The Truman loyalty program, which spread to the states and to private organizations, led to the firing of many people who were either innocent of disloyalty or who had previously belonged to communist or communist-affiliated organizations (as had many intellectuals during the Great Depression) but refused to endanger others by naming them to the authorities. The program was a catastrophe for civil liberties. Still, the stated goal, however ghastly its application, was defensible: Federal employees were expected to be loyal to the United States and not to its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.
To apply for a civil service job, you click onto this website. The Office of Management and Budget, for example, is looking for an economist. (It could use one!) The job pays in the range of $120,579 to $156,755, and an undergraduate degree in economics or its rough equivalent appears to be a minimal requirement. Your education must be at an accrediting institution recognized by the Education Department, which as of Wednesday looks like a problem for a Columbia PhD, and may soon be a problem for a Harvard PhD.
According to a May 29 memo by the White House Office of Personnel Management, this questionnaire will soon be expanded to include a loyalty test. Our prospective OMB economist will have to answer some variation on the following question: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? 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.”
Even under normal presidents, an executive order is a set of directions to an agency chief, not to rank-and-file civil servants. The agency chief directs civil servants to convert these directions into a proposed rule. The proposal is then put out for public comment to find out whether the rule (and perhaps the executive order requiring it) is faulty. The rule is then finalized, acquiring the force of law. Only then is a civil servant required to follow it.
One executive order instructed the attorney general not to enforce, for 75 days, a congressionally-enacted ban on TikTok. The delay was later renewed twice, and will likely be renewed again this month, even though the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban. Civil servants aren’t supposed to choose between upholding executive-branch policies and upholding Supreme Court decisions. OPM wants to make this choice explicit.
That’s just executive orders. How would our prospective OMB economist support Trump’s plans to annex Greenland, or make Canada the 51st state, or rename the Gulf of Mexico? How would this person help Trump reorder cryptocurrency regulations to maximize the Trump family’s participation in this exciting if dubious new financial industry? How would our OMB applicant support his president’s conclusion that Taylor Swift is no longer “HOT”?
But it’s easy to imagine plenty of people who would be ideal for this job but who can’t stomach pledging loyalty to the most corrupt president in United States history. It is correspondingly hard to imagine anybody willing to take the required oath who would be even minimally competent. The Hatch Act was passed to prevent such abuses; so were the Pendleton Civil Service Act and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (both ignored by the Trump’s “Schedule F” initiative). Harry Truman subjected the civil service to considerable stress when he imposed his loyalty program. Lives were ruined. But the fallout from Trump’s loyalty program will probably be worse.
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