Trump wants his loyal subjects in civil service jobs. That’s what Saddam Hussein did | Opinion
President Donald Trump and his administration’s attempts to remove America’s civil service corps as part of a broader effort to depopulate the federal government is genuinely horrifying. The American civil service was established in 1883 to form a merit based civil service corps to replace the “spoil system” in which all federal jobs were handed out as political favors.
Trump’s memo offering seven months of severance to workers who resign also came with a threat: If you don’t pass our loyalty test, you may not have a job anyway. The administration is also trying to re-classify career civil servants as “Schedule F” appointees who could be fired at will. While the courts will debate the legality of Trump’s plan, the results may be the same: exhausted civil servants may resign en masse, pressured out of their careers.
In 2005, the U.S. Agency for International Development sent me to Baghdad. I witnessed first hand the aftermath of a gutted civil service. There was no functioning power grid, no water and no schools. Trash lined the streets.
Shortly after the 2003 invasion, the U.S. gutted Iraq’s entire civil service through the de-Baathification policy. Modeled after the denazification policy in post-war Germany, the program in Iraq mandated that any member of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party could no longer hold a government job. The state department threw up huge warning flags, pointing out that Saddam Hussein had made every single government employee join the Ba’ath party and take a loyalty oath regardless of their ideology. Sound familiar?
The de-Baathification policy removed power plant operators, school teachers, office secretaries, government accountants and contracting offers, among other positions. In 2006, when Iraq elected a new government, the public expected the lights to go on, trash services to start and government functions to resume. However, there were no institutions left to resume government. Violent sectarian militias filled the void providing security, water, food and trash removal, and cementing public support for ISIS.
Eventually, Iraq got the lights back on. But the country lost decades of institutional knowledge and expertise. The gutting of the civil service dramatically slowed post-war recovery work and left dysfunction and corruption in its wake. Iraq reportedly lost $150 billion in oil revenues to embezzlement in the decade after the war.
Trump’s effort to incentivize civil servants to leave their roles is dangerous. No, I don’t think militias will take over neighborhoods like Baghdad and I don’t think the power will go out. But I do think Trump is clearing a path for a government rife with corruption and cronyism. By removing the civil service, firing inspector generals and freezing government funding, I think it’s highly likely that that funding will get rerouted to friends and allies of Trump without consequence.
Yes, government bureaucracies certainly need reform and modernization, but not destruction. Bureaucracy is cumbersome by design so that government institutions continue their services uninterrupted by political change. Government bureaucracy is like a coral reef — new programs are built on calcified older institutions, creating a system that looks funky but is unmovable by the changing political tides. Now, enter Hurricane Trump trying to destroy the entire reef.
If the Trump administration was really after bureaucratic efficiency and reform, they would focus on the complex network of laws that drive government inefficiency rather than the “shoot the messenger” approach of targeting civil servants executing those laws.
Frustrated that the U.S. Forest Service isn’t thinning forests fast enough? The answer is resources, staff and process reform, not pressuring mass resignation of the foresters who know how to thin the forest.
The administration argues that removing civil servants will save tax dollars. But in reality, the functions of these employees will be replaced by much more expensive government contractors. For example, when U.S. Agency for International Development’s operating budget was gutted in the mid-90s, the technical experts lost were replaced by massive government contracts, often doubling the cost of executing a program.
Taking a sledgehammer to the entire civil service is going to cause chaos. Projects will slow, institutional knowledge will be lost, safety standards will slip and corruption will become the norm. Talented workers will find other jobs and won’t return after Trump leaves.
It will take decades to restore the institutional knowledge and expertise lost to his grandstanding. I watched the extreme version of this nightmare play out in Baghdad — let’s not repeat it at home.