The New Yorker Radio Hour - In the Civil Service, Loyalty Now Comes Before Expertise

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Donald Trump came into office promising to make so many cuts to the government that “your head will spin.” Evan Osnos has been reporting from Washington on how the Administration is radically changing the civil service, and he’s found that, to a degree unprecedented in modern times, political loyalty is prized over qualifications and experience. In many departments, senior officials deemed insufficiently loyal have been “turkey-farmed”—reassigned to jobs that are meaningless or less important than their previous posts. (The practice was known in the Nixon Administration as the “new activity technique.”) Osnos spoke with Matthew Allen, who was, until recently, the communications director at the Bureau of Land Management. And Bob Odenkirk, who played a newsman in “The Post,” reminds you of some headlines you may have missed.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNMIC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Countless presidents have come to office promising to make government smaller. They almost all do. But no one has done so with quite as much conviction and consequence as Donald Trump. The government is vast. 2.8 million civilian employees whose jobs range from Forest Service fire, fighters to CIA codebreakers.

Trump has let many of the most crucial jobs absolutely languish, unfilled, even as tens of thousands of employees have quit or retired. In the midst of a confrontation with North Korea, we've had no ambassador to South Korea. Staff writer Evan Osno spent months reporting on Trump's assault on the Civil Service. He interviewed dozens of government workers to look at just how this shift has changed the life of the government. Evan, when Donald Trump was running for office, how did he talk about staffing the government and the size of the government?

What was his attitude toward government? Was it standard kind of smaller government conservative doctrine? Well, he said at one point, I'm going to cut so much, it'll make your head spin. But then he also made another promise, which a lot of us remember, which is he said, I'm going to fill the government with the best and most serious people. Those were his two promises. He has shaken up the government in ways that are really dramatic, actually, and frankly, in ways that don't really appear on the front page of the paper very often. We don't talk about what's going on in the ranks of the federal government. But if you look at the numbers, they're dramatic. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, 79,000 civil servants left the government, which is much larger than the same period under the Obama administration.

So there's tremendous turmoil beneath the surface of the water. And what about the quality of the people? What we've seen from the Trump administration, of course, is a huge amount of turmoil in the White House. There's been people coming and going. There's feuds. There's kind of factions. But the real problem has been that they're struggling to fill really crucial jobs across the government with people that know what they're doing. There are about 600 plus jobs that are the most crucial positions at the top of the federal agencies, and about half of those today are still unfilled. We've never had a situation like that, that number of vacancies. And that's because it's been very hard to find people to join who are both politically loyal, personally loyal to the president to the degree that he wants them to be and then also skilled and expert enough to be able to pass the test. What kind of jobs?

These are some of the most important jobs in the State Department. For instance, right now, we have no ambassador to South Korea, many of the most important jobs in diplomacy, what are assistant secretaries of state. And you see similar things like that in other departments, places where the president has decided that in order to be able to work for him, the most important piece of this is loyal to you. His supporters were always eager to compare him to Andrew Jackson, a kind of disruptive candidate and a man of the people who didn't stand on ceremony. you're suggesting another parallel based on how jobs are filled. What's what's that about? Well, there's been this long-running debate in government about do you want to fill jobs on the basis of partisan loyalty or on non-partisan expertise? What's more important? And if you go back, Andrew Jackson believed I want to fill the government with people who are personally loyal to me. And one of his friends in the Senate said, to the victor goes the spoils. And that famous declaration is how we got the spoil system, meaning that for most of the 19th century, the government was basically filled with people. who were friends and allies of the president. Congress at the end of the 19th century said this is really no way to run a government. They got rid of it and they created the civil service, which is the thing

we have today that says there are people who are professional experts. These are nonpartisan, merit-based jobs who rise up through the system. So that was in the 19th century, Evan, but wasn't there an overhaul much later around the time of Richard Nixon? There was. Yeah. Richard Nixon in in particular was very wary of civil servants. He thought they were out to get him. He was paranoid. about the subject. And internally, inside his White House, they created an instruction manual, which was a list of techniques, they called them, ways to try to marginalize civil servants. One of the things was to monitor people, give them grades on the basis of whether they seemed loyal to Nixon. And they also came up with methods, something they called the new activity

technique by which they meant you create a new activity that looks meaningful, but is in fact meaningless. And then you can assign hundreds or more staffers to that and basically sideline him, take them out of commission, and that was one of the things they did. And when that came to light as a result of Watergate, Congress passed a new round of laws that were really intended to try to protect civil servants and really sort of protect the taxpayer's interest so that you didn't have presidents pushing large numbers of government employees into meaningless work. And you spent months talking to civil servants. It's not usually the considered the sexiest kind of political reporting in Washington. But nevertheless, what are the ramifications of so many open

