One lesson Donald Trump learned after his first administration was that government employees are loyal to the country, not to him.
If Trump were to make his authoritarian fantasy come true, he would need to break the civil service and shift the loyalty of government employees from serving the American people to serving Donald Trump.
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Trump has been able to turn his cabinet and political aides into a group that puts him over the needs of the country.
The president tried to break the civil service first by turning Elon Musk loose and having him cut government agencies and fire employees. Step two of the plan was to replace the fired government workers with Trump loyalists.
The administration’s mechanism for doing this was to add a loyalty test to the federal job application.
A group of public sector unions sued the administration over the loyalty test, and a federal court has blocked Donald Trump and JD Vance from using it.
The court described how the administration tried to test the loyalty of potential government employees:
The plaintiffs in this civil action—several labor unions—have sued the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”), its director, Scott Kupor, and the United States to challenge the lawfulness of a question that has appeared in thousands of job applications to fill vacancies with the federal civil service.
The question asks, in relevant part, that the applicant “[i]dentify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to [the applicant], and explain how [the applicant] would help implement them if hired.” (Compl., Ex. A at 10 (dkt. no. 1-1).) The plaintiffs assert that the challenged question violates the Administrative Procedures Act (“APA”) and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution because it seeks to assess the applicant’s “loyalty” to the administration of President Donald J. Trump.
People who expressed loyalty to Donald Trump were more likely to get hired. If successful, Trump’s loyalty question would have wrecked the civil service.
