The Trump hiring plan wants to fix federal jobs, but it might just make things worse

If there’s anything that everyone anywhere close to the federal hiring process agrees about, it’s that the system is a mess, for applicants and agency officials alike. But the hiring plan the Trump administration launched during Memorial Day week would only make things worse—for everyone.  

Its goal is to make merit matter more, by “reforming the Federal recruitment process to ensure that only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans are hired to the Federal service.” That’s certainly a goal that everyone can get behind.

So, too, is ending self-assessments by applicants, which too often turned out to be exercises in wordy puffery, and making greater use of validated tools to assess applicants. Those are big steps forward. 

But the hiring plan also misfires. First, it screens applicants for ideology more than merit. Applicants must write four essays that, among other things, requires them to explain how they’d advance the president’s priorities. Now, we expect every civil servant to use their expertise to follow the president’s directives, within the scope of the law. However, the law also sets other standards as well, including recruiting individuals “from all segments of society” and  protecting them against “coercion from partisan political purposes.” The law defines 9 merit system principles, including recruiting individuals “from all segments of society” and  protection against “coercion from partisan political purposes.” Creating a political standard flies  directly in the face of the nonpartisan civil service that Congress created in 1883, and that has enjoyed support from presidents of both parties ever since.

Moreover, the goal of the civil service is to create an expert workforce that will endure for the long haul, not just one administration. The essays make no sense in building that workforce. And, as I know from grading college exams for 45 years, these essays would be ridiculously easy to game. Even my favorite AI app figured how to dish out the right word salad in about two minutes. 

In fact, the average federal employee has a dozen years of service. We expect every federal employee will follow every legal instruction they receive, and we want them to do so as expertly as possible. That’s been the goal of the civil service system since Congress created it in 1883. Moreover—and I say this as someone who has graded college essays for 45 years—the four essays would be ridiculously easy to game. Even my favorite AI app figured that out in about two minutes.

The hiring plan also sets some very useful goals, like reducing the time to hire new employees, but it doesn’t lay out a game plan for getting there. On average, it takes 98 days to hire a new federal employee, more than twice as long as in the private sector. That’s a huge problem for government agencies and prospective employees alike, and everyone needs a detailed work plan. 

In short, the administration’s hiring plan identifies many of the right problems, but it also misses several important ones, including finding the best recruits, defining the skills the government most needs for which positions, and producing a journey map, for supervisors and candidates alike, to move briskly from a vacancy to a successful new hire. That’s the biggest missing link in the administration’s hiring plan.

We Need a Third Way

Of course, no recent administration has dealt with this problem well. Nor has either end of the ideological spectrum. 

The right wants to shrink government. Since it’s hard to do that—just ask Elon Musk—it seeks to cut off government’s brain and its arms and legs. There’s no reason to focus on hiring the best and the brightest when the real goal is to slash government.

The left wants to build a bigger, more robust government, but when it comes to managing the system it has focused far more on the how than on the what. Even more, the left has tended to circle the wagons around the status quo to protect the jobs of federal employees without stopping to think about what those employees do and whether they could do it better. 

The right wants to cut many programs that people like and want. The left wants to create new programs without figuring out how best to make them work. It’s little wonder that government so often performs so badly. A 2013 survey found that more Americans approved of Genghis Khan than Congress. 

That’s why we need a third way to improve federal hiring, a way that avoids the pathologies of the right and the left and focuses, instead, on building government’s capacity to get done what the people want to get done.

This third-way approach would put mission at the very center of government. It would build government’s means to get that mission done. And it would recreate the merit system, which has enjoyed strong bipartisan support for 140 years, to match the challenges of the twenty-first century. 

Toward Effective and Responsive Hiring

Here’s what we need to build this mission-means-merit approach.

