The Trump admin is playing hardball with Congress in trying to break Government unions….
The Trump administration is threatening to furlough — and possibly lay off — 150 employees at the federal personnel agency if Congress blocks its plan to eliminate the department.
The Office of Personnel Management is preparing to send the career employees home without pay starting on Oct. 1, according to an internal briefing document obtained by The Washington Post. The employees could formally be laid off after 30 days, administration officials confirmed.
The warning of staff cuts is the administration’s most dramatic move yet in an escalating jujitsu between Trump officials and Congress over the fate of the agency that manages the civilian federal workforce of 2.1 million.
Even as House Democrats and some Republicans signal that Congress is not going to break up the 5,565-employee department, the administration is moving forward in defiance. Trump appointees paint a dire picture of a corner of the government in financial free fall and failing to carry out its mission. They want a commitment from Congress by June 30 to agree to disband the agency — or they say they will be forced to trim the staff….
…
The plan to dismantle the agency was the brainchild of a senior career official at the budget office. Weichert, a private-sector executive focused on improving business operations before she joined the Trump administration, has committed to it with a vengeance.
She has told her staff that she is “planning to play chicken with Congress,” according to three officials familiar with the comments.
Critics say she is deliberately starving the agency in an effort to kill it….
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But the plan, which would mark the first time in modern history that a large federal department has disappeared, has no buy-in from Democrats on Capitol Hill and their allies in the labor movement, who are smarting from more than two years of confrontation with President Trump’s anti-union policies.
I’d have to know far, far more about what the aim is, and how this would work. But I do remember the origins of OPM (Keith probably knows the details from dealing with OPM as a tangible entity, as opposed to my theoretical knowledge).
The U.S. Civil Service Commission was established in 1886 to replace partisan patronage in the Federal government with merit-based hiring and employment.
[Not at all by accident was it modelled on the Civil Service Commission in New York State nor that it was ardently championed (and eventually joined) by Teddy Roosevelt. What was a little more surprising is that it had at least the tacit support of Grover Cleveland, a former Governor of New York and the only Democratic President between Buchanan (1857-61) and Wilson (1913-21). Despite (or perhaps because) being a regular, organization Democrat, Cleveland has a fair claim to being America’s most conservative president — for example by breaking the Pullman strike in 1890]
The Civil Service Commission had two principal purposes (1) to manage Federal employees whose jobs were covered under civil service, and (2) to see that merit rather than patronage or political affiliation governed the hiring, discipline and management of lifetime Civil Service employees. The previous practice of Democrats, Whigs and Republican administrations upon taking power had been to hire their own partisans to replace those who had supported their opponents (“To the victor, belong the spoils” or the Spoils System).
In 1979, the responsibilities of the CSC were divided in two. Management and discipline of the federal civil service was given to the Office of Personnel Management, while the Merit System Protection Board heard appeals from employees who asserted they had been unfairly disciplined or fired for political or other improper reasons.
My uninformed guess is that the dismantling of OPM would only be the prelude to a far more sinister attack on the Merit Systems Protection Board. The President and his administration (as well as a host of self-serving regulated industries) are continually screaming against a Deep State infested with Democrats and leftists intent on sabotaging the administration, especially on the environment (the Climate Change Hoax), justice (the Witch Hunt), foreign affairs and intelligence (Russia wasn’t involved in the 2016 campaign, but Iran was violating the JCPOA). There is probably nothing more that would please the Trump cult and those who benefit from it more than to gut civil-service protection and install their own favored partisans in place of objective, independent, professional staff.
Great history DSD….
And yes…..
I remember from day one Trump has complained that government employee’s should NOT have labor unions….
(They can’t strike after PATCO)
Republican corporate types ALWAYS have it out for unions….