‘Salting the earth’: Trump ends presidential management fellowships and federal executive boards

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order aimed at eliminating the Presidential Management Fellows program, federal executive boards and a potential litany of other advisory councils across government.

The PMF program, first created by President Carter in 1977, provides a key pipeline for graduate students to consider and pursue a career in government. And the nation’s 26 federal executive boards, established by President Kennedy in 1961, help agencies with locations outside the Washington, D.C., area coordinate with fellow agencies in their region and better connect with local communities.

Along with those two programs, Trump’s executive order, entitled Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, tasks federal agencies with identifying other advisory councils across government for dissolution, calling them “unnecessary.”

“It is the policy of my administration to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government, while increasing its accountability to the American people,” Trump wrote. “This order commences a reduction in the elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary. Reducing the size of the federal government will minimize government waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation.”

Recent events, such as the Social Security Administration’s improper payments scandal, indicate that the opposite is true—disinvestment in Social Security’s workforce meant that overpayments of benefits went unnoticed for longer, thereby increasing waste.

Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, said the shuttering of the PMF program, alongside last week’s executive order closing down the Federal Executive Institute, seem aimed at ensuring no future administration can effectively rebuild the federal government’s capacity to serve the American people.

“Military forces used to throw salt on the earth to make it impossible for the people who survived to reestablish their farms, because nothing would grow,” he said. “That’s the strategy that for sure is going on here. They’re trying to destroy any opportunity to be able to recruit federal workers and to drive potential recruits away.”

And although federal executive boards’ work largely goes on behind the scenes, they represent another way that agencies work together to better provide services to constituents in a given region. Their work is particularly important during emergencies, Kettl said.

“The question of why they matter is something you can trace to the [1995] Oklahoma City bombing, when a terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, blew the front off of a federal building,” he said. “In addition to the tremendous loss of life, it totally disrupted federal government operations in the Oklahoma City area, including the FBI field office that was in charge of investigating what had happened . . . So the question became how best to put that all back together again, make government functional and resupply the services people most cared about. And the answer, as it turned out, was the Federal Executive Board.”

In a statement Thursday, Partnership for Public Service President and CEO Max Stier said ending the PMF program is counterproductive to the administration’s own stated aims of reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

“Eliminating the Presidential Management Fellows program dismantles an outstanding young talent pipeline and is a huge loss for our government,” he said. “Taking away a highly-competitive, merit-based program that has developed exceptional government leaders for over 40 years not only sends the wrong message to the next generation about public service, but also contradicts efforts to build a more effective and innovative government. With just over 7% of the federal workforce under 30, this decision risks widening the talent and critical skills gaps even further, and the holes will be felt in our government for years to come.”