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As the Trump administration indiscriminately fires tens of thousands of talented civil servants, it also wants to shell out big salaries to the hackiest of partisan hacks.
On April 10, Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, sent a letter to all agency heads, saying his office “reaffirms flexibilities” in setting the terms of employment for Schedule C employees. Schedule C employees are political appointees, and according to OPM, they typically serve in policy or confidential roles, often as confidential assistants, special counsels, and policy experts. They don’t require Senate confirmation but must be requested and approved by OPM.
Per Ezell, the flexibility to pay an initial salary of up to $195,200 to appointees is necessary to attract the people who will help “drive the unusually expansive and transformative agenda the American people elected President Trump to accomplish.”
Usually, these positions are filled by people with specific policy expertise or a background in providing assistance in confidential settings. An analysis of former President Joe Biden’s Schedule C employees, conducted by the nonpartisan group Leadership Connect, found that the bulk of the hires were from top colleges, more than 75% had at least five years’ experience post-college, and had most recently worked in nonprofits, on Capitol Hill, elsewhere in the federal government, or on a campaign.
Well, that all sounds good, right? So how many people are we talking about here? In the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, there were 1,403 Schedule C employees. Leadership Connect’s January 2022 analysis found the Biden administration had appointed 745 Schedule C employees by that point.
If the Trump administration hopes to use Schedule C jobs to fill in some of the gaps it created when it fired 200,000 federal workers, then it’ll have to hire a lot more than 1,400.
However, Ezell’s letter is vague on the reason for the Schedule C jobs. It may just be a way to smuggle an indeterminate number of hardcore, unqualified partisans into sweet federal government jobs.
The punchline to all this is that the administration also has no intentions of following the normal constraints on Schedule C employment. In his letter, Ezell tells agencies to “review and, where appropriate, revoke delegations and sub-delegations provided to agency Human Resources (HR) offices for setting the terms for Schedule C appointment, including initial salary.”
Here, Ezell seems to be telling agencies to ignore their human resources processes, including salary caps, which would mean that Trump’s stalwarts at OPM could dole out sweet six-figure jobs with minimal vetting of the appointees.
Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Patty Murray of Washington wrote to Ezell about this, pointing out that this also allows Schedule C candidates to start work in roles that the administration itself says are highly sensitive policy roles, “without any vetting, including for conflicts of interest or background checks.”
In the federal government, $195,200 is the maximum amount that can be paid to “general schedule” workers—that is, basically everyone who isn’t in an executive role—who lives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
To get a sense of how attainable that is for normal civil servants, that salary happens at what is called Grade 15 and Step 6 of employment. The “grade” reflects the job’s level of difficulty, its responsibilities, and the qualifications needed for it, while the “step” reflects the number of years a worker has had the role as long as they’ve performed acceptably.
In practice, moving from Step 1 to Step 10 normally takes 18 years. Moving up in grade is more flexible, dependent on performance and promotions. People with a master’s degree usually come in around Grade 9 to start, or $69,923. Those are people with advanced degrees and experience in the field, but they would receive about 36% of the salary that the unvetted, unqualified Schedule C individuals would receive.
The Trump administration is full of wildly incompetent people who have convinced themselves they got there on merit, when instead it’s generally due to a combination of a rather flexible sense of morality, a deep hatred for whomever Trump also hates, and because they are a white straight man. White straight men, in the Trump worldview, are inherently meritorious hires, standing on their own two feet, while everyone else is an unqualified diversity hire.
So the administration doesn’t seem to care that Trump appointee Billy Long, currently tucked away at OPM while awaiting confirmation to lead the Internal Revenue Service, seems to be doing almost nothing at OPM. And the administration remains behind Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, arguably the least competent Cabinet member in an administration well stocked with them.
In addition to Trump hollowing out the civil service, he is also attempting to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants as at-will employees, making them easier to fire.
Trump is remaking the government in his own image: cruel, mercurial, unstable, and unqualified. And unfortunately for the rest of us, that’s one of the only things Trump is genuinely dedicated to doing.
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