Why Not Allow the President to Fire Federal Employees?

A t a South Carolina rally this Saturday, Donald Trump made a basic assertion: Unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch should be accountable to the democratic will of the people. “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump proposed. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”

Defenders of democracy everywhere leapt into action: Authoritarianism was on the march once more. “Trump’s embrace of autocracy is now open and enthusiastic,” tweeted Bill Kristol. Keith Olbermann added that “Trump is openly running for Dictator” and that “all measures must be taken to stop him.” The left-wing group MeidasTouch wrote that Trump called “for an expansion of presidential power that would turn the presidency into a dictatorship. Republicans want to turn the United States into Russia.” In the Independent, author and columnist Eric Garcia decried the call for “a chilling new presidential power,” asserting there was “no evidence to support the claim” of a “deep state” out to get Trump.

Mr. Garcia must not remember the 2018 New York Times op-ed by an anonymous “senior official” in the Trump administration, since outed as former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor. Trump’s “dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” Taylor boasted. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies,” most of the White House’s “senior officials . . . are working to insulate their operations from [Trump’s] whims.”

“The result is a two-track presidency,” Taylor concluded triumphantly. “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

Uh . . . okay?

If all that sounds pretty anti-democratic, that’s because it is. No one voted for Taylor, or for any of the other “senior officials” who were working to “thwart parts of his agenda,” as Taylor himself put it. For all the high-minded talk of “defending democracy,” the premise of his entire piece, trumpeted by a procession of “pro-democracy” figures, was that unelected bureaucrats who don’t like a particular president’s policies can — and should — do everything in their power to block them.

There is a breathtaking ego to all this. The idea that administrators in the executive branch should just get to decide that a president’s decisions are unacceptable, over and above the expressed electoral wishes of the people, is fundamentally un-American. In our republican form of government, the administrative state doesn’t get to unilaterally determine which policies are worth pursuing. Within the parameters set by the Constitution, the people do. Or at least, they’re supposed to. The so-called “steady state” improperly got out ahead of their judgment, which was in fact rendered in November 2020.

In the face of all that, why not give the president — the only member of the executive branch who is directly accountable to American voters — the power to decide how his administration is run? The steadiness of Taylor’s state is precisely the problem. The growth of this “fourth branch” of American government, insulated from the democratic will, has come at the direct expense of the sovereignty of the people. The size of the federal government has continued to grow, ballooning from 1,000 nonmilitary workers at the time of the Founding to an estimated 2.1 million in 2021. As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote:

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

What’s more, it’s effectively a one-party regime. By the end of September 2016, some 95 percent of donations from federal employees had gone to Hillary Clinton. In 2020 — after four years of an ostensibly Republican administration — 72.63 percent of donations from federal employees were still going to Democrats. Just 24.15 percent went to Republicans. In many agencies, the percentage of Democratic Party donations was higher: 87.6 in the Department of Justice, 91.81 in the Department of Labor, 92.83 in the Department of Energy, and 97.06 in the Department of Education. There wasn’t a single executive-branch agency where employees donated more to Republicans than to Democrats.

That discrepancy had consequences during the Trump administration. The same intelligence agencies that spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign went to war with the president once he was in office, regularly leaking classified information to a willing press corps in an effort to undermine the White House. Former FBI director James Comey violated FBI policy on numerous occasions, leaking memos of his conversations with Trump. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe lied three times under oath while being investigated about his agency’s press leaks during the Russia probe.

So maybe the premise of Trump’s proposal — that the president should have ultimate authority over who works in his branch of government — isn’t so authoritarian after all. Of course, one could imagine ways in which this initiative could go awry. The 1883 Pendleton Act, which “made it unlawful to fire or demote” many federal employees “for political reasons,” was originally passed in an effort to combat “the ‘spoils system,’ in which officials rewarded political friends and supporters with government positions,” according to the National Archives. Any reform like the one Trump proposed last weekend runs the risk of a return to such a system.

But it is unsurprising that so many left-wing activists, social scientists, and intellectuals like the current progressive-stacked federal bureaucracy just fine the way it is. From their perspective, such a system is far preferable to one in which the will of the people prevails.