Civil servants shouldn't quit their jobs

Don't give in to Trump's attempted purge

Most high-level federal employees are understood to “serve at the pleasure of the president.” So when Donald Trump won the election, it was inevitable that Gina Raimondo would be gone as Commerce Secretary. Nobody fired her; it was just a turnover of administrations. If Kamala Harris had won, we would have been faced with a rare same-party transition that posed the question of whether Biden appointees should expect to stay on or resign by default. But she didn’t, so everyone resigned by default.

But there are a number of officials who, by statute, serve fixed terms of office.

These jobs exist in a kind of constitutional gray zone. The people doing them can only be removed “for cause,” but it’s not really clear what procedural guardrails exist to enforce that.

One such job is the Director of the FBI. Trump clearly signaled during the campaign that he would fire Chris Wray if he won, so when Trump won, Wray preemptively resigned. The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also serves a fixed term, and unlike Wray, Rohit Chopra was an actual Biden appointee (Wray was Trump’s pick after he fired James Coney) and a progressive Democrat. Chopra stayed in office until he was fired by Trump.

Earlier, Trump illegally fired a bunch of inspector generals. But USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong did the right thing and went back to work as if America is a country where the rule of law applies. She was escorted out by security and she complied (which is also the right thing to do) and there will be litigation. We’ll see what happens. But this is the right approach.

The other major officials with fixed term appointments are Jerome Powell and the other members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Powell is a moderate Republican, and Joe Biden’s other appointees — Philip Jefferson, Lisa Cook, Michael Barr, and Adriana Kugler — are, to the best of my knowledge, pretty mild-mannered technocrats. And I hope none of them step aside. Which is not to say they should form some kind of secret cell of anti-Trump resistance. They should just do their jobs to the best of their ability, without fear or favor, and make Trump fire them rather than preemptively ceding the seats to him.

And I think the same applies broadly to the civil service. Trump would clearly like to orchestrate some kind of nationwide purge and replace the entire government with Heritage Foundation interns. But he can’t actually do that. What he’s trying to do is get people to quit, and the solution, unpleasant though it may be, is to not quit.

Praise the ones who stay

On top of the general effort to make civil servants’ lives worse, the Trump team seems to be planning targeted efforts to get career officials to quit their jobs.

Last week, for example, we got a story that “Corey Amundson, the U.S. Justice Department's senior career official in charge of overseeing public corruption and other politically sensitive investigations, resigned on Monday after the Trump administration tried to reassign him to a new role working on immigration issues.” He’s not the only DOJ attorney to have been reassigned in this way. Perry Stein and Ellen Nakashima reported on Trump’s second day in office that “at least 15 experienced career staffers across several divisions were removed from their positions and reassigned” — mostly to some kind of new bureau that will allegedly be working on policy related to sanctuary cities.

This is a kind of clever triple play for Trump:

1. It gets non-cronies out of key areas related to public integrity and national security, moving them to areas where they will have less political influence.

2. Senior DOJ lawyers make good salaries, but successful lawyers have high-paying outside options, so if you assign them to something non-prestigious they have a strong incentive to quit.

3. Because most liberals find the idea of working on a sanctuary city crackdown distasteful, there will be some inclination to single Amundson out for praise relative to attorneys who take their new assignments.

People leave jobs all the time, and if you want to switch to a new role where you’ll make more money, that’s a valid life choice. But in terms of who is worthy of public praise and esteem, I think it’s very much worth resisting option three. It’s better for America if civil servants given unpleasant assignments by Trump simply do their jobs. For starters, the loss of their expertise and institutional knowledge is bad. Trump won’t be president forever, and it’s even possible that in the face of some future misfortune, he’ll reconsider the wisdom of downplaying organized crime and counterterrorism in favor of immigration politics.

There’s also just a whole spectrum of outcomes here, with the senior DOJ reassignments at one end and just saying “we want federal workers to come to the office” at the other end. Everyone needs to make their own decisions in life. But the intention here is clearly to break the back of the civil service, and at the margin, anything anyone does to avert that is being politically and substantively constructive. All else being equal, anyone who manages to stay at their job and put the onus on Trump to fire them and bear the legal and political consequences deserves praise.

Don’t sabotage, do be rigorous

A telling early-Trump story was that during his first week in office, he ordered the government to cancel all DEI programming. That led someone at the Air Force to take a mention of the Tuskegee Airmen out of a training video. People complained about that, Trump backtracked, and Katie Britt called it an example of “malicious compliance.”

