The other time an administration sought a ‘more responsive’ federal workforce

“The record is quite replete with instances of the failures of program, policy and management goals because of sabotage by employees of the executive branch who engage in the frustration of those efforts because of their political persuasion and their loyalty to the majority party of Congress rather than the executive that supervises them. And yet, in their own eyes, they are sincere and loyal to their government.”

Readers may be forgiven for thinking the above quote came from proponents of reviving Schedule F, a controversial yet abortive effort at the end of the Trump administration to move tens of thousands of career federal employees in “policy-related” positions into the federal government’s excepted service, effectively making them at-will employees.

But in fact, it is an excerpt from the Federal Political Personnel Manual, more commonly known as “the Malek manual”, named for its architect, Fred Malek, who served as the first head of the White House Personnel Office—now the Presidential Personnel Office—during President Nixon’s first term.

Though he is more often remembered for helping to compile a list of Jewish Bureau of Labor Statistics employees, Malek also directed the “Responsiveness Program,” a secret effort to replace career civil servants with political patrons across government. It had the dual purpose of rewarding Nixon’s political allies and thereby shoring up support for his reelection, and making agencies more politically pliable to the president.

Nixon’s effort to tear down merit systems principles, which at that point had undergirded the federal civil service for nearly a century, was exposed as part of the Watergate investigation, and led to the enactment of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. A 1976 report from the Fund for Constitutional Government outlines Malek’s project and its impact on agency operations and offers a window into the debate that coalesced into the 1978 law.

Similar themes run through both Malek’s secret arguments for the “responsiveness program” and those of Trump allies in favor of Schedule F. A 1971 article in The Washington Post, written by a future Nixon staffer, cites a plan to “reshape” the “unwieldy federal bureaucracy to make it more responsive to President Nixon.”

Indeed, the Malek manual itself discusses at length the need to exert “political control” over federal agencies, the very same phrase used by a Project 2025 and former Trump White House staffer when describing the replacement of career employees with political appointees at the Office of Personnel Management in recently leaked training videos.

“One thing we understood in our time in the Trump administration was the importance of retaining political control over OPM,” said Kaitlin Stumpf. “There were several career employees in powerful positions who hindered the work of the president and his staff. They were later replaced by political appointees. OPM is the federal entity that actually processes the paperwork of appointees once [the White House Presidential Personnel Office] has selected them . . . If PPO and OPM don’t have alignment, there will not be any success.”

Tom Devine is legal director at the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection advocacy group, and was a co-author of the 1976 report on Nixon’s civil service record. Devine said he has been struck by the brazenness of both the Trump campaign and the conservative think tank apparatus in advancing proposals like Schedule F.

“What really struck me is that President Trump is openly seeking to do what President Nixon tried to do in secret, which is to turn the 2 million-person federal workforce into a patronage operation, and to the extent that Trump is running against ‘bureaucratic abuses,’ the Schedule F proposal would create a blank check for any political abuses that federal employees want to engage in, as long as they’re serving the president’s interest,” he said. “It’s a fundamental threat to the integrity of the executive branch.”

Though the impact of Malek’s “responsiveness program” was widespread, with many career job applicants losing out to partisans in rigged hiring announcements and career employees shunted out of their positions in politically motivated agency reorganizations, the impact perhaps was most felt at the federal government’s newest agency: the Environmental Protection Agency. Per Devine’s report, the lack of a preexisting personnel management system meant that the political hiring operation loomed larger, creating a culture of favoritism and devoid of the merit system and resulting in a 33% annual attrition rate.

“In EPA, abuse centered around promotions,” the report states. “Sixty-three percent of promotions at the agency were by accretion . . . The political hiring maneuvers at EPA damaged employee morale and the agency’s effectiveness. A [Civil Service Commission] poll taken at the EPA in March 1974 revealed that only 54% of the employees felt the agency was doing a good job. Sixty percent of employees said they were not adequately notified of changes in policy which affected their duties.”

Devine said the introduction of political loyalty into positions jobs that were before based solely on merit can only result in the degradation of service to the public.

“With the patronage workforce, it means every agency will have two missions,” he said. “One is its official mission, created by statute, and the second would be its political mission, which will trump the former whenever there’s a conflict. There’s no question that when you start politicizing public service that there’s going to be severe impacts.”

Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a cofounder of the Working Group to Protect and Reform U.S. Civil Service, an anti-Schedule F organization, said that while the details of Nixon’s attempted politicization of the federal workforce often are overshadowed by the actual Watergate break-ins and the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, they are particularly relevant today.

“One of the things I think people forget about Watergate is how large and sprawling an effort it was,” Kettl said. “It was far, far bigger than Nixon squeezing people into supporting him or misusing certain powers . . . More fundamentally, it was all an effort to twist the government in ways that would make it as politically responsive to his point of view as was possible, and in any way possible.”

The difference now, he suggested, is that the federal judiciary is far more open to conservative legal arguments on the topic than it was half a century ago.

“The dots connecting Schedule F and Project 2025 with some of Watergate are there for all to see, though that is not to say in any way that the people involved are involved in the same massive conspiracy to undermine government [as Nixon and his allies were]. There is a fundamental, political, philosophical debate on what accountability ought to look like.”