jobs and so many dissatisfied civil servants in one bureaucracy after another in D.C. Well, that's the thing that I found really fascinating about this. Look, you know, civil service is the kind of thing that operates below the radar screen. It definitely doesn't make much traction on Twitter every day. But that's where the real meat of government goes on. Those are the people who are preparing to deal in complex negotiations with foreign countries. These are the people who are deciding what kind of information gets out to the public and what is ultimately sideline, what sort of debate they have. all kinds of issues. And what's become clear when you talk to enough people is there's tremendous

pressure right now on civil servants ever since the Trump administration took office, pressure on them to do things that in many cases they feel is inappropriate. That's designed to protect the president's political interests, prevent embarrassment, not to do the work of the civil service, which is not supposed to be related to politics. One man who did speak to you on the record, and quite a number of people speak to you on the record, was, is named Matthew Allen, who is he and why is his story so significant? Matthew Allen's an interesting case. He's a guy who grew up in Spokane, Washington and sort of a ranching, mining family,

not somebody who ever naturally thought he was going to go into the federal government, joined the Army, ended up working at the Department of Veterans Affairs, rose out through the ranks, ended up at the Pentagon working on the counter ISIS campaign. So this is somebody who's a really seasoned civilian public affairs officer, knows his way around government, went over to the Department of the Interior shortly before Trump arrived. And what happened to him there is really a story of what's happening across the government. And he's found himself now sort of surprising himself, speaking out to say that he's concerned about what's happening in the ranks of the federal government. And he spoke to us for this.

And I know you're going to speak to him in a moment, but as he put himself in jeopardy by speaking out. Well, in his view, he didn't really have a choice. He said, look, I, I can't continue to work in this government and not let it be known how worried I am about what's happening. And he's filed a case believing that he's been unfairly targeted for speaking out against the administration. And we'll see. He believes he has a strong case to make. And he is not going quietly. He is talking about it publicly in ways that a lot of civil servants, I think, frankly, are unwilling to do.

It's risky. Staff writer Evan Osnos, his article about the civil service. is called Trump versus the Deep State. Here he is with Matthew Allen in Washington. Matthew, when Trump took office, you were the communications director at the Bureau of Land Management at the Department of Interior. Ryan Zinke came in as the head of the Department of Interior, and what began to change? You know, there were a lot of changes as soon as the team walked through the door. And I think things felt like they constricted. The information. flow, felt like it slowed down that certain people in a tight circle were involved with the meetings

and the decision-making processes. And it made it difficult to understand which direction we were going. So at a certain point, you received an order, and it had to do with Freedom of Information Act requests. What are they? And what were you asked to do with them? The Freedom of Information Act permits anyone. to petition the government to provide information related to whatever subject matter that they would like. So I was asked by leadership at the Bureau of Land Management to provide an opportunity to review a FOIA request that had to do with those specific individuals. In other words, leadership at the BLM wanted to have the chance to review FOIAs concerning themselves. prior to public release.

Is that normal? That was atypical. Having the approval authority rest with the individual with whom the information concerns seemed like a conflict of interest to me. And you've worked at the Pentagon, you've worked elsewhere, the Department of Veterans Affairs. Had you ever been asked to pass a long FOIA request to the people who were the subject of those inquiries?

No, never. Information, which is really the field in which you've been working, is something that the administration and Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior put an enormous emphasis on. There's a lot of talk about controlling and maintaining and orienting the flow of information, making sure that the right people have it and the wrong people don't have it in effect. And that came to impact your job because several memos were leaked in the spring of 2017, a couple months after the new administration had come in. And in those memos, it showed that Zinke intended to roll back protections on public land. What happened after they were leaked? After they were leaked, there was sort of a push in the building amongst the leadership to find out who was leaking the documents and to prevent leaks of the documents.

You know, folks stopped sending emails. They started producing things in limited hard copy only. They stopped sending emails. Correct. They stopped sending around draft documents via email. They would hand out documents at meetings, and the documents would be left at the meetings afterwards so that there were no copies that could be sent outside of the building.

And that environment, in turn, seems to have spawned even more leaks because certainly in the span, since last summer, that's persisted, and we've seen numerous stories about other documents that had leaked and other conversations and email threads and things of that nature. So after some of these documents leaked in the spring of last year, at some point your superiors came to you and ask you to try to plug the leaks, is that right? Yes, there were a few conversations where, first it was asked why I couldn't stop the leaks. and at the time I had sort of framed it as number one,

I certainly don't have the resources to investigate information leaks and second, I'm not sure if that's legal to do. So when you said that, what was the reaction? Then the reaction shifted from, why can't you stop the leaks to veiled accusations that I was, in fact, the one leaking the information. I mean, I got to ask. Were you the one leaking the information?

I was not. So you'd worked in a lot of different parts of the government. You've got a lot of experience in communications. Had you ever been asked to try to plug leaks like this before? No, I had not. And what struck me was having just beforehand worked at the Department of Defense in what is probably one of the most sensitive current operations that the United States is undertaking, we would still have not leaks of that nature, but. information still traveled, and we would address it as professionals, and we would have conversations with reporters, and we would have conversations with different units that were in those areas of Iraq and Syria. And in this situation at the BLM and with the Department of Interior, the level of concern and perhaps even borderline paranoia about the leaks didn't quite warrant the situation.

