Outside the Beltway

Loyalty Tests For Government Hiring

It was inevitable.

James Joyner · Saturday, May 31, 2025 · 17 comments

POLITICO (“Trump administration to prioritize ‘patriotic Americans’ for federal jobs“):

As President Donald Trump moves to slash the size of the federal workforce, his administration unveiled a plan to ensure that any new hires are “patriotic Americans” who vow to advance the president’s policy priorities.

The White House and the agency that serves as the government’s human resources arm Thursday released directives for departments to use when recruiting employees in a memo that represents a dramatic shift in federal hiring procedures.

The administration’s “merit hiring plan” comes after Trump ordered a revamp to the federal hiring process on his first day in office. The resulting plan issued this week says it aims to ensure that “only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans” are hired by the government.

The “overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats,” says the memo authored by Vince Haley, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.

So, in principle, this sounds reasonable. There has long been frustration with the cumbersome and slow nature of civil service hiring. And, while I support various hiring preferences and diversification programs in theory, they can contribute to both further slowing the process and making it harder to hire and promote the best people for the job.

Obviously, we want people who are “talented, capable, and patriotic” in positions of public trust. The devil, of course, is in the details.

Trump and his allies have railed against civil servants, accusing them of working to undermine the president’s policy priorities. The new hiring plan will require job applicants to write short essays describing how they plan to advance Trump’s priorities.

This undermines the entire spirit of the civil service system, which is to create a permanent cadre of experts to administer the government regardless of political party. While I fully sympathize with President Trump (and many of his predecessors) being frustrated with bureaucratic intransigence, loyalty tests are not the answer. It is, at best, a return to the spoils system and would naturally require a purge of the entire Federal workforce every time there’s a change of administration.

Under the plan, all federal job vacancy announcements starting at the GS-5 pay grade or above will require short essay responses to questions about their commitment to the Constitution, how they plan to improve government efficiency, how they plan to advance Trump’s executive orders and policy priorities, and about their work ethic.

This is, frankly, just bizarre. GS-5s are low-level employees with a starting pay of $22,360 a year. That they would have any useful insights into making the government more efficient is laughable. Further, they’re going to be doing extremely low-level clerical or administrative work, not making or even influencing public policy. Even GS-12s and -13s are middle managers, not policymakers.

Critics called the requirements a loyalty test for the administration, while saying they could make future recruiting even harder.

“I think it’s foolish,” said Paul Light, professor emeritus of public service at New York University. “It’s hard enough to get talent these days.” Putting additional hurdles in the way of recruiting for government jobs at this point “ain’t a good thing,” he said.

Given that the administration sent “DOGE” in to “take a chainsaw” to agencies, fired essentially all new or newly-promoted employees (until forced by the courts to rehire them), and dismantled programs to bring in top-tier talent to the government, I suspect that would be considered a feature, not a bug.

It’s important to hire federal workers based on their skills, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. But “asking every federal applicant to demonstrate work toward presidential policy priorities should not be part of the criteria.”

“Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress,” she said. “These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.”

This is actually a crucial point. There’s at least an argument to be had around taking steps to ensure that people in policymaking and policy-adjacent roles aren’t ideologically disposed to stymie the President’s agenda. But the vast bulk of the federal workforce simply carries out duties that are policy-immaterial. Why we should care if a firefighter, air traffic controller, or food inspector is a Democrat or a Republican escapes me.

The Trump plan also says it aims to limit the government’s focus on recruiting from “elite universities.”

The memo says hiring has focused too much on “elite universities and credentials” and says it will target new recruits from “state and land-grant universities, religious colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups, American Legion, 4-H youth programs, and the military, veterans, and law enforcement communities.”

This amuses me on a number of levels. First off, the President, Vice President, and most of the Trump cabinet are graduates of elite universities. Second, with very few exceptions (such as the Presidential Management Fellows program that the administration killed), the federal government gives the least credence to elite credentials of just about any major employer I can think of. For most federal jobs, a bachelor’s degree from Mail Order U counts the same as one from Stanford. It’s literally just a check in the box. Indeed, while a college degree is a typically a requirement for GS-5 and above, it can often be waived for those with sufficient work experience.

The administration also bars agency heads from using racial quotas and preferences in federal hiring, recruitment and promotion.

The memo directs agencies to “cease using statistics on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or the broader concept of ‘underrepresentation’ of certain groups” in decisions about hiring or promotions. It orders agencies to stop disseminating information about the composition of agencies’ workers based on their race, sex, color, religion or national origin.

To the extent this is legal (I honestly don’t know which of these requirements stem from bureaucratic rule-making and which are mandated by law), I’m not opposed in theory to ending preferential hiring on bases not directly related to the job. (This also goes for veterans’ preferences, which don’t seem to be going away under this order.) But there’s reason to be concerned that this will turn into reverse-reverse discrimination, given that women and persons of color who are hired or promoted may be viewed as “DEI,” making managers more inclined to hire white men. Whether this is a bug or a feature depends, I suppose, on one’s perspective.

Also on Thursday, the administration issued a memo detailing hiring and talent development plans for leaders within the federal government’s career employee ranks known as the Senior Executive Service, or SES.

Trump issued a memo on the first day of his administration saying that because those officials “wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.”

The new hiring memo criticizes SES hiring as a “broken, insular” process that has “resulted in the hiring of executives who engage in unauthorized disclosure of Executive Branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently.”

Leaving aside the hyperbolic language, I think Presidents have a right to expect those in the most senior civil service posts to carry out administration policies, so long as they’re consistent with the law. Leaking to the press is a time-honored tradition that has frustrated Presidents for a very long time. President Obama was known to be irate about the practice and expended considerable effort to root out the perpetrators.

Still, the SES has been around for nearly half a century for a good reason: we need seasoned professionals in the civil service. Indeed, as the OPM website notes, “Members of the SES serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees. SES members are the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce.”

Again, given that link, the President and his policymaking appointees have every right to expect the SES to carry out administration priorities. At the same time, most of them will have several decades of experience within their agencies and will be able to advise them on the pitfalls of said priorities as well as the best way to navigate them. Turning them into a cadre of sycophants would do not only the country but the President himself a disservice.

Previous qualifications for SES hiring “included unlawful ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) criteria for hiring Federal executives,” the memo says. The administration says it’s eliminating DEI factors in hiring for the service, and will focus on candidates’ efficiency, merit and competence, ability to lead, and ability to achieve results.

To build a pipeline of potential executive leaders, the memo says, OPM will provide an 80-hour intensive “fee-based aspiring executive development program” that’s “grounded in the Constitution, laws, and Founding ideals of our government, and will provide training on President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

That program is “designed to equip aspiring leaders with the skills, knowledge, technical expertise, and strategic mindset necessary to excel in senior leadership roles,” the memo says.

Oddly, a Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program already exists. It does not focus on ideological indoctrination, of course. But I can guarantee you that every SES (and probably most GS-13s and above) have read and discussed every single executive order that remotely impacts their agency. They can’t do their job otherwise.