There is a revolution going on in Washington concerning governmental administration. But it has been ignored by most media, at least partially because of the seemingly “boring” bureaucratic matters that produced this fundamental reorientation.
At best, the reported media story is that President Donald Trump is cutting the size of government by firing good civil servants. The real news, however, is that the Trump Administration might be fundamentally reforming the federal bureaucracy with the legal support essential to change how government is actually administered.
Two recent court decisions support this fundamental change—one of which hits home to this author, going back to my days as head of Washington’s civil service agency, as Director of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The other court ruling is even more fundamental.
What court decision today could still be relevant back into the Reagan era? Forty-four years ago, as Reagan’s successful political team was transitioning into office, we were advised that elements of the outgoing Carter administration had settled with civil rights groups to end Professional and Administrative Examination (PACE) intelligence tests. These had long been required for entry into top government positions to ensure a fair selection of applicants for an objectively tested civil service. The justification for the change was that the tests were “discriminatory” since white people scored higher on the exams, suggesting that they were racially biased against black minority applicants.
As head of the personnel management offices for the Reagan transition, I brought the matter up to the president-elect, who was supportive of a request to challenge it in court. But then incoming Attorney General William French Smith told us that we had no standing at the time to object. Efforts were made later, but the court supported the Carter Administration settlement for a ten-year period during which OPM was allowed to introduce alternative tests without the so-called “adverse impact” on minorities. A Reagan attempt to do so was blocked by the Commission on Civil Rights, and over the years, the government basically gave up trying to produce IQ-like tests that did not produce the same results.
The lack of real examinations for top government employment is not widely known and clearly undermines the principles of the original Pendleton Act of 1883 and its extensions, all of which required that “recruiting, selecting, and advancing employees on the basis of their relative ability, knowledge, and skills, including open consideration of qualified applicants for initial appointment.” Over the years, the government began selecting top applicants primarily by “examinations,” where applicants assessed their own attributes and skills. After ten years, the court-imposed decree was extended by the following Department of Justice’s Civil Rights divisions until this very year.
What replaced PACE, in fact? More recently, a very few IQ-like exams have been internally validated but not proven in court. With the great majority of applicants self-testing, obviously very few applicants failed when assessing themselves. So, bureaucrats, especially at higher levels, selected people they or their associates knew. In fact, the overwhelming number of mid-to-upper-level vacancies in the civil service have long been filled by what are called “name requests” (Direct Hiring Authority). This is a “semi-spoils system”—not of political pals as before nineteenth-century civil service reforms, but of bureaucratic friends and acquaintances.
It took forty-four years for a political administration to face the charge of racism and have the courage to eliminate the decree. And on August 1, 2025, the Supreme Court allowed President Trump to go forward. “For over four decades, this decree has hampered the federal government from hiring the top talent of our nation,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. “Today, the Justice Department removed that barrier and reopened federal employment opportunities based on merit—not race.” US Attorney Jeanine Pirro added, “It’s simple: competence and merit are the standards by which we should all be judged; nothing more and nothing less. It’s about time people are judged, not by their identity,” but instead “by the content of their character.” Imagine, competence and merit in government—revolutionary!
A second and even more important Supreme Court decision impacts federal employees in an even broader manner, including whether they would be required to be represented by union collective bargaining and the payment of union fees. The high court voted 8 to 1 in ruling that a lower court injunction against Trump was improper because the president’s orders were likely to survive lower-level judicial review.
Trump’s Executive Order “Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs” and the implementing OPM regulatory memorandum were the center of the Trump reforms before the lower courts. These broadly exempt named “agencies and agency subdivisions from the provisions of the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute and the Foreign Service Labor-Management Relations Statute.”
Today’s reforms are actually a step back into history and the original intent of the Act, and now provide a serious opportunity for elected leaders to actually manage the government.
The ruling provision of the OPM guidance directly states that “covered agencies and subdivisions are no longer subject to [certain] collective-bargaining requirements.” As a result, executive agencies no longer must engage in collective bargaining with federal unions. Consequently, the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, and unions lose their status as exclusively recognized labor organizations requiring agency facilitation in collecting union dues.
Agencies are further arguably allowed to proceed with personnel policies generally, including reductions in force. Units covered by the memorandum include the departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Justice, and Homeland Security, and substantial parts of most other major federal agencies. All are directed “to return to the policies of Executive Order 13839” and are “accordingly required to, consistent with applicable law, return performance evaluations to 30 days, and administer discipline and unacceptable performance policies to those set in the first Trump administration and to separate employees for unacceptable performance in appropriate cases.” Union involvement in employee separations was invalidated, and government-paid union positions were eliminated.
A memorandum titled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives” revived performance management principles requiring actual plans from each top career senior executive to be evaluated by a political superior and reviewed by performance review boards managed by non-career executives. Failure to perform could lead to removal without an appeal to an administrative review. Similar procedures would again cover second-level career supervisors as in the original Carter legislation.
Together, these reforms change the nature of government administration. The union-related changes alone are fundamental. These weaken government unions and associations’ powers, agency fees, and costs, freeing willing career managers and executives to implement the decisions of presidentially appointed agency leaders. Even Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt opposed unionizing federal government employees.
President Trump’s reforms go well beyond what any other president has achieved in this area, although Reagan tried earlier with some success. Elon Musk provided the energy required at the beginning, as did those in the transition at OPM and in the other agencies. And all was based on serious analysis beforehand by conservative think tanks in Washington, some of which have been advocating many of these reforms for generations.
Major policy reform based upon serious intellectual analysis is rare in government. Moving the bureaucracy from being under significant control by unions, management associations, ideological “experts,” media leakers, outside staff, consultants, and contractors to being controlled by officials appointed by an elected president is historic.
There are two major theories of today’s public administration. The dominant recent view has been the progressive one associated with Woodrow Wilson in his classic The Study of Administration, emphasizing rule by national government experts acting as the leading force in shaping public policy. The second, a view that goes back to the Constitution, stresses administrative control by national and local political leaders. It was put into modern form by Vincent Ostrom in his classic The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, stressing the role of separate power sources based on pluralism and responsible elected officials.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was a bipartisan attempt by a political academic to place more power in the hands of political appointees rather than career managers. It was modified administratively over the years to increase labor and career management power. Today’s reforms are actually a step back into history and the original intent of the Act, and now provide a serious opportunity for elected leaders to actually manage the government.
The question is, how will the president and his appointees exercise this newly won administrative power? One anomaly is that it will no longer be so easy to put the blame for failure on bureaucracy.