Another Trump Advisor Resigned
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The background: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/22/trump-order-strips-worker-protections-431359
The reporting on the resignation:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/trump-federal-salary-adviser-quits-post-over-executive-order-reclassifying-workers-432507The resignation letter:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-65e6-dd19-a175-6de70cc80000Excerpt from the resignation letter:
... the Executive Order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.
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I simply cannot be part of an Administration that seeks to do so...to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career Federal employees are legally and duty- bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law...not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration. I took that same oath, and despite being a life-long Republican (I was even named after Ronald Reagan), I would like to think that I lived up to it, even as I served three Democratic and three Republican Presidents. Yet the President’s Executive Order seeks to make loyalty to him the litmus test for many thousands of career civil servants, and that is something I cannot be part of.
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To some, requiring that loyalty may seem entirely appropriate. After all, shouldn’t all employees do what the boss and his lieutenants tell them to do? I say no, at least not when it comes to career civil servants. The only ‘boss’ that they serve is the public, and the laws that their elected representatives enact...whether this or any President likes it or not. And if a President doesn’t like it, he can propose that the Congress change the law. That is the way our Constitution is supposed to work, and no President should be able to remove career civil servants whose only sin is that they may speak such a truth to him.
