The DOGE strategy is a cop-out

Elon and Vivek's workforce plans would backfire terribly. There's a welcome alternative.

I assume Elon and Vivek think they’re being bold and decisive by planning to use existing authorities to lay off vast swaths of the federal workforce. They indicated in an op-ed recently that they are aware of the rules that prevent layoffs from considering performance as a major factor. But are they aware of the rest of the restrictions? And the effect those restrictions will have?

According to Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 351, reductions in force must affect employees by group in the following order:

Group III - Employees serving under specific term appointments, those in specific temporary positions, and those under various special authorities.

Group II - Career employees who are still in their probationary period, and career-conditional employees. Career-conditional employees are those in their first three years of federal service.

Group I - Career employees who are not serving a probationary period. These permanent employees have completed their initial probationary period and have the strongest job protection.

Within each tenure group, employees are further divided into subgroups based on veterans' preference, with non-veterans going first.¹

I am going to give Elon and Vivek the benefit of the doubt that some of you may not be so generous to extend: that they don’t actually want to destroy everything they see, despite the rhetoric, that they are willing to break some things in the short term for the promise of building something leaner, more focused, and less kludgy in the long run. This may or may not be true, and is certainly less true in some areas than others. By all accounts, including his own, Elon does not want to be told more efficiently that he can’t launch his rockets — he doesn’t want to be told that at all. But does he really intend for us to be more vulnerable on the global stage, to deny people social security benefits, to stop collecting taxes? I suspect that Elon and Vivek see their proposed actions as short term pain for long term gain, not pure chaos for the sake of it. Perhaps there would be little difference in practice, but indulge me for a moment in the thought experiment.

If long-term gain is broadly what they want, and a shock to the system is how they want to get it, firing term appointees, those hired under special authorities, and those recently hired is a terrible way to do it. What you’ll be left with is the employees who’ve been there the longest and have the most invested in the system as it stands. Now, the majority of long-term public servants are amazing and would just get more stuff done in a less burdensome system. The heroine of my book is a 25 year career employee. The Post’s profiles of several remarkable ones will make your heart swell with pride for our country. But it’s true that some of them are very precious about the processes that have accumulated over the years, and wield the power they have to enforce these processes in ways that don’t benefit the public interest – and can be hugely frustrating if you’re trying to get stuff done, no matter your politics. If Elon and Vivek want a leaner, healthier civil service, increasing the ratio of procedure fetishists to problem solvers is a very bad start.

Those hired under excepted authorities are in that first group to go. I know a bit about these because USDS used (and I believe still uses) one of those authorities (Schedule A Subpart R) to hire for a general category of “digital services experts.” That meant the early USDS hires weren’t subject to the insane “competitive” selection process I described here. These authorities can be invoked, with permission from the Office of Personnel Management, in cases when you need to hire staff with specialized skills or unique qualifications that are difficult to evaluate through standard (and again, let me repeat, insane) competitive procedures, when you need to quickly fill critical positions where there's a documented shortage of candidates (like cybersecurity professionals), or support national security and intelligence positions that require special handling. A lot of the people with digital transformation skills in government were hired under one of these authorities. Elon tweets that he’s going to use the Tesla playbook on government, but a lot of the people he’d fire first are the people who know how to and have been trying to use that very playbook.

I want to be clear here. I’m not saying that junior employees are better than senior ones. I’m not saying that less tenure in government or being hired through a special authority means you’re better than others. What I’m saying is that Elon and Vivek are proposing a very blunt strategy that will leave intact the part of the current workforce they least want to work with.

This could be good for Trump-resisters. The longer you’ve been around the more ways you know to make the machinery go — and stop. If Elon and Vivek go with their stated strategy, one upside might be a more effective obstruction of the worst of Trump’s plans. But I don’t think that’s what they were going for.

No one talks about this, but civil servants want civil service reform. I can’t back that up with stats, only with my own experience of hearing never-ending complaints from both new government recruits and long-timers. It’s awful to join a team for the mission, only to find yourself and your teammates dragged down by folks who can’t or won’t do the job. I’ve talked before about how that’s pushed at least one public servant I know towards Trump, but I hear the same complaint from my former colleagues from the Obama administration. One texted me the other day that he’d been told by his HR manager not to give his poor performers low ratings — it created too much risk for the agency.²

When public servants talk about employees caught watching porn on their computers all day, like the one at the EPA,³ they speak with outrage.⁴ But civil service reform has been off the table when Dems are in charge (and is miles from the table in blue-run states like California) because the unions block it. The position of the unions doesn’t match what government employees I talk to actually want — not in the least. With a Republican trifecta, it should be on the table. And Musk and Vivek should be its champions.

Certainly, they could go too far with it, making it too easy to fire, and possible to fire for the wrong reasons. That’s not a reason not to start the dialogue, nor is the fact that civil servants want this change a reason Elon and Vivek shouldn’t champion it. As for Schedule F, I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again: Schedule F isn’t civil service reform. It does nothing about ridiculous hiring processes and nothing about the ability to sanction or remove poor performers. It’s just a loyalty test, and it's a disastrous idea that should be stopped if at all possible. And it’s not what Elon and Vivek are talking about. They’re talking about a strategy of firing as many people as they can indiscriminately. Vivek has clearly learned that it won’t stand up to legal scrutiny, but he originally proposed what I call the Thanos strategy, firing every other employee based on their social security numbers. Now they’re just talking about using existing authorities to reduce headcount massively, which means it’s not entirely indiscriminate, but instead governed by this roughly last in/first out rubric. They could do so much better.

I get it. “We will work with Congress, the White House, and the public sector unions to enact meaningful civil service reform that allows for hiring on the basis of skills and holding underperformers accountable” doesn’t sound exciting or bold. “We will fire half the workforce” does. But what they’d get with the latter is not what they want. The backlash would be swift and devastating. It’s the former that would leave a lasting legacy, one the American public would thank them for.

1. I think this is roughly correct. This stuff is complicated, so I’ll post any corrections.

2. Technically, the manager was not allowed to give his poor performers low ratings without following an unwritten process of extensively documenting failures in a way that exactly matched an expectation of an arcane position description document. And even if this process was followed, he was told he should expect a lawsuit which the agency would likely lose.

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/09/24/congressman-seeks-ban-to-stop-federal-employees-from-watching-porn-all-day/

4. Note that Congress’s reaction was to introduce a bill to ban employees from looking at porn at work, not to fix civil service rules and practices. The problem here is that the employee isn’t working. They could be shopping for shoes all day and it's still a problem. Stop layering on dumb rules, start fixing the ones we have.