Don Kettl: The Trump Administration and the Politicization of the Civil Service

It is great to be with you today, Bill.

I

really enjoyed the chance to talk.

Good.

Well, I'm looking forward to it.

And okay, even though it may not be an entirely cheerful conversation, but that's okay.

So am I right that what the Trump administration has been doing with respect to government personnel, let's call it, the civil service, is really important.

And as I think it's sort of not, it's not, you see each of these discrete, you read sometimes the headline, they're changing some mechanism that most of us don't even know what it is about how people are appointed or hired or fired or moved around in the government, and then it fades away out of the headlines for two, three months.

But you study this, and so give us a little bit of the forest here as opposed to the trees of what's going on.

Yeah, because I think people follow this closely.

I think you just get gobbled up by all these individual announcements, so it's hard to step back and take a look at the whole thing.

And then for most of us sitting out there just reading the headlines, there's a blip that comes across, but people, I think, tend not to pay that much attention to it.

But I would argue that of all the things that the Trump administration has been doing, the thing that's most important and least appreciated is what's happening with the structure of government and the people who work for it.

And this is just a fundamental remaking of the way in which the executive branch operates at the expense of Congress, too, at the same time.

And one other point, too, and just going back to that new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory, the argument of that book is that Trump really had the advantage of capitalizing on a very strong foundation laid long before he ever got into politics and has a series of ideas underneath it that is guaranteed to continue long after he's no longer president.

And so that the...

Positioning all of what's been happening in that broader context is even more important because it really suggests a big, big, big, big, big set of changes that go right to the heart of the constitutional power of the president.

And so after that long-winded preamble, what's really going on is that brick by brick by The Trump administration has been pulling out a lot of the underpinnings of what had happened before, starting with the civil service and then building up a new wall that is a fundamental effort to try to seize and shift as much power as possible to the president, to the executive branch at the expense of Congress and sometimes at the expense of the Supreme Court.

The president has been reading, along with his people, the idea that the president is in charge of making sure that the laws be faithfully executed, as Article 2 of the Constitution says.

And what they've been up to is an effort to try to take that as broadly as they possibly can and take everything having to do with the administration and execution of the law, pulling it to the executive branch away from Congress, within the executive branch, pulling it to the executive office of the president, and then within the executive office of the president, pulling it to the president himself.

And so what we have is a broad effort to try to reshape power so that...

in a way that's fundamentally different in terms of the constitutional balance of power.

And it's been not anything that they've announced as, here's what we're doing as a big thing, but it's something that's been happening bit by bit by bit since actually the evening of the inauguration.

Yeah, Sarah, I mean, that's striking, I think, in your analysis.