The Trump administration wants federal agencies to shuffle top civil servants to more effectively implement the president’s agenda.
The head of the Office of Personnel Management on Monday issued guidance encouraging agency leaders to review their rosters of top civil servants known as the Senior Executive Service and to consider reassigning them to new posts.
The guidance marks the Trump administration’s latest move to overhaul the federal workforce and its senior management. The administration says the move will help dislodge “entrenched” civil servants, but critics accuse the administration of exerting undue political influence over federal workers.
President Donald Trump has “directed that agency heads shall, consistent with applicable procedural requirements, ‘reassign agency SES members to ensure their knowledge, skills, abilities, and mission assignments are optimally aligned’” to implement his agenda, OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in the guidance issued Monday.
When Congress created the SES category of executive leaders in government in the late 1970s, Kupor wrote, lawmakers envisioned a team of strong leaders who can “respond to rapidly changing conditions and circumstances” while achieving “presidential and congressional goals.”
However, Kupor said, the “SES has too often failed to fulfill Congress’s expectation that it would serve as a mobile corps of managers responsive to the public interest and presidential priorities. Instead, SES members frequently become entrenched at a single agency and place the parochial interests of particular departments above the national interest.”
Under the law, the guidance says, agencies can direct the reassignment of career SES appointees to other senior management positions in the agency. Agencies can also send senior managers on temporary details within or outside the ranks of the SES.
After a governmentwide push to reduce the size of the federal workforce, the Trump administration last week urged federal agencies to review its needs for senior managers and senior scientists across the government and to consider possible reductions.
Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, said Monday that SES was designed “to create a corps of senior executives who could rotate to where their expertise was most needed.”
The SES “was not designed, however, for an administration to shuffle senior leaders around for political reasons, including removing people who were not sufficiently politically loyal or to nudge out senior leaders for political reasons,” Kettl said. The guidance “seems to encourage” moving “senior managers for political reasons,” he added, and there is “a significant risk here of politicizing the SES.”
Moving senior executives “within and across agencies can be beneficial to driving good outcomes,” said Jenny Mattingley of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. But it “needs to be done intentionally based on skillset, agency needs and organizational fit,” she said, adding that there should be a clear process to ensure that those staffers “are not arbitrarily moved for political reasons and that continuity of knowledge and agency stability are taken into account.”
Separately on Monday, the administration issued another memo announcing the sunsetting of the Federal Academic Alliance, which allows federal employees — and sometimes their families — to pursue post-secondary education at colleges and universities at reduced tuition.
After a “comprehensive review,” OPM has determined that continuing the program on a “government-wide basis is no longer warranted,” Kupor wrote in the memo announcing the program’s cancellation. He cited an “administrative burden” and low participation rates in recent years.
Kettl called the end of the education program a “genuine loss” of a benefit that has long “enriched the workforce and motivated employees.” Its end signals “that the administration is continuing its disinvestment in its employees,” he said.