In my mind, if the administration or the secretary or the Bureau of Land Management is going to make a decision or take an action, part of what we're accountable to the American people to provide is our rationale and our reasoning behind why we're taking that action. And it felt to me like there was a reluctance to do that. There was a reluctance to sort of talk about how they were reaching decisions. Correct. And what happened after that? In the midst of the leak to the Washington Post related to the Monuments Review, I was removed from my position and placed into a staff role at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Your experience, your training, everything that the government's invested in you over the years has been to help you become a communications professional.

Are you now using those skills in this job? No, I am not. And is this a promotion, a lateral move, something else? This would definitely be considered a demotion. A demotion. In Washington, as you know, there's there's an old saying that when they want to move a civil servant out of a job to get rid of them in effect that they are turkey farmed. They're sent to a job that has no particular urgency or no sort of central role in the decision making. It sounds to me as if that's more or less what happened to you.

I would say that the position they put me in certainly feels like the intention was. that I would have no direct access or intersection with the media, with Congress, with external organizations or non-governmental organizations who had received leaked documents from the building. Some people might wonder as they hear you talking about your experience. They say, well, you know, the president won an election. This is his government. You took an oath. Why don't you just do what the president?

and his cabinet wants you to do. I think in the circumstance we're talking about, we were there and prepared to do what the president asked of us. The challenge was that we never had the opportunity to do so. My colleagues and I were removed from our positions as soon as it was legally feasible for those types of movements to happen. And it was unprecedented that that sheer quantity of, senior executives that was relocated last year and reassigned, hadn't been done before, never in

mass, and never for what really appears to be politically motivated reasons. You know, Matthew, you've been now in a kind of confrontation with the department. Why haven't you quit? Why do you stay? You know, what's interesting is in eight months, nobody's actually asked me that question. I feel that. I took my oath to the Constitution and not to an office and not to an individual. And I serve the American people. And what I've devoted my career to is communicating to the American people what actions their government is taking on their behalf.

And I felt that if I were to leave just because things had become unpleasant or difficult, I would be doing a disservice because there are still ways that I can help communicate. Why did you decide to speak out publicly? Yeah, so one of my philosophies on communication is maximum disclosure and minimum delay. And it feels to me that I can't be in a position where I'm asking the agency I work for to do that and where I'm asking my employees to do that if I'm not willing to live that as well. Matthew Allen, thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you.

The New Yorkers Evan Osnos, speaking with Matthew Allen of the Department of the Interior in Washington. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Out. Get it downstairs and I want the page editor to stand in over line until they got it ready to print. Bob Odenkirk isn't a newsman, but he did a pretty good job of playing one in the movie, The Post. Did you get the study from the same source as the Times? We do not reveal our sources. Hey, Bob Odenkirk here, the actor. When you're acting, you have a fair amount of downtime.

So instead of drinking too much or playing golf, I've been reading the newspaper. Turns out, a lot has happened since Donald Trump took office. And we've all been skipping over news stories that aren't about him and his antics. So in the spirit of public enlightenment, I wanted to tell you about some news that you may have overlooked.

Goodbye, big crack. The Grand Canyon has collapsed. Apparently, there was some kind of earthquake windstorm combination that caused the canyon sides to crumble. 392 people died. You knew 10 of them personally. Two were your cousins. And they had texted you pictures of themselves,

standing on the rim, waving. Final fish flounder. Three weeks from now, the world's final piece of high-grade sushi will be consumed. After that, there will only be farm-raised catfish. Overfishing and pollution have been obvious problems for a while now, and this was a situation that clearly could have been avoided, but enjoy your farm-raised catfish sushi.

Special moments. Your first granddaughter was born three months ago. This happened on a presidential tweet storm day, so you were preoccupied. Her name is either Eileen or Ellen. You should visit her. Neighbor down. Your elderly neighbor was murdered right in front of you in broad daylight. You are cleaning the gutters and listening to an interview with Justin Trudeau on NPR

when about 30 feet away, a man wearing a hockey mask used a machete to mince old Mrs. Samuelson to bits as she returned from the store with a bag of parakeet treats. In sports, the Super Bowl happened again, and you missed it. Seriously, you missed a Super Bowl. Think about that. And in extremely personal news, your medical tests came back positive. The doctor gives you six months. It's seriously time to turn off the TV, put down the newspaper, and, I don't know, open your mail, have a conversation, maybe just sit quietly and take it all in.

But wait. I'm getting a report that the test results came back five. a half months ago, so it's already too late. This is Bob Odenkirk. That's the news you missed. And now, back to All Trump All the Time. That's Bob Odenkirk with headlines you may have missed. And that's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick. And I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next time. Be sure to keep in touch on Twitter, and you can always find us at New Yorker Radio.