific examples, and explain how those qualities would enable you to serve effectively in this position.

Now, does any of those strike you as especially problematic? Read again, and take a minute to ponder!

If you said number three — “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?” — you are correct!

This question asks job candidates to identify their alignment and support with a specific partisan political figure. That tie between them and Trump becomes a crucial part of how they are then selected into the public service. The question works as a loyalty test. Employees unwilling to identify how they would advance a partisan agenda need not apply.

This is, of course, contrary to the vision of the civil service as a nonpartisan entity. It is a question perfectly appropriate for a political appointee, but inappropriate for a civil servant who must serve Presidents of both parties. It would be equally inappropriate if asked of job candidates when a Democratic President was in office.

I cannot think of anything like this level of politicization being formally introduced into the hiring process. Under the George W. Bush administration, it was a scandal when appointees in the Justice Department were caught scanning candidate CVs for civil servant positions to try to discern their political leanings. Now they will just ask them to explain how they can serve President Trump’s agenda. Within the space of a generation, backdoor politicization practices went from being a source of shame to a formal policy.

With this policy, any future President would know that some portion of their workforce was selected because they had expressed explicit support with their predecessor, and an agenda that the current President might disagree with. For all the Republican complaints about rooting out “the deep state” or “Democrat holdovers” the policy specifically encourages selection into permanent civil service based on political leanings that will invariably run contrary to future Presidents. They want to build their own deep state!

Do conservatives really want such a policy? What happens if President AOC decides to engage in a massive expansion of the federal public sector, and makes hiring contingent on support for her policies?

I suspect the conservative plan is to simply fire such hires once they retake office, using tools like Schedule F.

And so the cycle of politicization becomes worse and worse: more politicized hiring encourages politicized firing. The federal workforce becomes less stable, and less capable, and the public suffers as a result.

If you are in any doubt about the intention here, the OPM makes clear that partisan political appointees will be making hiring decisions:

Agency leadership, or designee(s), may be involved in the candidate selection and ranking process, including by determining which assessments to use in connection with a particular role and participating in interviews, resume reviews, accomplishment record reviews, and writing sample reviews.

Agency leadership, or designee(s), should function as a hiring committee in the candidate selection process:

• Agency leadership, or designee(s), must approve the selectee’s candidate packets (resume, answers to application questions, interview feedback, job description for role) prior to offers being extended,

• Agency leadership, or designee(s), should conduct a final “executive interview” to confirm organizational fit and commitment to American ideals. The level of agency leader that conducts this interview depends on the level of the position being filled.

And this is where it gets really problematic. It is possible to provide more personnel flexibility in both hiring and firing if you can keep political actors out of those processes, because their very strong instincts are to support those with shared beliefs. To be clear, agency leaders should have a role in defining hiring priorities to ensure they align with agency mission and presidential goals. Indeed, a 2024 Biden hiring policy pushed agencies in this direction. But they should not be directly involved in individual personnel decisions over career officials. Pushing such involvement is a significant departure from past practice.

The combination of “agency leadership” (read: appointees) with vague essay-based evaluations that include no objective standards ensures the process will be politicized.

For example, the idea of hiring “patriotic Americans” who are committed to the Constitution and founding principles of the United States seem relatively unproblematic. But what if your “executive interview” is with someone who pardoned January 6 assailants on the Capitol? Can you reasonably expect to have the same interpretation of patriotism, or the constitution? Is it appropriate that he should deny you a job based on your view of what defending the constitution looks like?

I talked with Robert Gordon, who was a senior political appointee serving in multiple roles in the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden. He pointed out that organizational leaders, who themselves are selected mostly for reasons of loyalty rather than expertise, will have limited ability to evaluate job candidates. This creates a logistical problem for hiring:

Agency heads can't interview every one of the hundreds or thousands of hires who ladder up to them. And under the memo, they don't have to. The required "executive interview" can be handed off to a political appointee, often quite inexperienced. Many hires require technical skills which that appointee won’t be able to evaluate. But they don't need to. They are looking for "organizational fit and commitment to American ideals."

There are other problems with the open-ended essays. Because of AI, these are as easy to game as self-assessments. They don’t compel applicants to demonstrate their actual skills. The vagueness and brevity of the essay format (maximum 200 word responses!) eliminates any sort of objective criteria that could be used to assess the fairness of the outcomes, opening the door for discrimination based on political ideology.

The Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica wrote an excellent post about the implications. Here are some key excerpts:

Beyond the essays, the system ensures political control at every level. Climate scientists can't be hired at NOAA without approval from appointees who deny climate change. Financial regulators need blessing from those who oppose regulation. "Executive interviews" test for "organizational fit," a euphemism for ideological conformity conducted where no record exists of what was asked or answered…

These loyalty tests arrive at a moment when expertise itself has become politically polarized. Research mapping the political leanings of professionals who typically staff the federal government—lawyers, doctors, scientists, academics, and other skilled workers—reveals overwhelming majorities now identify as Democrats.

This isn't because expertise inherently leans left, but arguably because one party has increasingly embraced anti-intellectualism, science denial, and conspiracy theories. The Republican Party's expertise vacuum has been filled with climate deniers, vaccine skeptics, and economic cranks. Rather than competing for talent on the merits, they're now rigging the system to exclude the vast majority of qualified professionals.

Doesn’t this all sound sort of illegal?

Well, yeah! The Civil Service Reform Act mandates that: “All employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of personnel management without regard to political affiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition, and with proper regard for their privacy and constitutional rights.”