• Emphasize the central importance of a nonpolitical workforce. The civil service, from its very start, has had the goal of creating a system based on merit and insulated from political pressure. The primary allegiance of federal civil servants is to the Constitution and to the body of law they are charged with implementing. 
• Make mission drive hiring. Federal employees play a critically important role in governance: they create the capacity to translate policy into results. However, since the 1950s, government’s culture has increasingly focused more on complying with rules instead of accomplishing the mission. Mission must be at the center of the hiring process—and personnel managers must be part of the agency management team, just as budget analysts are. 
• Recruit in the mode that works best for recruits. Posted job listings are as useful today as the floppy disk or computer punch card, both of which are relics now in the Smithsonian Institution. In contrast, the District of Columbia has created a wall-to-wall, job- announcement-to-onboarding process that syncs with the online instincts of job applicants—and which applicants can easily use on their smartphones.  That’s an important step toward making federal employment attractive to applicants—as long as top officials do not seek to traumatize the very people they want to recruit and retain. 
• Qualify potential employees for broad pools, not individual jobs. The federal government, for too long, conducted its hiring one slot at a time. Recent federal hiring initiatives have empowered subject-matter experts across the government to establish the competencies required for broad categories of jobs, to pre-qualify applicants for jobs across the government, and bring candidates on board far more quickly. Finding the best match between the skills required for a position and the skills of employees is the best way to conduct hiring, as the administration’s plan suggests. 
• Hire for the ability to work in teams. No federal employee works in an organizational chart box. All work that matters happen in teams. The hiring process must assess a candidate’s ability to contribute to a collaborative enterprise. Ranked scoring won’t get us there.
• Create a two-year probationary period. Federal supervisors need the flexibility to determine whether new employees can create the results at the core of agency missions. A two-year probationary period, which had been the standard in many agencies until recently, would provide that opportunity. 
• Establish a streamlined process for removing poor performers—but ensure that they are removed for legitimate reasons. There are undoubtedly poor performers in government, although the number certainly is not as high as white-hot political rhetoric often suggests. Poor performers ought to be removed briskly, but “poor performance” should not be used as an excuse for dismissing employees who refuse to carry out an illegal or unconstitutional directive or because they blew the whistle on these activities. 
• Ensure that veterans continue to receive consideration for employment in a manner that’s consistent with a merit-based, mission-driven hiring system. Former members of the military, who have sacrificed much in service to the country, unquestionably deserve preference in federal hiring. The current veterans’ preference system, however, effectively squeezes out many other exceptionally well-qualified applicants, hamstrings agencies in the hunt for talent, and often disserves veterans, who too often depart government sooner than other new employees. Veterans ought to be given preference in applying for their first job. They should receive a preference to get them into the pool of the top five applicants from which agency managers make their hiring decision. From that point forward, veterans should work under the same standards as all other federal employees. 
• Streamline the security clearance process. The administration’s hiring plan recognizes that the process of obtaining a security clearance often creates a bottleneck in hiring the best employees. In recent years, reforms have greatly reduced that bottleneck. Continued progress in reducing the security clearance backlog is essential in reducing the federal government’s time-to-hire. 
• Less firing requires better hiring. There is substantial debate about how to make it easier to fire poor performers in government. That, however, is a too-late issue.  Firing problems are the result of hiring problems—and inadequate management of employees by their supervisors. This is a problem in all organizations, public and private. The federal government needs to step up its own efforts to solve it.
• Merit must be at the center. Throughout all of these steps, the federal government must increase, not downgrade, its emphasis on merit. We cannot solve the problems of the workforce of the future by trying to move back to a time in the past when the federal personnel system seemed rosier. The current system needs fundamental reform. But so has the personnel system at every point in the nation’s history.  

Accountability and Trust in Federal Hiring

The bureaucracy doesn’t exist to protect employees’ jobs or to serve as a proxy in the war against big government. Rather, its fundamental purpose is to do the people’s work, as defined in law.

We need a new, third way for leaders to effectively lead and for experts to expertly manage. We need a fresh and innovative partnership between them, with a workforce highly tuned to the collaboration—between employees, between agencies, between the public and private sectors, and even between nations—that is the emerging environment of twenty-first century government. 

And we need a system that does so by nurturing trust. As the noted author Philip Howard told me, “The benefit of accountability is not mainly to purge poor performers (although important) but to instill mutual trust that everyone is pulling their share.” Neither the traditional approaches of the right nor the left will produce that trust. 

Instead, we need a third way, built around the principles laid out here, with mission, means, and merit at the core.