Partnership for Public Service offers an alternative to “burning down” the civil service

The Partnership for Public Service on Wednesday unveiled its new Vision for a Better Government, a plan to improve how federal agencies hire, fire and promote federal employees and deliver services to the public.

The roadmap stands as a stark rebuke of proposals like Schedule F, the unsuccessful 2020 effort to convert tens of thousands of career federal workers in “policy-related” out of the competitive service, effectively making them at-will employees. Both Trump and the Republican party more broadly have signaled they would quickly revive the plan upon returning to the White House, both in Trump’s own campaign speeches and as part of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led presidential transition project.

“Unfortunately, proposals by former President Donald Trump and his political allies would give a president and political appointees the power to arbitrarily fire thousands of professional nonpartisan civil servants who are afforded due process rights and replace them with individuals considered loyal to the White House,” the Partnership wrote. “[Our] government is not perfect, but we need to modernize it rather than burn it down.”

The group said that contrary to the arguments of Schedule F supporters, that the president needs broader latitude to remove employees he or she deems to have “resisted” or are otherwise disloyal in order to deliver for his voters, would instead have the opposite impact, making government less, not more, responsive.

“The plans would undermine our government’s ability to deliver fair and responsive services,” they wrote. “A federal workforce filled with employees hired for their political beliefs rather than their skills and qualifications would move us further away from the type of government the public deserves. It would strip federal agencies of expertise and hamper their ability to provide good service to everyone, not just to those who support the president of the day.”

The plan is buttressed by five pillars: developing better agency leaders, further improving the federal hiring process, holding poor performers accountable, leveraging data and technology to find better ways to serve the public and improving customer service.

Citing low morale among senior executives as measured by the annual Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey—57.3 out of 100 by the Partnership’s Best Places to Work metrics compared to 65.7 government-wide—and difficulty encouraging upper-level General Schedule workers to apply for the Senior Executive Service, the group recommends creating a modern, standardized set of leadership requirements with better management training.

Additionally, the plan calls for reducing the number of presidential appointments that require Senate confirmation, noting that the average time it takes for a nominee to be installed in their position has tripled since the Reagan administration to more than six months. That not only makes it harder for agencies to reach full strength following a presidential transition, but also reduces the time that lawmakers can devote to debating and voting on legislation. Votes taken in the Senate on nominations have climbed from 10% of all recorded votes during the George H.W. Bush administration to 60% under both Trump and President Biden.

On the hiring process, the Partnership endorses expanding on the Biden administration’s work encouraging agencies to improve their internship and other opportunities for early-career jobseekers and both parties’ work in recent years to institute skills-based hiring, in which job applicants are measured by their experience and skills as demonstrated to subject matter experts, rather than focusing on educational attainment.

The Partnership called for a holistic approach to improving how supervisors deal with poor-performing subordinates, including improving training for managers on how to hold workers accountable, encouraging supervisors to evaluate and make affirmative decisions on whether to keep new employees past their one-year probationary period before most civil service protections kick in and “streamlining” the disciplinary process.

“The current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for workers, leading to a lack of accountability for government employees who do not carry out their roles and responsibilities effectively,” the plan states. “It is important to ensure that federal employees cannot be fired for politically motivated or unjust reasons, but there are ways to update and simplify the current system that would make it easier to remove poor performers.”

And the group reiterated longstanding complaints that the government spends too much on maintaining legacy IT and other computer systems rather than modernizing those networks. Progress on that front may not only make agencies work more effectively, but could de-silo information agency leaders need to develop new solutions to problems.