Pushed out by the Trump administration, these ex-feds want to make agency firings simpler and fairer

After being pushed out of their jobs last year by the Trump administration, Maureen Klovers and April Mohr Harding co-founded We the Doers, an organization that aims to take the expertise of former civil servants and use it to improve government operations. 

Because she had been in a new Senior Executive Service position for less than a year, Klovers was briefly fired as a result of the mass removals of newly hired or promoted agency staffers in their probationary periods. Ultimately, however, she decided to leave government service through the deferred resignation program rather than be reassigned to a new location as part of the Agriculture Department’s reorganization initiative. 

Similarly, Harding, who was a senior official at the IRS, participated in DRP after being told that her position was slated to be eliminated as part of workforce reductions. 

In the midst of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the procedures for removing agency staffers, which critics contend is chipping away at federal employees’ due process rights, We the Doers on Thursday issued a report on federal firing reform. Klovers and Harding argue that their recommendations would make it easier to terminate an underperforming employee for cause while still preserving civil service job protections. 

“[Firing] is one of those very polarizing things — and our approach to this, as with all of our work — is really to bring the lived experience of people who have moved through the actual process into the conversation and to pretty aggressively pursue a common sense set of solutions that is not partisan and that is based on the things that we can all agree on — which is if someone's not in the right job, there should be a way to move them on or move them out,” Harding said. “And if that happens, it should be as quick and painless as possible for all parties involved.” 

For its report, We the Doers in the spring convened 10 former or current federal managers who addressed an employee performance or conduct issue as a first- or second-level supervisor. Across a dozen cases that these individuals were directly involved in, it took an average of 19 months between when the manager initiated the removal process and when the employee resigned, retired, transferred to another agency or was fired. 

Klovers and Harding also consulted with federal HR officials and a former Democratic and Republican member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates federal employee appeals concerning violations of merit principles. We the Doers is financially supported by the Fund for Constitutional Government nonprofit. 

Harding said that their "most high-impact" recommendation is to establish a standard, governmentwide removal process. She argued that the federal firing process seems simple on paper, but that it is complicated by agency-specific policy and possible additional requirements in union collective bargaining agreements.

“This is an example of a much broader issue in the sort of breakdown between theory and practice in workforce management. The process as documented at different levels is pretty straightforward and pretty clear. But then it immediately exponentially grows because there is so much variation,” she said. “That's a big part of why [the removal process] feels opaque and confusing to people. Because you can do it in one place and then do it in another place — or do it in the same place with different people supporting you — and have a different experience. If we don't clean that up, then the rest of the reforms won't be effective.”

Klovers shared, for example, that she had to discipline an employee who wasn’t showing up for work. An HR official told her that before she could issue a written reprimand she needed to engage in informal counseling. (i.e. “Just tell [the employee] you have to show up for work when you're scheduled.”) In contrast, other feds who We the Doers interviewed said their agency mandates an automatic written reprimand when a worker is AWOL. 

Klovers and Harding also recommended that lawmakers “consolidate all post-removal appeals and investigative processes for federal employees into a new, strengthened, non-political single adjudicatory body.” 

Currently, feds can appeal a removal decision to the MSPB, the Office of Special Counsel (which specializes in whistleblower cases and can act as a prosecutor before the MSPB) as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which has jurisdiction over claims of discrimination in the public and private sectors). 

An agency attorney who We the Doers interviewed said that they handled a case that took a decade to resolve because the employee “bounced back and forth” among those three agencies. 

“At the end of those 10 years, none of the witnesses were available because they died, moved or other things had happened, and so the agency ended up having to settle with the employee because after 10 years they didn't have a case because they had no witnesses,” Klovers said. “That's an extreme example, but it's an example of why it's such a problem that there are three different bodies an employee can go to.” 

The duo acknowledged that a challenge to establishing such an agency is a recent Supreme Court decision that permitted the president to fire without cause members of bipartisan boards, such as the MSPB. 

“We think it's critical to get buy-in from both sides of the aisle and to have a fair process to have an adjudicatory body that is truly independent,” Klovers said. 

Some of We the Doers’ other recommendations include:

• Requiring agencies to track how long it takes to remove employees, or “time to fire.” 
• Mandating agencies to request agency-funded second medical opinions for most Family and Medical Leave Act or reasonable accommodation requests from employees on an active performance improvement plan. Based on their interviews, Klovers and Harding found that staffers can take advantage of these processes to delay removal or use a denial as grounds for a complaint. 
• Assessing supervisors’ ability to address “performance and conduct issues in a professional, expeditious manner.” The duo noted that OPM in June similarly required performance plans to include a section regarding how “timely and efficiently” supervisors address “poor and mediocre performance” of employees they oversee. 

Since the start of Trump’s second administration, OPM has issued rules to grant itself the ability to fire government employees for post-appointment conduct (which previously only applied to job applicants), take over adjudication of appeals for reduction-in-force decisions from MSPB and overhaul federal worker discipline.