The Environmental Protection Agency is on track to slash 47% of
its total staff by the end of President Trump’s first term, according to a
report in the Washington Examiner. After just one year, EPA chief Scott Pruitt
has reduced his staff to levels unseen since the Reagan administration. If just
those federal employees set to retire by 2021 do indeed leave, Pruitt will have
cut more than 7,000 bureaucrats.
“We’re
proud to report that we’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer
dollars, and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment,”
Pruitt boasted. Meanwhile, other federal agencies have followed suit after
President Trump’s January 2017 hiring freeze hit large swaths of the executive
branch. Trump’s order stated, “No vacant positions existing at noon on January
22, 2017, may be filled, and no new positions may be created, except in limited
circumstances,” including those pertaining to national security. Although the
freeze technically lifted in the spring, most agencies have continued to abide
by its guidelines. The last president to enact a major federal hiring freeze
was Ronald Reagan.
With
the exception of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Interior, all Cabinet
departments by September had fewer permanent staff than the day Trump took
office. In addition, Trump’s proposed spending cuts triggered a spending
slowdown across agencies despite the absence of a 2017 budget from Congress.
Tony
Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union representing 150,000
federal workers at over 30 agencies laments, “Morale has never been lower.
Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.” Taxpayers
can only hope that Trump’s government labor policies soon put Reardon himself
out of a job, as even left-wing labor pioneers Samuel Gompers and Franklin
Roosevelt understood that government workers should never have the right to
unionize, as the natural tug and pull of union dealing disappears when the
government negotiates with itself.
Not
all federal employees dislike the cuts. An annual survey of federal workers
shows a slight uptick in job satisfaction. Stephanie Valentine, a program
analyst at the Education Department, explained, “Oftentimes we run on autopilot
and continue to fund programs that don’t produce the results that were
intended. You can’t keep blindly spending because that’s what we’ve always
done.” Valentine has reportedly never perused a Democrat Party platform.
Before
his death in 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia observed that unaccountable,
overgrown executive agencies posed the greatest threat to American liberty. If
President Trump can reduce bureaucracy to Reagan era levels within a year,
Americans might hope to press on to Coolidge era numbers by his second term.
For an administration that promises to make America great again, at least it’s
a good start.
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