Civil service

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• SOURCE: Substack
  7/24/2022
  

  Trump's Reelection Threatens a Politicized Civil Service

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Since 1883, the federal civil service has been protected from the old spoils system by rules for merit-based hiring and promotion. Trump has threatened to revert to a system of rewards for loyalists and punishment for enemies, without regard for performing the public's business. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  10/28/2020
  

  The Transition Is Already Happening (And It’s Going Fine So Far)

  by Kate Shaw and Michael Eric Herz

  "The civil service—technocratic, objective, neutral, and around for the long haul—is an insurance policy in many ways, of which its central role in the transition is just one."

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• SOURCE: Defense One
  10/22/2020
  

  ‘Stunning’ Executive Order Enables Politicized Civil Service

  Trump's executive order would make political loyalty, rather than expertise, experience or skill, the main criteria for retention in a new category of Federal jobs, potentially destabilizing the Federal civil service. 

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• 10/4/2020
  

  Loyalty and Duty in the Federal Bureaucracy, From Nixon to Trump

  by Michael Koncewicz

  Independent civil servants checked Richard Nixon's worst impulses to use the executive branch to punish enemies. The independence of the bureaucracy has since eroded, to Donald Trump's advantage. 

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• SOURCE: Forbes
  8/26/2020
  

  Here's Why Trump Officials Rarely Face Penalties For Hatch Act Violations

  By hosting part of the GOP convention at the White House, the Trump administration is accused of violating the 1939 federal ethics law.

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• 4/26/2020
  

  Trump's Quislings

  by David Driesen

  Autocrats use law not to achieve the laws’ objectives, but to subdue opposition and bolster their supporters. If Trump remains in office, America will likely lose its freedom through these forces. 

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• 4/12/2020
  

  Woman Citizen: On This Day in 1920 Helen Hamilton Gardener Became the Highest-Ranking Woman in Federal Government

  by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Gardener’s historic appointment as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner marked one symbolic step toward the idea that women should be universally recognized as “self- respecting, self- directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own.”