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President Trump is looking to ensure the top career federal workers are adhering to his priorities, issuing a new directive that would place more political influence on those executives.
Trump said the presidential memorandum, which he signed into effect on his first day in office on Monday, would free agencies of the “cancer” the Biden administration left behind. The memo does not create any new firing authorities—as Trump sought to do through another order he signed on Monday—instead creating more political influence over the nearly 9,000 Senior Executive Service members’ hirings and performance reviews.
“We’re getting rid of all the cancer,” Trump said during an Oval Office signing ceremony. “I call it cancer, the cancer caused by the Biden administration.”
Many of the provisions of memo simply reinforce existing provisions of law, such as agency performance plans for SESers and the capacity to transfer those staff. The document marks a shift in tone toward the top career staff, however, and questions their current status in which they enjoy civil service protections.
“The president’s power to remove subordinates is a core part of the executive power vested by Article II of the Constitution and is necessary for the president to perform his duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Trump said. “Because SES officials wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the president.”
The memo will require the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget to set SES performance plans for agencies throughout government. Agency heads must use their authority to “reinvigorate” the SES and reassign the executives to ensure an alignment of their skills and knowledge.
In his first term, Trump’s Interior Department sought to reassign much of its Senior Executive Service workforce. The shakeup led to widespread confusion and allegations the department was retaliating against employees working on issues that were not Trump administration priorities, such as climate change.
A subsequent inspector general report criticized the department for its approach.
“We found that the ERB did not document its plan for selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it consistently apply the reasons it stated it used to select senior executives for reassignment,” the IG said.
Part of the criticism stemmed from the Interior using only political appointees on its Executive Resource Board, a panel at each agency that makes qualification, hiring and assignment decisions for senior executives. In its guidance for establishing ERBs, OPM instructs agencies to include a “balanced perspective” that includes “a mix of political and SES appointees, career and noncareer appointees.”
In his new memo, Trump mandated the boards be comprised of a majority of noncareer individuals. He tasked agencies with disbanding the current panels and selecting new individuals to sit on them. He similarly called for entirely new Performance Review Boards, which evaluate senior executives’ performance and make pay and award determinations. The PRBs are statutorily required to be made of primarily career officials.
Joel Clement, one of the SESers who was swept up in Interior’s reassignments and eventually left government, called Trump’s approach “ham-fisted and inappropriate.” He speculated his experience at Interior could become more widespread as the administration will say, “We got away with it and we’ll do it again.”
By statute, the SES is designed to move throughout government to cultivate new skills while spreading their managerial expertise. Clement said in practice, however, it has become a tool for administrations to sideline the employees they disfavor. The Justice Department already has reassigned more than a dozen senior executives, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Much of the other contents of the memo, he added, are more familiar and mark only a change in tone.
“I’m sure the folks that are in there now are just shaking their heads and saying here we go again,” Clement said. “There’s not enough in there to say ‘this is apocalyptic.’”
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said there were elements of the memo that were “quite positive,” even as he noted it included some redundancies. SES staff, like all career employees, already receive performance reviews, for example, though he hoped some good would come of the renewed points of emphasis.
It is an “agency leadership responsibility to ensure that the best talent has been selected for the senior most career ranks of the government, as well as that there’s clarity about what they’re supposed to do and that they’re held accountable in doing it,” Stier said.
Trump said the changes are necessary because SES officials “have enormous influence over the functioning of the federal government.” Those employees who leak internal deliberations, violate Americans’ constitutional rights, refuse to implement policy priorities or are otherwise inefficient or negligent “should be held accountable,” he said. The president instructed agency leaders to fire or otherwise discipline any SESer not living up to those standards.
“Restoring an accountable government workforce is a top priority of my administration,” Trump wrote.
Ron Sanders, a former SESer who served as the top human resources official at the Internal Revenue Service, Defense Department and elsewhere as well as an associate director at OPM, also said for all its bluster, the memo largely maintained the status quo. He noted, however, the “proof is in the implementation.”
The new political makeup of the boards overseeing SES staff would be troubling “if they’re doing it for political loyalty,” Sanders said. He cautioned the Trump administration that Congress has created an array of protections for career staff that shields them from serving only at “pleasure of the president.” Still, he said career executives are duty bound to give their best advice and subsequently carry out lawful orders their political bosses hand down.
“Take a deep breath, we’ve been down this road before,” said Sanders, who quit his post on the Federal Salary Council in 2020 after Trump’s first attempt at stripping federal workers of civil service protections, as advice to current executives. “Be worried, but don’t panic.”
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