Personnel is Policy

executive power. Simply fulfilling this basic constitutional requirement would reap huge dividends for the American citizenry, especially on the issue of immigration. Our current border crisis has been fueled—and deliberately so—by the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce federal immigration laws (specifically its failure to enforce the legal requirement that those seeking asylum be detained until their claims can be adjudicated).

Beyond faithfully enforcing the law (backed by a competent legal team that believes in that mission), Trump should quickly undo all of the damaging executive orders that President Biden has issued. Executive orders are supposed to be guidance to executive branch personnel about how to enforce the law. Biden’s orders and proclamations, however, have often veered into quasi-lawmaking, such as his kingly mask and vaccine decrees and his edict that student loan debt should be transferred from borrowers to taxpayers as a whole.

The list of Biden-era executive orders, or administrative decrees, that should be reversed is quite long. Near the top of the list would be Biden’s executive order on “equity,” his administration’s attacks on American energy independence and fossil fuels (and its corresponding efforts to force everyone to buy electric cars), and its attempts to compel everyone from coast to coast to do the bidding of trans activists.

Additionally, there is much work to be done to get institutions such as the FBI, the Secret Service, and the military back to fulfilling their core missions rather than sacrificing basic competence in the interest of playing politics or implementing ill-conceived social experiments at the behest of leftist activists. Such activists might not seem like much of a concern during a conservative administration, but most career federal employees are left-leaning and will be sympathetic to what the activists have to say. Political appointees, therefore, have a crucial role to play in keeping everyone on task, reminding all staff that each part of the executive branch has a mission to fulfill and that the “customer,” so to speak, is the American people, not radical activists.

The Right Staff

Perhaps the most pivotal decisions Trump will have to make involve getting the right personnel in place to implement his goals. The old adage that “personnel is policy” is even truer than most people realize.

Success here comes down to two essentials: filling political-appointee positions with talented, dedicated people who work well with others and who see eye-to-eye with the president in most important ways; and letting the political appointees hire and manage career employees rather than allowing career human resource officers to call the shots.

The key is to appoint the right people at the top—cabinet secretaries and the rung or two below that—and then entrust those people, and those whom they select, to fill out the political-appointee ranks. Perhaps the biggest weakness of the first Trump Administration was that it made too many ill-considered picks at the higher levels and then needlessly micromanaged picks at the lower levels.

Trump routinely appointed cabinet secretaries who were either inept (Tom Price) or fundamentally didn’t agree with him (Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, and Mark Esper). Indeed, how many former Trump cabinet secretaries, or those in similar positions of authority, have subsequently written tell-all books or come out in opposition to him? What’s more, the positions right below these individuals were often filled with Mike Pence loyalists, while some cabinet secretaries weren’t even allowed to pick their own chiefs of staff—which only makes sense if you’re banking on your cabinet secretaries being folks you can’t trust.

While often failing to adequately vet or wisely select high-level personnel, the Trump Administration applied an absurdly tight screen when it came to approving potential political appointees at the General Schedule level. The result was that a large number of political-appointee positions remained unfilled, with career staff happily filling the void.

Time and again, those selected by political appointees to fill lower political-appointee positions were rejected or held up for months on end—often for dubious reasons—by a White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) staffed with folks just a few years out of college. PPO reportedly rejected one young lady because she’d posted a picture of herself on social media. PPO’s objection? In the picture, she was wearing a bikini and holding a beer while standing on a boat. Maddeningly, this sort of thing happened repeatedly and was an open secret in the Trump Administration. The only beneficiaries of such senseless PPO rejections were career staff.

Admittedly, PPO must take a more active role in vetting applicants when the cabinet secretaries or other higher-ups are not to be trusted—and many of the higher-ups in the first Trump Administration, unfortunately, were not to be trusted.

Though PPO seemed to improve in the later stages of the first Trump presidency, not having the right cabinet secretaries leading some executive departments, and for a long time not having the right people or even the right sense of mission at PPO, did incalculable damage across the administration. Most of that damage came in the form of countless things that could have been done to benefit the American citizenry but were never accomplished.

Deconstructing the H.R. State

Conservatives often talk about reining in the administrative state, but they don’t generally propose concrete actions to do so. Aside from getting the right people into political-appointee positions, perhaps the most crucial course of action required for curbing the administrative state is to give political appointees support in dealing with federal H.R. departments, which are almost always staffed with career employees.

It’s all too often the case that H.R. employees’ primary goal is to limit the discretion of conservative political appointees. They cite byzantine H.R. rules—whether real or imagined—that keep political appointees from hiring, promoting, or rewarding career employees at their discretion. These rules are mysterious and often impossible to find, or to interpret if found, which gives career H.R. staff a huge leg up.

The solution is to establish an H.R. hotline, likely housed at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), that is staffed by a few political appointees who know H.R. rules inside and out and can guide their fellow political appointees in navigating the traps that career H.R. staff will inevitably set. Any political appointee, or at least those with hiring authority, ought to have access to this hotline and be able to call or meet with a political-appointee H.R. expert as needed. This would help the president’s political appointees save a tremendous amount of time while simultaneously making it more likely that they could triumph over H.R. obstructionism.

Beyond this, the H.R. rules themselves must be addressed. Only in the federal government could a person be fast-tracked to the front of the hiring line on the basis of claiming a “history of drug addiction” or “alcoholism” (provided the applicant is “not currently using illegal drugs”), being morbidly obese, suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, having Parkinson’s disease, or otherwise meeting the so-called qualifications that grant a person favoritism in the ludicrous government hiring process.

If these rules have been set by Congress, which is doubtful, the president should work to get legislation passed to get them changed. If they are merely a product of prior executive actions, they should be changed within the executive branch. The net effect of these and other unreasonable rules is that when looking to hire someone to fill a federal career position (at least in the absence of “direct-hire authority,” which OPM should try to grant more freely), it’s often nearly impossible to hire someone out of the private sector—certainly not someone of your choice. Yet prior conservative administrations have left these insane hiring rules in place.

There’s much more to be done in terms of revising the H.R. system:

1. Good career employees should be rewarded without also having to reward mediocre or poor career employees. Currently, nearly every career employee expects to—and does—receive a year-end bonus at taxpayer expense.
2. It should not be a colossal waste of time to try to fire a do-nothing employee. As it stands, trying to fire a bad employee requires having good employees waste vast sums of time on bureaucratic processes rather than doing meaningful work, to the point where it’s far more efficient and productive just to leave the do-nothing employee in place.
3. Rapid career-employee promotions and corresponding pay raises should not be the norm (as they are not in, say, the military). Senior career employees often make more money, while also taking more vacation time, than their political-appointee bosses.

Another mistake that conservative administrations often make is instituting federal hiring freezes. While well-intentioned, such freezes simply create more openings for career positions over time (as career employees quit or retire)—openings that left-leaning administrations relish filling when they take power. Indeed, the only effective way to shrink the federal workforce is to have Congress pass legislation to reduce the number of career employees that a given agency is statutorily authorized to have.

A great sports team is made up of players who do the little things well. Likewise, a great presidential administration realizes that doing the little things well makes it possible to tackle the big things with success. And you can’t have a great team—or a great administration—without the right players.

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