A hiring process that makes explicit request for information about political sympathies is inconsistent with the merit principles. The question not only encourages candidates to talk about those sympathies, but it advantages candidates more clearly embedded in the MAGAverse, who can use the shared language, experiences and symbols when selling themselves to Trump appointees. Will Trump political appointees favor men? Or women with the well-defined MAGA look?

To give a sense of the scale involved, in a normal hiring season, government agencies hire about 350,000 employees from about 22 million applications. It will be fewer under Trump, but millions of applicants can reasonably assume that they did not get the job because essays were not MAGA enough, because “organizational fit” is a euphemism for membership of a political tribe. And so, the public comes to see the government as corrupt, prioritizing cronyism over merit. The best will look elsewhere.

A federal HR specialist said: “Everything in it will make it more difficult to hire, not less. How the fuck do you define if someone is patriotic?” But the vagueness of the process is a feature, not a bug. Political appointees who know exactly the type of patriotism they want will be fine, shielded from accusations of illegal action by virtue of the much broader plausible deniability the new policy provides them.

At the same time, the Republican reconciliation bill includes a sneaky provision that imposes a financial penalty for civil servants who do not want to become at-will employees. Under the bill, they would pay twice as much in retirement contributions to keep their civil service protections. Employees who maintain civil servant protections would pay 9.4% of their salary in contributions to retirement versus 4.4% for employees who become at-will employees. It is effectively fining public employees for not being willing to be fired by Trump appointees.

Hiding hiring discrimination

The proposed policy proclaims that it is “Ending All Racial Discrimination in Federal Hiring, Recruiting, Retention and Promotion.” This sounds like a great thing that they would want to demonstrate to the world! The reality is that the Trump administration is going to make it more difficult to assess if any discrimination occurs.

Of course the racial group the Trump administration is seeking to protect from discrimination are White people. Indeed, the only potential example of discrimination offered by the OPM guidance are “illegal, demeaning, and immoral” DEI programs.

However, certain types of DEI programs are permitted. As Government Executive noted:

As part of the plan, OPM said it will expand its recruiting efforts particularly at religious colleges and universities, homeschooling and other faith-based groups, an apparently conservative spin on the Biden administration’s efforts to step up recruitment at historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently no other type of racial discrimination exists beyond anti-White discrimination. But what if discrimination were taking place? How would we know? One means would be to look at broad patterns of demographic change occurring under the Trump administration. Some demographic change may occur for reasons unrelated to individualized discrimination in one-on-one interviews. For example, when the Trump administration moved US Department of Agriculture offices to Kansas City, it resulted in fewer Black employees in the unit. Revoking probationary hires will likely also skew the workforce to be older and less diverse given basic demographic differences between older Whiter employees and a more diverse younger cohort. The firing of staff working on DEI initiatives will disproportionately affect employees of color, reducing their number in the federal workforce.

Even without Trump, there are compelling reasons to collect demographic data. If, for example, we see higher representation of some groups more than others in the workforce, or at more senior levels, we might analyze and debate the reason why. But we at need the baseline data to have such conversations. The policies of the Trump administration make it especially important that the government tracks its workforce characteristics given how centrally his policies have emphasized such differences. For example, Jamelle Bouie has argued that the collective intent of the Trump administration’s policies are “a conscious effort to undermine recognition of Black Americans, women and other groups as well as stigmatize their presence in positions of authority.”

But from now on, it will become nearly impossible to assess the full effects of Trump’s policies, at least using government sources. The federal government has stopped sharing racial data about it’s workforce. The new policy forbids agencies from “disseminating information regarding the composition of the agency’s workforce based on race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.” Racial and ethnicity data are also no longer reported in FedScope, the federal employment data source.

While DEI training is out, the new policy requires the Senior Executive Service to complete an 80 hours of video training including briefing on Trump’s executive orders. Eighty hours! No word on who will provide the training since the administration closed the training institute for these employees, but it is safe to assume it will be a group aligned with the administration. As the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists said:

While the Administration has closed down training programs like the Federal Executive Institute that were designed to train new generations of federal leaders, it is also adding ideological training to the SES that lacks a clear purpose or evidence that it will improve governing outcomes. Requiring Senior Executives to watch an “80-hour video-based program that provides training regarding President Trump’s Executive Orders” is both offensive to the principle of a nonpartisan civil service and a waste of time for the busiest, most senior leaders across the entire enterprise. While America’s most productive tech companies are trying to reduce the meeting load to free staff to get things done, torching 4% of our senior executives’ working years for ideological training is the opposite of efficient.

There are parts of the new policy that are unobjectionable bipartisan reforms, like an emphasis on speeding up hiring. But that is not the purpose of the new policy, which is to find another way to embed partisan control into the civil service, minimize accountability, and cover-up the harms done. The public dependent on a competent civil service will end up paying the price.

Worth reading

DOGE vowed to make government more ‘efficient’ — but it’s doing the opposite. This is a great round-up of something that has been clear to federal employees (and readers of this blog!) for a while. Far from increasing efficiency, DOGE is adding layers of red tape, asking federal employees to do more pointless paperwork that takes them away from their mission. It is hard not to conclude that the point of DOGE is to gum up the works of public services.

John Warner wrote a very nice profile of some of my writing on academic freedom and campus speech. We are both members of the AAUP’s Center for Defense of Academic Freedom and you can find the CDAF newsletter “Academic Freedom on the Line” here.