Critics warn of loyalty test in new White House hiring guidelines
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New White House hiring guidelines sent out to federal agencies last week include what looks like a presidential loyalty test, say current and former federal employees and Trump administration critics.
Why it matters: Meant to serve as guidelines to focus hiring on merit, the memo is the latest move from the Trump administration to politicize the civil service, eroding, more than a century of law and tradition meant to insulate career employees from politics, critics say.
Where it stands: Candidates for civil service jobs — including janitors, nurses, surgeons, engineers, lawyers and economists — are to be asked four questions on their level of patriotism and support for the president's policies.
- They are to answer in essay form, at a maximum of 200 words, and certify that they did not use help from artificial intelligence.
How it works: "How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?" reads the third question, which is garnering a lot of attention.
- It continues: "Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired."
Zoom out: These questions have nothing to do with a candidate's merit or skills, says Jeri Buchholz, a former chief human capital officer who led HR at NASA and ran HR at other federal agencies for decades.
- "When you're doing hiring, traditionally by law, you have to focus on the knowledge, skills and abilities required for the position," she says.
- The questions "are philosophical. They're not even aptitude related. And I'm very unclear how you score that."
Dealing with these questions could slow the hiring process, running counter to the stated intent of the guidelines to speed it up, Buchholz says.
- Taken together these plans "will make it more difficult to hire, not less," a current federal HR official told Government Executive.
- "A merit-based civil service that took generations to build is being dismantled via memo," writes Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica in a Substack post on Sunday.
The other side: An official from the Office of Personnel Management defended the questions as legal and within the bounds of presidential authority.
- "The President has the power of superintendence over the Executive Branch and clear statutory authority to ask these questions of prospective employees. He is not imposing a loyalty test by doing so," they say.
- The law requires those who work for agencies to act consistently with the president's lawful executive orders and policy priorities, they say, making it reasonable to ask for examples that candidates are excited about.
- Agencies will decide whether and how to use the questions.
The big picture: The White House has already fired or pushed out more than 100,000 federal workers, chasing away a lot of talent from the government.
- Now it looks like they'll be replacing those folks with partisans, says Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.
- "They're emptying the shelves of the existing nonpartisan expert civil servants, and they're restocking with the loyalists," he says.
The bottom line: Trump bristled at the pushback he received from "deep-state" federal employees in his first term, and a focus this term is ensuring that does not happen again.
Read the full 30 page memo from the Office of Personnel Management.
