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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
In the Civil Service, Loyalty Now Comes Before Expertise
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In the Civil Service, Loyalty Now Comes Before Expertise
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Evan Osnos talks to Matthew Allen, the former communications director for the Bureau of Land Management. Last year, after refusing to carry out orders from his superiors, which he found legally and ethically questionable, Alan was removed from his job and assigned to a new position with no staff and no responsibilities. This practice, known as turkey farming, is common in the Trump administration.
- [01:50]
David Remnick
Countless presidents have come to office promising to make government smaller. They almost all do. But no one has done so with quite as much conviction and consequence as Donald Trump. The government is vast 2.8 million civilian employees whose jobs range from Forest Service firefighters to CIA code breakers. Trump has let many of the most crucial jobs absolutely languish unfilled, even as tens of thousands of employees have quit or retired in the midst of a confrontation with North Korea. We've had no ambassador to South Korea. Staff writer Evan Osnow spent months reporting on Trump's assault on the civil service. He interviewed dozens of government workers to look at just how this shift has changed the life of the government. Evan, when Donald Trump was running for office, how did he talk about staffing the government and the size of the government? What was his attitude toward government? Was it standard kind of smaller government, conservative doctrine?
- [02:49]
Evan Osnos
Well, he said at one point, going to cut so much, it'll make your head spin. But then he also made another promise, which a lot of us remember, which is he said, I'm going to fill the government with the best and most serious people. Those were his two promises. He has shaken up the government in ways that are really dramatic, actually, and frankly, in ways that don't really appear on the front page of the paper very often. We don't talk about what's going on in the ranks of the federal government. But if you look at the numbers, they're dramatic. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, 79,000 civil servants left the government, which is much larger than the same period under the Obama administration. So there's tremendous turmoil beneath the surface of the water.
- [03:30]
David Remnick
And what about the quality of the people?
- [03:32]
Evan Osnos
What we've seen from the Trump administration, of course, is a huge amount of turmoil in the White House. There's been people coming and going, there's feuds, there's kind of factions. But the real problem has been that they're struggling to fill really crucial jobs across the government with people that know what they're doing. There are about 600 plus jobs that are the most crucial positions at the top of the federal agencies, and about half of those today are still unfilled. We've never had a situation like that, that number of vacancies, and that's because it's been very hard to find people to join who are both politically loyal, personally loyal to the president to the degree that he wants them to be, and then also skilled and expert enough to be able to pass the test.
- [04:14]
David Remnick
What kind of jobs?
- [04:15]
Evan Osnos
These are some of the most important jobs. In the State Department, for instance, right now, we have no ambassador to South Korea. Many of the most important jobs in diplomacy, what are assistant secretaries of state? And you see similar things like that in other departments, places where the president has decided that in order to be able to work for him. The most important piece of this is loyalty.
- [04:39]
David Remnick
His supporters were always eager to compare him to Andrew Jackson, a kind of disruptive candidate and a man of the people who didn't stand on ceremony. You're suggesting another parallel based on how jobs are filled. What's that about?
- [04:51]
Evan Osnos
Well, well, there's been this long running debate in government about do you want to fill jobs on the basis of partisan loyalty or on non partisan expertise. What's more important? And if you go back, Andrew Jackson believed I want to fill the government with people who are personally loyal to me. And one of his friends in the Senate said, to the victor goes the spoils. And that famous declaration is how we got the spoils system, meaning that for most of the 19th century, the government was basically filled with people who were friends and allies of, of the president. Congress at the end of the 19th century said this is really no way to run a government. They got rid of it and they created the civil service, which is the thing we have today that says there are people who are professional experts, these are nonpartisan merit based jobs who rise up through the system.
- [05:34]
David Remnick
So that was in the 19th century, Evan. But wasn't there an overhaul much later, around the time of Richard Nixon?
- [05:40]
Evan Osnos
There was, yeah. Richard Nixon in particular was very wary of civil servants. He thought they were out to get him. He was paranoid about the subject. And internally, inside his White House, they created an instruction manual which was a list of techniques, they called them ways to try to marginalize civil servants. One of the things was to monitor people, give them grades on the basis of whether they seemed loyal to Nixon. And they also came up with methods, something they called the new activity technique, by which they meant you create a new activity that looks meaningful but is in fact meaningless, and then you can assign hundreds or more staffers to that and basically sideline them, take them out of commission. And that was one of the things they did. And when that came to light as a result of Watergate, Congress passed a new round of laws that were really intended to try to protect civil servants and really sort of protect the taxpayers interests so that you didn't have presidents pushing large numbers of government employees into meaningless work.
- [06:35]
David Remnick
You spent months talking to civil servants. It's not usually considered the sexiest kind of political reporting in Washington. But nevertheless, what are the ramifications of so many open jobs and so many dissatisfied civil servants in one bureaucracy after another in dc?
