Thread by @donmoyn

If you are concerned about threats to democracy, such as changes in election laws, you should also worry about how politicization of the career public sector will remove a protection against creeping authoritarianism.

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Despite Trump's framing of the "deep state" the US actually relies more on political appointees than other countries, and the career public service has been shrinking over time. 2/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/you-should-b…

This post digs in to explain something that did not get a lot of attention before the election, which was a Trump Executive Order that would have allowed him to convert career officials to at will employees. Why was this so dangerous? 3/

There are three reasons why we should worry about politicization. First, despite the claims of proponents of the unitary exec & politicization (incl. members of SCOTUS) the evidence we have is that politicization reduces performance, transparency and stability in government. 4/

Second, politicization embeds polarization more deeply into our governing processes, pushing our moderates and replacing them with ideological extremists. This, in turn, will undermine continuity in policy implementation.

(Drawing from @yesthatabbywood & @BrianDFeinstein) 5/

Third, and most importantly, career officials are more likely than political appointees to flag illegal behavior and norm violation, and bring attention to it. They did so during Trump’s illegal effort to trade US resources to Ukraine for dirt on his political opponent. 6/

The push for politicization comes not from people who actually study public management, but conservative unitary executive fans from places like the Heritage Foundation & Federalist Society. They have not accounted for how such powers will be abused by authoritarian leaders. 7/

Interesting to note the hypocrisy of Trump appointees like Kellyanne Conway and Russ Vought who refused to resign from government advisory gigs.
Vought tried to convert 88% of his OMB career employees to at will - a much more damaging form of politicization. 8/

Part of my goal with this blog is to link research about public organizations and policy to political discussions. Hat tip to @davidlewisvu & @DonKettl whose work I cite.
Wrote more about politicization @PAReview (open access: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…) 9/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…