A Primer on the Federal Workforce

It’s more than just civil servants

One of the infuriating things in the reporting about DOGE and the firings of federal workers is that the press isn’t differentiating between the types of Federal workers. It makes it much harder to determine what is going on. In this article, I’m going to discuss the classes of Federal Workers and then some personal experiences on the pros and cons of Civil Service Protection.

There are four classes of Federal Workers:

1. Political Appointees

2. Civil Servants covered by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978

3. Probationary Civil Servants

4. Support Contractors

Political Appointees

These Federal workers are the agency heads and usually the top few layers of leadership in the agencies. They serve at the pleasure of the President once the Senate has given their “advice and consent.” They can be fired at will by the President.

Civil Servants covered by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978

The 1978 Reform Act was designed to professionalize the civil service. Among other things, it establishes due process regulations for removing civil servants so that they cannot be removed at the whim of the political appointees.

There are four ways that I know of to remove a Civil Servant covered by the Reform Act.

The first is to fire them for cause. For example, I know one Civil Servant who was fired for having porn on his Government computer (which constitutes misuse of Government equipment). Firing a protected Civil Servant for cause invokes a great deal of due process to confirm that the cause is indeed accurate. There are hearings and a chance for the fired Civil Servant to bring in counsel and make motions to prevent the firing. A protected civil servant must be given 30 days notice and has rights both to reply and to get independent arbitration from the Merit Systems Protection Board. They can also appeal through the courts or their union if they have one. Furthermore, many of the causes for firing someone also require earlier steps like implementing Performance Improvement Plans.

This is a lot of work. In my 31 years, I only know of the one Civil Servant being fired for cause.

The second is to have a Reduction In Force (RIF). This is where Congress cuts the budget for an agency and thus forces it to lay off protected Civil Servants. The challenge is that, per Federal Code of Regulations, a RIF is a reduction in positions and not personnel. [https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/workforce-restructuring/reductions-in-force-rif/]

As an example, consider a RIF with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) (which happened in the 1990s and affected my father). The USGS managers decide they can only fund three geologists in their Western Colorado field office instead of the five currently employed there. The managers do not get to pick which two they lay off. The rules require them to lay off the least senior staff that isn’t also a Veteran. If two employees have the same seniority, the Veteran stays and the non-veteran gets laid off.

So if the managers want to fire Joe and Bob but not Tom, Dick and Harry, they have to reorganize the department. Instead of having five field geologists, they’ll have three Igneous Rock field geologists and two Sedimentary Rock field geologists and tailor the definitions of those positions so that Joe and Bob don’t qualify for the Igneous Rock ones. Then they eliminate the Sedimentary Rock positions. This chicanery takes a lot of effort and doesn’t always work.

The third way to get protected Civil Servants out is to harass them into quitting. Don’t let them work remotely. Freeze their government credit cards. Move their offices around. Assign them scut work tasks. It’s clear the Trump administration is doing all of these but it’s not clear to me yet as to what effect.

The fourth way to get rid of them is to illegally fire them and ignore court orders to let them go back to work. It’s not clear to me if this is happening, but given Trump’s record of not paying his contractors back in his Casino days, it may very well be. If it is happening, the implications for Constitutional law are immense.

Probationary Civil Servants

People who are hired to be civil servants do not immediately get the protections covered by the 1978 Reform Act. There is a probationary period that is typically one year, but can be two years or more depending on the agency and position.

The goal of this probationary period is to make sure that the new employee is worth extending the protections to. If someone isn’t up to the job, they can easily be fired before receiving their protections.

Under Trump, the Government is indeed engaging in mass firings of this class of civil servants. [https://www.npr.org/2025/03/04/nx-s1-5318039/fired-federal-employees-opm-memo]. The legality of how that’s being done is being contested but that’s an argument over the methodology and not the authority.

Support Services Contractors

The fourth class of Federal workers aren’t actually civil servants. The Government supplements its Civil Servants by issuing Support Services contracts. These are Time and Materials or IDIQ contracts for companies to provide labor for Government Agencies.

In many cases, the Support Services contractors outnumber the actual civil servants. For example, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where I worked from 1993-1999, only about 3,000 of the 10,000 people who work there are actual Civil Servants. The other ~7,000 are Support Services contractors.

Support Services contracts exist for two fundamental reasons: one stated and one unstated.

The stated reason is that Support Services contracts allow the contractors to be easily hired and fired. If the Civil Service manager of a support contract wants Joe off his team, the manager tells the Support Services company to remove Joe from the team. A week later, Joe will be reassigned or laid off. Similarly, if the manager of a support contract decides that their group needs more staff (say more programmers), the Support Services contractor can bring them on quickly and usually at a competitive salary (Government salaries are not competitive as a rule).

Support Services contracts are traditionally five year contracts where the funding is determined year to year. So as the agency’s budget fluctuates with Congress’s annual appropriations, the Support Services contract can expand or contract. At the end of the contract period, the contract is re-competed. Usually when that happens, the winning company just makes offers to the current staff. It’s not uncommon for a support services contractor to have the company name on their paycheck change multiple times while never changing their desk.

