Federal hiring is about to get the Trump treatment

0:01NPR.

0:11The federal government is the largest employer in the country. Not counting the military, the Federal Civil Service employs around 3 million people. We're talking clerks, nurses, engineers, lawyers. Janitors, welders, park rangers, and postal workers. And get this, Darren, I just learned this today, the federal government even employs bakers. I know where to get my government bread from there. And so the basic picture is the federal workforce is massive. It's also a workforce President Trump really wants to shrink and reshape. Yesterday, he offered buyouts to workers who don't want to go back to the office.

0:48And last week, he issued a bunch of new orders, including a hiring freeze and a plan to prioritize job seekers who are, quote, passionate about the ideals of our American republic, unquote. And while Trump's actions have drawn criticism and thrown some agencies into chaos, some argue that there's actually an opportunity here. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Darian Woods. Today on the show, we talk with Jennifer Palker. She's a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center who has spent years thinking and writing and doing government reform. She also served as deputy chief technology officer under President Obama, and she was an advisor to the Defense Department during President Trump's first term.

1:31After the break, she will explain why, in her view, government hiring has been broken for a long time and what she thinks about Trump's current proposals to fix it.

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2:26It was called the spoils system. Yeah, as in, to the victor go the spoils. And under this system, whoever won the presidential election doled out plum government jobs to their family and friends and their supporters. And this started to change in 1883 when Congress passed a law called the Pendleton Act. So the Pendleton Act required government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit. And this whole merit-based approach was later reinforced by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Jennifer Palka of the Niskanen Center says that law, which emphasized hiring qualified people over cronies, had the right idea.

3:04But the way that it has been implemented over the years has been definitely suboptimal. The suboptimal-ness, Jennifer says, starts from the very first step in the hiring process. If you're in the regular competitive hiring process, 90 % of those really rely just on the HR manager doing a resume screen, which involves looking for the exact language that's in the job description on the candidate's resume. And so the closer that is, often just literally cut and pasted from the job description, the higher up that that candidate gets. Yeah, Jennifer says she actually has a friend who works in government and came across this resume that not only had it been obviously copied and pasted from the website, but it was still in the original website font.

3:57And this resume still made it through the initial screening process. So this mechanical approach to screening candidates is one way that Jennifer says the hiring pool gets skewed. And the candidates who make the first cut go to the second round. What they do is they send those candidates a self-assessment and ask them to rate themselves on how good they are on all of the core competencies in the job description. And so if you know to mark yourself as master on every level, then you'll make the next down select. Which is HR speak for making it to the next round. And so you can see this self-assessment process, it helps narrow down the pool of potential candidates.

4:42But Jennifer says it also further skews the pool of potential hires in favor of people who know how to game the process. So by the time the hiring managers get a short list of candidates, a lot of them turn out not to be qualified for the job and they have to start over. It's very, very widely accepted that this does not work well. I should say there's so many wonderful civil servants that it is not that we don't get good people. It's that the process makes it very hard to get good people and puts a huge burden on those who are trying to do the hiring. In short, Jennifer says the major defect in government hiring is its rigidity.

5:21Unlike in the private sector, hiring managers in the federal government often have very little flexibility to assess candidates. So how did it get to be this way? It's risk aversion, essentially. We've developed a culture in government where we want to be able to say that the process got the outcome rather than a person. Because if a person made a judgment that this was, you know, the right hire, someone's going to criticize it. Or someone may file a legal complaint about it. Jennifer says as a result of all this, the actual work of government takes longer than it should. She points, for example, to the raft of infrastructure spending laws Congress passed early in the Biden administration.

6:02You had the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA. These didn't get all the money out the door. And now those are subject to clawback, in part because the teams charged with implementing those laws had to fight to get the people that they need. Previous presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, have tried, with varying degrees of success, to revamp the way the government hires people, to make it more efficient and fair. But Jennifer says it's long past time for a refresh. Which is what the Trump administration says it wants to do. So what does Jennifer think about some of Trump's proposals?

6:45Well, on the one hand, she says she is deeply skeptical. For instance, one of Trump's orders is titled Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service. And one of the changes it calls for is a process that prioritizes candidates that are, quote, passionate about the ideals of the American Republic. So I wonder, on a practical level, like, how is this even assessed? And do we know exactly what the ideals of the American Republic are? Imagine trying to implement that language on the ground. what are you actually doing to test for passion for the ideals of the American public, right?

7:23Like, I think that that language is all messaging and all signaling. I mean, Darian, it's not that complicated. I feel like you just come up with a multiple choice question. You ask people like, football or soccer? I know the right answer is soccer. So we're just playing around here, right? But this passion for American ideals language is vague. and some worry it could be used in the hiring process as a sort of political loyalty test, which could undermine the independence of the civil service. We don't want to go back to a spoils system. And I think there's fear right now that that would be returning to what we had before, which is essentially graft.

8:02On the other hand, Jennifer says there is an opportunity under a new administration for the Office of Personnel Management, essentially the government's HR department, to make some improvements. It could simplify the hiring process and give managers, the ones actually supervising employees, more say. Also, the government could take a page from the private sector and bring more experts into the interview process. So, for instance, if you're hiring for a programmer or a product manager, in the private sector you would have programmers look at that person's work and interview them. And in the public sector right now, it's very uncommon to do that because the processes take so much time.

8:46Now, Trump's incoming head of the Office of Personnel Management is a guy named Scott Cooper, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. And Jennifer says she is somewhat hopeful that he might be able to make some positive change in what she calls the nerdy guts of government. And if we can get rid of some of the, you know, very overly strict policies that try to not use any judgment at all in the hiring and diminish some of the possible downsides, we could really end up, frankly, with a better hiring system at the end of these four years. I'm not saying that's guaranteed. I'm saying that's absolutely possible.

9:25Darian, if you were to self-assess how well we did at this podcast episode, what marks would you give us? Well, I guess I've learned that the only answer is 10 out of 10. There you go. That is what I was hoping for. I'm learning quickly. This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Patty Hirsch edited this episode. Kate and Cannon is our editor. And The Indicator is a production of NPR. you