Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Remarks During Hearing with OPM Acting Director
Washington, D.C. (May 22, 2024)—Below is Ranking Member Jamie Raskin’s opening statement at today’s hearing with Rob Schriver, Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Opening Statement
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Committee on Oversight and Accountability
“Oversight of Our Nation’s Largest Employer:
Reviewing the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Pt. II”
May 22, 2024
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Shriver. I know it’s just your third week of work on your new job and we welcome you today. I look forward to hearing from you about everything you’re doing to strengthen the 2.3-million-person workforce that we have in the federal government working for the American people.
OPM oversees this nonpartisan workforce, which takes an oath to our Constitution, not to the president, not to a king, certainly, not to any individual, but rather, to the Constitution and to the country.
Our Constitution clearly defines roles for the branches of government. Congress writes the laws and appropriates funding. The president and agencies faithfully execute those laws using the resources that Congress provides. America is in a bit of a struggle right now over whether the job of the executive branch is to faithfully implement the laws that have been adopted by the people’s representatives, or whether it is to serve the personal whims and the political demands of the president.
From the beginning of his time in office, the last president made clear his desire to strip the federal workforce of experts and replace them with loyalists. Right out of the gate, then-President Trump proposed cutting 20% of funding from the National Institutes of Health in my district. The institution has saved the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans through research into diseases like cancer, diabetes, asthma, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, and so on.
As his administration continued, Trump continued to undermine a professional, expert, nonpartisan federal workforce, and to undermine scientific and policy expertise. At various points throughout his term, he asserted that Americans should inject themselves with disinfectant as a cure for the Coronavirus, that the noise from windmills causes cancer, and that you need an ID to buy a box of cereal.
The former president elevated political loyalty above professional expertise in the workforce, and he made no effort to conceal his desire to remove any official who dared to disagree with his particular positions. We saw that in the firing of Chris Krebs, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for daring to say that, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was any way compromised in the 2020 election.”
In his zeal to rid the government of anyone who might dare to contradict him, Trump took drastic action to convert the traditional nonpartisan federal workforce into an army of partisan loyalists. He did this by creating a new category of federal workers called Schedule F, for which civil service protections would not apply. Schedule F would make it possible for the president to fire any federal worker who disagreed with his particular spin on policies, or who dared to tell the truth about public safety, public health, science, or the law.
And it doesn’t take much imagination, to picture how this policy could transform our government into what one former Republican political appointee called, “an army of suck ups.” Because this is how our government used to work, before the Civil Service Act of 1883—The Pendleton Act—federal jobs were basically at the control of political bosses and were for sale to the highest bidder. And now there is an effort to revive this system.
Thankfully, during his first week in office, President Biden revoked the Schedule F executive order, and OPM recently finalized a rule to strengthen our workforce and ensure that it remains expert and nonpartisan. But the former president has been explicit about his plans to revive Schedule F and to strip the workforce of its nonpartisan productions very aggressively, should he be returned to office.
Well, what would government be like if we moved in the direction of this assault on the professional civil service? Well, here’s the example I like to think of: In 2019, the then-President declared that, despite all the evidence to the contrary from the scientific experts at the National Weather Service Service in NOAA, Hurricane Dorian, he said, was going to hit the state of Alabama. Now, all the meteorologists said that was wrong—it was not going to hit Alabama. It was going to hit Florida’s Atlantic coast, which it did, wreaking devastation across the state. The experts at the Weather Service had to scramble to try to undo the misinformation that had been spread by the president.
But, what if they had not been able to do that? What if they feared that speaking up about where the hurricane was really going to land would cost them their jobs? What if they stayed silent and allowed the dispatch of hundreds of emergency personnel to the wrong states, leaving communities to drown without essential help and services?
Well, the former president promptly instructed his team to track down the scientist who corrected his predictions by Sharpie. According to a 2020 report by the Office of Inspector General at Commerce, Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney wrote an email to Commerce Department officials stating, “As it currently stands, it appears as if the National Weather Service intentionally contradicted the president, and we need to know why.” And then they demanded a correction or an explanation.
And NOAA’s leadership under Trump went so far as to rebuke the National Weather Service’s Birmingham Alabama office for tweeting accurate, lifesaving hurricane prediction information, simply because it contradicted what the president had to say. Now, no one got fired, because the old protections were in place. The very protections that Trump pledges to destroy if he’s elected again.
Is that the government we want? Do we want the reign of folly over science and whim over professional expertise, or Big Money over the public interest? I’m sure everyone saw the former president’s meeting with oil and gas executives where he asked them to raise a billion dollars and then pledged he would issue a series of regulations undoing all of the climate progress that has been made in the Biden Administration.
Look, our Constitution put in place a series of checks and balances. And we elect a president to faithfully execute the laws. That’s the job of the president. That’s the job of the executive branch, not to rewrite the laws, not to distort the laws, not to mangle the laws, and not to override the laws with a Sharpie. And so, we must preserve those safeguards, and I’ll be interested to hear from our witness about what he will do to make sure that those safeguards are kept in place.
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