Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order in the Oval Office. Win McNamee / Getty Images
Trump’s Odious New Demand of the Civil Service: Loyalty Oaths
They were a disaster when Harry Truman forced them on federal workers—but at least he demanded loyalty to the United States, not to the president himself. Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order in the Oval OfficeWin McNamee/Getty Images
The 1939 Hatch Act prohibits government employees from using their position to engage in partisan activity, and prohibits their membership in any organization that advocates the overthrow of the United States. At the dawn of the Cold War, President Harry Truman used the latter provision to authorize investigations of government employees concerning their loyalty to their country and to authorize the administration of oaths declaring such loyalty.
The Truman loyalty program, which spread to the states and to private organizations, led to the firing of many people who were either innocent of disloyalty or who had previously belonged to Communist or Communist-affiliated organizations (as had many intellectuals during the Great Depression) but who refused to endanger others by naming them to the authorities. The program was a catastrophe for civil liberties. Still, the stated goal, however ghastly its application, was defensible: Federal employees were expected to be loyal to the United States and not to its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.
Now loyalty oaths are back; the Trump White House is imposing them on already-beleaguered civil servants. Only this time, Trump is violating the Hatch Act by demanding that they be partisan and by requiring that employees be loyal not to the United States but to Donald Trump. The forty-seventh president has achieved the impossible. He’s making Truman’s loyalty program look good.
To apply for a civil service job, you click onto this website. The Office of Management and Budget, for example, is looking for an economist. (It could use one!) The job pays in the range of $120,579 to $156,755, and an undergraduate degree in economics or its rough equivalent appears to be a minimal requirement. Your education must be at an accredited institution recognized by the Education Department, which as of Wednesday looks like a problem for a Columbia Ph.D., and may soon be a problem for a Harvard Ph.D.
Our prospective OMB economist has to fill out this questionnaire. The questions are fairly anodyne and have to do with reasonable-sounding job requirements. Are you able to analyze “economic resource allocations, structure, and the behavior of specific sectors”? Do you have experience presenting research and analysis to senior officials? Are you competent to review congressional testimony to be given by your boss?
