President Donald Trump kick-started his second presidential term by issuing a slew of executive orders taking aim at federal career civil servants, including those at the U.S. Department of Education.
The first-day directives seek to freeze hiring at agencies including the Education Department, crack down on telework among federal employees, and make it easier to terminate career civil servants.
The legality of these executive orders is an open question. Federal workers’ unions are expected to challenge them in court.
But their mere existence may create enough concern among federal workers that a significant portion of the Education Department’s roughly 4,000 career staffers leave, depriving the agency of valuable expertise and hindering its effectiveness, said Rachel Perera, a fellow in governance studies at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
Trump would have to clear nearly insurmountable political and legislative hurdles to make good on his campaign promise to abolish the Education Department.
But “hollowing out” the agency’s career ranks could be a significant step toward diminishing its power, Perera said.
Taken together, the changes envisioned by the Jan. 20 executive orders “may lead to a federal bureaucracy that will be characterized by less competence, more corruption, leading to an overall decline in the quality of services,” she added, noting that career staffers are often the group keeping an eye on whether funds are spent appropriately.
During Trump’s first term, the agency saw a 13.7 percent decline in staff, according to historical figures in a Biden budget proposal. And some state officials reported sluggish responses to questions and a lack of clear direction from the federal government.
To be sure, the Biden education department, where staffing was restored beyond pre-Trump levels, had its own share of management challenges, particularly a tumultuous rollout of a revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
If the department’s ranks thin significantly in this second Trump term, state officials and those in district central offices will be more likely to feel the impact than teachers or school leaders, said Michael Petrilli, who served in the department under President George W. Bush and is now the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank.
“There will be times when [officials] want to know, ‘can I spend money on X, Y, and Z? I need somebody to give me an affirmative so that I don’t worry about getting audited some day,’” he said. “In the classroom, I don’t think you’re going to see a big impact,” from the federal workforce changes.
But Carlas McCauley, who served as a career staffer working on K-12 policy issues in the department from 2007 to 2014, said that civil servants with deep knowledge of specific programs become the department’s eyes and ears in states and districts, ensuring that policy is being carried out as intended.
“They’re the people talking to states and districts,” McCauley said. They “provide a voice to the folks on the ground,” and can help those educators communicate their concerns with policymakers in Washington. Weakening that connection will ultimately hurt the “people that the policy is intended to support,” including vulnerable children, McCauley said.
Critics say that prohibiting telework is a move to make federal work less attractive
The executive actions—which the Trump White House billed as part of its efforts to “drain the swamp”—would temporarily freeze hiring at most federal agencies, including the Education Department. They would also allow the incoming administration to review the job functions of employees hired in the past year, many of whom aren’t yet subject to full civil service protections.
Such moves would “end the onslaught of useless and overpaid [diversity, equity, and inclusion] activists buried into the federal workforce,” according to the Trump administration.
The orders would also make it easier for the Trump administration to remove career staffers by reclassifying those whose jobs include some form of policy work as political appointees.
Trump issued a similar directive at the end of his first term. Federal employee unions quickly challenged it in court and President Joe Biden rescinded the action shortly after taking office.
Such action offers “improved accountability of government bureaucrats,” the Trump White House said. “The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country.”
But Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents Education Department staffers, in a statement called Trump’s decision to revive the directive “a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons.”
He added that it will “remove hundreds of thousands of federal jobs from the nonpartisan, professional civil service and make them answerable to the will of one man.” Kelly urged Congress to block the move.
The orders also require all federal employees to return to the office full-time “as soon as practicable,” potentially upending telework arrangements made before and during the pandemic that continued through the Biden administration—a move critics say is aimed at making federal work less attractive. Importantly, the executive order allows department heads to make exceptions for some employees.
Federal workers don’t live up to negative stereotypes, former Ed. Dept. staffers say
Stereotypes paint federal bureaucrats as lazy and out of touch. But Petrilli did not find that to be the case during his time at the Department of Education, particularly among those at the top levels of management.
“I quickly learned that if I wanted to be successful and effective, I would need to find some great career civil servants to help me get stuff done,” Petrilli said.
On the flip side, Petrilli recalled that “because these folks had basically lifelong tenure, it was very hard to remove ineffective staff.”
During his time as a career staffer, McCauley forged relationships with political appointees from the administrations of both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama that continue to this day, he said.
“You were working on a weekend with them,” he recalled. It will be tougher for Trump’s incoming team to create those kinds of bonds, he said, if career staff are “in a position of wondering about their job.”
