As Republicans work to generate a faux scandal in the FBI, and as the list of people Trump either fired or wanted to fire grows by the day, it shouldn’t be surprising that Donald Trump dropped a call for a purge into his State of the Union speech.
"Tonight, I call on Congress to empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.”
Most government workers are protected from being fired without cause explicitly so that each change in administration doesn’t bring with it a wholesale swap of every slot. Those rules were put in place more than a century ago after the government faced enormous problems with patronage and corruption explicitly because every slot in the existing government was open to being flushed when a new resident moved into the White House.
Mowing down government workers wholesale also deprived the government of experience, meaning that government operations were slowed, work was often pointlessly redone, and efficiency was low. Much of the reputation the government still enjoys for being less effective than private industry comes from the era when most of a president’s first year in office was taken up with thousands of patronage-seekers lining up at the White House door. But Trump needs those rules revised if he’s going to flush away everyone who shows the least interest in doing things right instead of doing what she or he is told.
Don’t worry, it won’t be like the movie. Because it will be every day of the year.
With xeroxed “right to work” bills authored by conservative law factory ALEC being passed by Republican legislatures across the country, it seems only fitting that Trump would want to join the parade. It both satisfies the general Republican attack on workers and Trump’s itch to use his catchphrase without restraint.
Federal workers and their primary union, the American Federation of Government Employees, took immediate exception.
"I was particularly disturbed that the president chose to demagogue hard-working federal employees, who are already being asked to do more with less with every passing year in service to their country," said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia.
Hollywood, it seems, already anticipated Trump’s speech.