So the stated reason for having Support Services contracts is to give Federal Agencies the same flexibility in hiring and firing that industry has.

The unstated reason for having Support Services contracts is lobbying. Federal Civil Servants are prohibited from lobbying Congress. The agency can propose its budget to Congress and the heads of the agency can make the case for why they should get the money, but individual civil servants are not allowed to lobby their congress critters to pass laws or budgets that could affect them.

Support Services contractors do not have this restriction. They can make political donations, meet with Congressional members and staffers, and engage in other forms of lobbying. So of the 10,000 people who work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, 7,000 of them can legally lobby for more money etc. for Goddard. And they do.

Eisenhower’s Iron Triangle has come into play.

An aside: For those who don’t know Eisenhower’s Iron Triangle, it works like this: Congress funds the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy gives money and favors to special interest groups and contractors, notably military contractors. The special interest groups/contractors then in turn provide lobbying and re-election support for Congress members. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s one reason why the Military Industrial Complex is so big—defense contractors put a lot of money into making sure that congressfolks who support funding defense projects get re-elected and congressfolks who don’t support funding defense projects don’t get re-elected.

It's clear that the Trump administration is terminating some of these support services contracts. My frustration is that too often the press is calling these people Civil Servants when they’re not. They are Federal workers, but have never had and won’t have the protection Civil Servants do.

Okay, now having covered the classes, let me talk about the Pros and Cons of Civil Service Protection.

Advantages of Protecting Civil Servants

The first major advantage is professionalism. Protected Civil Servants can focus on their job instead of pleasing their political appointee bosses. If a boss goes off the rails and directs them to do something blatantly stupid, the Protected Civil Servants can say no. If bending the knee is more important to your survival than doing the right thing, people will bend the knee.

Part of that professionalism is it lets the Government insist on qualifications. The geologist must actually know something about geology, and not just be a good friend of the head of the department.

The second major advantage is it makes corruption harder. Why would your average bureaucrat risk getting fired for taking a bribe? The high job security provides a counterweight. Corruption is still possible, but it’s harder and slower and thus less prevalent. I’ll have a future post on this.

Another unspoken advantage of civil service protection is it lets you pay them less. When I was a support services contractor, I made 20% more than Civil Servants with the same qualifications. They got paid less in exchange for being harder to fire.

Disadvantages of Civil Service Protection

The first major problem with all tenure-like protections is dead wood. What do you do with someone who once was productive but no longer is?

When I was at Goddard, I worked with a Civil Servant I’ll call Joe. Joe was a few years from retirement and had pretty much checked out. He came into the office at ten. He left at four. He only worked the assignments he wanted to and ignored the ones he didn’t care about. He got away with it because his managers knew that the effort to get him fired for cause was more work than just tolerating his poor performance.

That was a huge drag on the rest of the team. Not only did others have to pick up the slack, but it hurt morale. Why am I working 50 hours a week when he’s only working 30 and getting away with it?

The second major problem is that it pushes the agency to a consensus culture.

In the military, if a leader gives an order and the person doesn’t follow it, they’re in serious trouble up to possibly court-martial and execution. In a business, if a leader gives an order and the person doesn’t follow it, they can be fired (note, I’m talking non-union shops here since I don’t know enough about firings in union shops to comment).

So what happens if that person can’t be fired?

Yes, there are various disciplinary options, but most people quickly figure out ways to sandbag or throw grit into the gears in ways that are ambiguous enough that they can’t be disciplined. I talked about some of these with respect to releasing data to the public.

So the leader of a team of people who can’t be fired has to go a different route—persuasion. The leader has to persuade each of the individuals to do what the leader wants.

This quickly becomes a culture where consensus is required to make any forward progress at all. Every protected Civil Servant can “veto” the effort by throwing sand into the gears if they don’t want to do the effort. So the leader has to get the consensus of all of them.

A non-government example is volunteer organizations. Since any volunteer can quit at any time for any reason, the leader has to get them all on board individually if they want to accomplish anything. That requires persuasion and consensus on what the organization is doing.

Another example is government legislatures. The more independence each of the legislators has, the more any individual member can stall change and the more persuasion is required.

Consensus organizations are slow. They’re also conservative—not in the political sense but in the “resist change” sense. They’re never visionary and they generate a lot of waste as the price of bringing everyone on board.

Summary

Of the four types of Federal workers, three can be fired or removed through established law and procedures. The fourth is not so easy to remove and there are advantages and disadvantages to having this protected class.

So if you want to reform the Federal bureaucracy, it helps to understand these types. I don’t know if DOGE does, but the press reporting on DOGE clearly does not.

Finally, the consensus culture that’s been created by de facto tenure is a source of a lot of the frustrations with the bureaucracy. The inability to make decisions quickly or take risks bloats the organization and costs a great deal of money with little to show for it.