The idea here is that Trump never intended his order to mean anything so extreme, and civil servants who don’t like the order decided to deliberately stick it to him by going with an embarrassing interpretation of it. The DIA canceling any observance of Martin Luther King Day will probably be seen in a similar light.

It’s important to say that while the “malicious compliance” construct makes some sense as a framework, career officials are really in a double bind here. If Trump issues an order and it’s implemented in a way he deems insufficiently aggressive, then conservatives will complain that the Deep State is refusing orders. If they implement his directives too aggressively, they’ll complain that the Deep State is doing malicious compliance. If they respond to every order with dozens of follow-up questions to clarify, they’ll complain that the Deep State is foot-dragging. The truth is that conservatives have gotten very animated around a series of ideas like “wokeness” and “gender theory” that do not have universally agreed-upon or unambiguous definitions. It’s genuinely the case that making sure everyone knows the story of the Tuskegee Airmen or hailing MLK as a great American hero is, in fact, part of an effort to make American institutions more inclusive. Those two examples just don’t happen to be politically controversial.

But the MLK Day holiday was controversial for a long time; conservatives just eventually stopped disagreeing with it. By the same token, these days the “woke” position is that we should replace or complement Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. But the origins of Columbus Day was as a kind of DEI for white Catholics (particularly Italian-Americans). This stopped being controversial at some point, and then became newly controversial for different reasons.

The point is, if Trump dishes out vague orders, he can’t expect the civil service to read his mind. If he wants better implementation, he needs a more deliberative process, including consultations with the people charged with actually implementing the orders. The best thing is for civil servants to keep doing their jobs, and to use their best judgment. They will inevitably end up angering Trump to some extent in all three possible directions because that’s just the nature of the relationship. Nobody should assume it’s deliberate or encourage any deliberate malfeasance. We should do our best to insist on legality. Trump would clearly relish having a bunch of high-profile fights with defenseless bureaucrats rather than taking responsibility for implementing his own borderline incoherent agenda. The best thing is to deny him the circus atmosphere he craves, but also resist the impulse to self-purge the institutions.

Watch out for actual crimes

Last, but by no means least, it’s worth insisting on the distinction between receiving orders that you find distasteful or misguided (divert resources away from serious crimes to hit arbitrary immigration prosecution quotas) and the risk of actual illegality and abuse of power (target Trump’s political enemies with audits).

The best safeguard against gross misconduct, by far, is to have people with integrity in the government. Documenting and memorializing abuses of power so that they can be reported is useful and important. So is simply saying “no” to unlawful requests. So is requesting that directives be delivered in writing from a clearly responsible official rather than simply passed around verbally.

The question of exactly when to blow the whistle and to whom is obviously difficult, and I’m probably not the best person to opine about it (though if you want to hand me any juicy scoops I am, of course, open to that). But whatever it is you do, it can only be done if you’re there in the first place. Preemptively resigning as part of a vague sense that Trump is bad doesn’t ultimately help anyone. Many of Trump’s policies are truly awful, and I do understand that at a point, some might find staying to be untenable. But I also believe we should not accuse anyone of being “complicit” for staying in their positions and following lawful Trump directives. On the contrary, people who choose to put up with an abusive boss for the good of the country deserve to be praised.

And to circle back to where we started, that starts with the people at the top.

It’s clear, for example, that Trump intends to “pressure” the Fed into making the interest rate decisions that he wants. But there’s no real mechanism of pressure here. He can say what he wants, but the Open Market Committee has the authority to make appropriate interest rate decisions. He can make people fear that he’ll fire them if they don’t do what he wants, but the truth is being fired by Trump for refusing to behave inappropriately would be a badge of honor. And as a question of law and policy, he in fact cannot fire these people without cause. In the case of James Comey, the comical pretext they came up with was that Comey had violated DOJ policy and been too mean to Hillary Clinton. Wray, by preemptively stepping aside, spared Trump the embarrassment of even needing to come up with anything. That’s a mistake.

Everyone from the most senior political appointees to the most anonymous rank-and-file civil servants should stand their ground and make Trump pay the price — even if it’s small — of actually removing them. As we saw last week with the fiasco of his grant freeze, even though “lol nothing matters” sometimes seems like the order of the day, news events in fact do matter. Resigning meekly is non-news. Doing your job and getting fired is news. Reporting misconduct is news. That’s the spirit we need.