For the past two decades, Max Stier has distinguished himself as Washington’s foremost champion of the federal civil service, a quiet but influential voice in favor of practical reforms to make federal bureaucracy work better both for the people who serve in it and for the people that it serves. The Partnership for Public Service — the nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that Stier helped found in 2001 and still runs today — works largely behind the scenes in Washington to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy, doing everything from crafting common sense proposals to modernizing government programs to hosting a much-beloved annual awards ceremony honoring the country’s top performing civil servants.

These days, though, Stier is increasingly preoccupied with what he sees as a fundamental threat to that work: former President Donald Trump’s sweeping proposal to convert thousands of career civil servants into political appointees if he wins a second term in the White House. That plan — which has won the support of powerful, Trump-aligned conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute — is modeled on an executive order from Trump’s first term that redesignated 20,000 civil servants in policy-related positions as “Schedule F” employees, thereby allowing them to be fired unilaterally by the president.

The Biden administration reversed the Trump administration’s order upon assuming office in 2021, but Trump has vowed to reinstitute an expanded version of the Schedule F order if he is reelected in 2024, converting as many as 50,000 civil servants into political appointees and stripping them of the career protections that they currently enjoy.

For Stier, Trump’s proposal is as ironic as it is dangerous. Although Trump and his allies have argued that their plan is necessary to vanquish the “deep state” that allegedly undermined Republican policy initiatives during Trump’s first term, Stier argues that a revamped order on Schedule F would in fact go a long way toward creating the sort of “deep state” that conservatives now rail against.

“If you were to convert a significant segment of that professional workforce into one that is being chosen by political fiat, then you end up in a system that is responsive to the political desires of the individual rather than the larger responsibilities to the Constitution and to law,” Stier said when I spoke to him recently. “You wind up with a workforce that is not only going to deliver poor service, but also that is going to be a tool for retribution and actions that are contrary to our democratic system.”

Even so, Stier cautioned, Americans should not underestimate the damage that the reforms would do to the federal government’s ability to deliver basic services in a timely and efficient manner. “At the end of the day, it’s intuitive,” he said. “If you are selecting people on the basis of their political persuasion or their loyalty as opposed to their expertise and their commitment to the public good, you're going to wind up with less good service and more risk for the American people.”

The following has been edited for concision and clarity.

How seismic would the changes wrought by Trump’s proposal be? Is there any precedent for it?

It would be a very large earthquake. There is precedent, but it’s precedent from the 19th century. In effect, when you talk about implementing Schedule F, you’re talking about turning the clock back to the late 19th century, when our government operated under the spoils system. That all changed, importantly, when President [James] Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker [in 1881], resulting in the passage of the first piece of legislation that professionalized our........

© Politico