Civil servants threatened by possible Trump storm
President Donald Trump on Sept. 4 with the Sharpie-altered map of Hurricane Dorian's cone of uncertainty. Credit: Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla
In September 2019, then-President Donald Trump made what should have been quickly acknowledged as a public error. Trump tweeted about the path of Hurricane Dorian. He included Alabama as one of the states potentially affected — which it was not.
The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, besieged by callers, corrected Trump, tweeting that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” That proved true.
A couple of days later, under pressure from the White House, top appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an unsigned statement denying that the president had the facts, as the bureau knew them, wrong.
The whole surreal waste-of-time episode became known as “Sharpiegate.” It seemed Trump or an aide added a line on the official weather map for public display in order to show Alabama in the storm’s path.
These days, as Trump runs again, Sharpiegate has relevance, but in a new context.
That’s because Trump vows if elected to bring back a rule in the executive branch he introduced toward the end of his term, known as “Schedule F.” The revived rule would allow him to relieve certain classes of civil servants of their employment protections.
Could Trump, in that same situation, wield the power to dismiss, demote, or intimidate government meteorologists from Birmingham to Anchorage just for doing their jobs — and inadvertently making him look silly?
Possibly. NOAA and the weather bureau are under the Commerce Department, where the secretary is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, thus part of the presidential administration.
Surely, Trump would have liked to legally retaliate against the rank-and-file of his government: State Department employees who resisted his demands for extracting political favors from Ukraine, or maybe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention personnel who pushed back against his impressionistic COVID-19 “theories.”
“I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump has declared. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
Can a “rogue bureaucrat” be defined as any official who doesn’t fully sign on to a president’s impulses?
President Joe Biden in January 2021 revoked Trump’s controversial directive. This month, with the “rematch” campaign gaining momentum, the Office of Performance and Personnel Management published a final rule it says reinforces job security protections for thousands of nonpolitical, career federal employees. Whether that rule would survive a new Trump administration is a matter of speculation.
To be sure, elected executives of all stripes find Civil Service regulations limit their executive choices — and that government employees sometimes obstruct and slow-walk their desired initiatives. Making some of them “at-will” employees could arguably be billed in theory as an “efficiency” move.
But critics of “Schedule F” see it as something quite different — a trashing of 19th century reforms meant to end the “spoils” system in favor of a “merit” system.
“Schedule F” as introduced by Trump was aimed at employees “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating character” — a category with perhaps 50,000 federal workers. But documents provided to union officials under the Freedom of Information Act indicated that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget planned to reclassify most of that agency’s workforce, the Washington Post revealed.
The National Federation of Federal Employees and other labor groups have raged at Schedule F and praised Biden for burying it.
n COLUMNIST DAN JANISON’S opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
