Proposals to Undermine Professional Civil Service Would Endanger Public Health and the Environment
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Today's inaugural feature comes from Mark Hague, Chair of the Board of Environmental Protection Network. Mark served as the Regional Administrator of EPA’s Midwest Region in Kansas City. This commentary is particularly timely with the recent announcement of a new regulation from the Biden administration to protect civil service employees from political loyalty tests. This important principle, however, could be put into jeopardy by future administrations if the architects of Project 2025, a blueprint led by The Heritage Foundation to "take back our government," have their way.
Proposals to Undermine Professional Civil Service Would Endanger Public Health and the Environment
By: Mark Hague
Sipping a glass of clean water from the tap, taking a deep breath on a summer walk, catching a trout in a gurgling brook, cleaning up contaminated properties for reuse—these are among the many things Americans can take for granted thanks to fifty years of professional work by civil service employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies.
Across Republican and Democrat administrations, professional staff at EPA and the Justice Department have impartially held polluters accountable and enforced the bedrock environmental laws that have cleaned the air, safeguarded our waters, cleaned up contaminated properties, and protected the public from toxic chemicals. Today, Americans living in rural towns and urban centers, red states or blue states, can count on EPA scientists, engineers, attorneys, inspectors, emergency responders, and other professional experts to safeguard their communities and make sure everyone is playing by the same set of environmental rules.
This nonpartisan legacy of impartiality, fairness, and competence would be discarded and turned on its head at EPA and every federal agency in favor of a return to political favoritism if Trump administration proposals to strip long-standing safeguards from the civil service are resurrected. Such threats were dispensed with over 100 years ago by the Civil Service Reform Act.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13957, which set in motion a system that would allow the President to summarily dismiss career civil servants without regard for decades of due process. It would return our professional civil service back to one rife with spoilage and patronage. Dubbed by the Trump administration as “Schedule F,” it would allow any president to fire thousands of long-serving career staff without cause and reward their jobs instead to political allies.
If enacted, this plan would be a dramatic and traumatic departure from the long-standing protections for civil servants, which have historically limited political appointments to high-level government agency positions. The roughly 4,000 politically appointed leaders are in place government-wide to promote the president’s policy agenda, but they must rely on the technical expertise and experience of career employees to guide them in decision-making.
In an effort to protect the integrity of the professional civil service, this plan was withdrawn by President Biden soon after taking office in 2021. Biden further strengthened civil service protections by finalizing a rule ensuring that people are hired and fired based on merit, not political loyalty.
However, the threat to the integrity of the civil service envisioned by Schedule F remains. Under the executive order, employees would no longer be protected against arbitrary and politically motivated firing if their jobs were reclassified as “Schedule F.” Even if career staff were not immediately reclassified, they would work under the threat of possible reclassification and termination if they offended presidential political appointees. Career civil servants are duty-bound to ensure that administration policy prerogatives are implemented, but only within the confines of established laws and ethical codes of conduct.
In 2020, Dr. Ronald Sanders, a lifelong Republican, resigned as Chair of the Federal Salary Council in protest against Donald Trump’s Schedule F rule. In his resignation letter, Dr. Sanders warned:
“Career Federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law…not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration…. Yet the President’s Executive Order seeks to make loyalty to him the litmus test for many thousands of career civil servants.”
Consider the potential ramifications of an EPA managed by newly-appointed political operatives whose sole qualifications were rooted in patronage or campaign contributions. This would undermine the ability of EPA to protect our health and the environment and hold violators of environmental laws accountable. In a fire-at-will environment in which management positions are filled by political allies of the administration, the prospects for such abuses would become acute.
The full scale of Schedule F’s impact is not fully known because the Biden administration rescinded the executive order before most agencies could implement it. The Office of Management and Budget, however, acted more quickly, proposing that two-thirds of its workforce be reclassified as Schedule F.
Max Stier, President and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, explains the threats to the merit-based civil service system:
"If you are selecting people on the basis of their political persuasion or their loyalty as opposed to their expertise and their commitment to the public good, you’re going to wind up with less good service and more risk for the American people.”
If you believe in small government and an anti-regulatory agenda, then pulling technically skilled and experienced EPA staff off the job may sound like a good move. But imagine the consequences when your local drinking water is no longer adequately monitored for contamination or safeguarded against unhealthy levels of toxic chemicals, or your local environmentally responsible business is undercut by competitors who are not held to account for allowing illegal toxic discharges. So, think twice about the real impacts of placing responsibility for protecting your health and the environment with a new class of political patronage employees who were selected based on their loyalty to the president rather than their competency and impartiality.
Mark Hague was a career employee of the Environmental Protection Agency for 35 years and then served in a political appointment as the Regional Administrator of EPA’s Midwest Region in Kansas City from 2015-2017. Mr. Hague currently serves as the Board Chair of the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit organization of over 650 former EPA career staff and confirmation-level appointees from Democratic and Republican administrations who volunteer their time to provide the unique perspective of former regulators with decades of historical knowledge and subject matter expertise.