It's all but impossible to imagine anything President Donald Trump could do to enrage further the Far Left activists who dominate the federal career civil service than offering 2.3 million government employees an extremely generous severance package.
Trump was overwhelmingly elected in November 2024 by voters who made crystal clear their convictions that the federal government costs way too much, has imposed millions of unneeded and wasteful regulations, employs far more bureaucrats than it actually needs, and cannot even document that all of them on the payroll are working productively.
So Trump offers an incredibly generous buyout or severance package that includes full compensation and benefits through the month of September, as well as exemption from all in-person work requirements. To accept, you simply click the "Reply" button, type "Resign," and send.
The alternative is to take your chances with the reality that Trump and the Republican Congress are determined to do what the majority of voters decreed, that is, to eliminate unneeded and duplicative federal programs and agencies, which will in turn render hundreds, and quite possibly thousands, of federal jobs no longer needed.
The response to Trump's offer was predictable, with federal employee unions and associations uniformly rejecting it while accusing Trump of "politicizing" the federal workforce, as epitomized in American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley's comment to AP:
“Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” Kelley said in a statement.
“Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”
And then there is this raging manifesto re-posted on X, which declares:
"I’ve been an OPM [Office of Personnel Management] employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I’ve never witnessed anything even remotely close to what’s happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.Let me say this in no uncertain terms — OPM has been compromised and taken over.
"The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen."
The author of those two paragraphs clearly knows nothing about the origins of the career federal civil service and its relationship to the only popularly elected executive branch official, the President of the United States.
The Pendleton Act of 1883 was signed into law by President Chester Arthur, who succeeded President James A. Garfield following the latter's assassination by an angry spoils system job seeker. What is now known as OPM was originally called the "Civil Service Commission," with its three members being presidential appointees.
The main task of the commission was to establish a merit-based examinations process to end the distribution of government jobs as the "spoils" rightfully gained by the winner of the most recent presidential election. To that end, the Pendleton Act said this about the role of the President:
"THIRD. Said commission shall, subject to the rules that may be made by the President, make regulations for, and have control of, such examinations, and, through its members or the examiners, it shall supervise and preserve the records of the same; and said commission shall keep minutes of its own proceedings.(emphasis added)
Under Pendleton, the President decided how the commission went about creating and administering the new civil service's examination and selection process for hiring government workers. The same still applies to the commission's successor, OPM, and covers every aspect of hiring, evaluating, promoting, and separating all career civil servants on the basis of how well they perform their work. That basis has nothing to do with their political opinions.
In other words, when Trump directed OPM to issue the buyout offer described above, he was acting in accordance with the very founding document of the career civil service. The people elect a president to carry out a promised agenda. The President then directs the government workforce on how his or her agenda is to be administered.
Put another way, civil service workers are public employees, and it's not up to them to decide whether or not to implement administrative procedures underlying the policy agenda endorsed by the majority of voters who select the President.
To say civil servants should be totally independent of the President and be empowered to decide how the government functions is to replace our representative republic's rule of the many with the unaccountable and tyrannical rule of the few.
Just don't expect the Mainstream Media to include these facts in its coverage. But that's a column for another day.
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