Understanding Trump's Executive Order on the Civil Service (It's Much More Serious Than It Sounds)
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This inauguration week, we're revisiting a 2020 podcast on President Trump's assault on the civil service. In this episode, Harvard law professor, Matthew Stephenson, provides some context for understanding Trump's executive order on the civil service and then lists the three primary threats it poses for corruption. A more detailed discussion can be found on his Global Anticorruption Blog.
This episode was originally published on 4 November 2020.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rocky. Today we're talking about the president's recent executive order and its impact on the federal civil service. I can already hear our non-American listeners dropping off, and I completely understand that. |
| 0:21.2 | While this is a very big deal in the United States, it's pretty arcane for just about everybody else. |
| 0:26.4 | My guest is Matthew Stevenson. |
| 0:28.4 | Matthew is the Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. |
| 0:31.8 | He writes extensively, both formally and on his blog, on anti-corruption and related topics. |
| 0:39.0 | Thank you for joining me, Matthew. |
| 0:42.4 | It's great to have you back on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. |
| 0:49.8 | In your excellent global anti-corruption blog, you described the president's new executive order on the civil service as among, quote, |
| 0:54.9 | the gravest threats to U.S. government integrity emerging from the Trump administration. |
| 1:00.4 | As we record this, we don't yet know who the next president will be, but this executive order is effective through the January inauguration either way. So let's just leave that issue aside. |
| 1:06.1 | And before you dive in, we should probably provide a very brief primer on U.S. employment law, |
| 1:11.5 | which will strike many of our listeners as something out of the Industrial Revolution. |
| 1:15.6 | The U.S. as a whole, has employment at will. |
| 1:19.2 | You've been cautioning your listeners, especially your non-American listeners, |
| 1:22.0 | that this might seem arcane or unrelated to things that they care about. |
| 1:26.5 | And I actually want to push back on that a little bit. |
| 1:28.9 | Before we get into the details of U.S. civil service law, I think it's important to emphasize that |
| 1:35.5 | what's really going on here, what we're really talking about, is the degree to which civil servants, |
| 1:42.8 | government employees, are protected from being hired and fired |
| 1:48.8 | on the basis of their political affiliation or loyalty to the governing party. And this is an |
| 1:56.3 | issue that is relevant not only in the United States, but in every country of which I'm aware. |
| 2:03.0 | The concerns about patronage hiring, about the so-called spoil system, about the politicization |
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