- [06:52]
Evan Osnos
Well, that's the thing that I found really fascinating about this. Look, civil service is the kind of thing that operates below the radar screen. It definitely doesn't make much traction on Twitter every day. But that's where the real meat of government goes on. Those are the people who are preparing to deal in complex negotiations with foreign countries. These are the people who are deciding what kind of information gets out to the public and what is ultimately sidelined, what sort of debate they have all kinds of issues and what's become clear when you talk to enough people is there's tremendous pressure right now on civil servants ever since the Trump administration took office. Pressure on them to do things that in many cases, they feel is inappropriate. That's designed to protect the president's political interests, prevent embarrassment, not to do the work of the civil service, which is not supposed to be related to politics.
- [07:40]
David Remnick
One man who did speak to you on the record and you had quite a number of people speak to you on the record, is named Matthew Allen. Who is he, and why is his story so significant?
- [07:51]
Evan Osnos
Matthew Allen's an interesting case. He's a guy who grew up in Spokane, Washington, and sort of a ranching mining family. Not somebody who ever naturally thought he was going to go into the federal government. Joined the army, ended up working at the Department of Veterans affairs, rose out through the ranks, ended up at the Pentagon working on the counter ISIS campaign. So this is somebody who's a really seasoned civilian public affairs officer, knows his way around government, went over to the Department of the Interior shortly before Trump arrived. And what happened to him there is really a story of what's happening across the government. And he's found himself now, sort of surprising himself, speaking out to say that he's concerned about what's happening in the ranks of the federal government. And he spoke to us for this.
- [08:36]
David Remnick
And I know you're going to speak to him in a moment, but has he put himself in jeopardy by speaking out?
- [08:41]
Evan Osnos
Well, in his view, he didn't really have a choice. He said, look, I can't continue to work in this government and not let it be known how worried I am about what's happening. And he's filed a case believing that he's been unfairly targeted for speaking out against the administration. And we'll see. He believes he has a strong case to make, and he is not going quietly. He is talking about it publicly in ways that a lot of civil servants, I think, frankly, are unwilling to do. It's risky.
- [09:11]
David Remnick
Staff writer Evan Osnos. His article about the civil service is called Trump Versus the Deep State. Here he is with Matthew Allen in Washington.
- [09:21]
Evan Osnos
Matthew, when Trump took office, you were the communications director at the Bureau of Land Management at the Department of Interior. Ryan Zinke came in as the head of the Department of Interior. And what began to change?
- [09:34]
Matthew Allen
You know, there were a lot of changes as soon as the team walked through the door. And I think things felt like they constricted the information flow, felt like it slowed down, that certain people in a tight circle were involved with the meetings and the decision making processes, and it made it difficult to understand which direction we were going.
- [10:03]
Evan Osnos
So at a certain point, you received an order and it had to do with Freedom of Information act requests. What are they and what were you asked to do with them?
- [10:11]
Matthew Allen
The Freedom of Information act permits anyone to petition the government to provide information related to whatever subject matter that they would like. So I was asked by leadership at the Bureau of Land Management to provide an opportunity to review a FOIA request that had to do with those specific individuals. In other words, leadership at the BLM wanted to have the chance to review FOIAs concerning themselves prior to public release.
- [10:47]
Evan Osnos
Is that normal?
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Matthew Allen
That was atypical. Having the approval authority rest with the individual with whom the information concerns seemed like a conflict of interest to me.
- [11:00]
Evan Osnos
And you've worked at the Pentagon, you've worked elsewhere, Department of Veterans Affairs. Had you ever been asked to pass along FOIA requests to the people who were the subject of those inquiries?
- [11:09]
Matthew Allen
No, never.
- [11:12]
Evan Osnos
Information, which is really the field in which you've been working, is something that the administration and Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior put an enormous emphasis on. There's a lot of talk about controlling and maintaining and orienting the flow of information, making sure that the right people have it and the wrong people don't have it, in effect. And that came to impact your job because several memos were leaked in the spring of 2017, a couple months after the new administration had come in. And in those memos it showed that Zinke intended to roll back protections on public land. What happened after they were leaked?
- [11:54]
Matthew Allen
After they were leaked, there was sort of a push in the building amongst the leadership to find out who was leaking the documents and to prevent leaks of the documents. You know, folks stopped sending emails. They started producing things in limited hard copy only.
- [12:14]
Evan Osnos
Stop sending emails?
- [12:16]
Matthew Allen
Correct. They stopped sending around draft documents via email. They would hand out documents at meetings and the documents would be left at the meetings afterwards so that there were no copies that could be sent outside of the building. And that environment in turn, seems to have spawned even more leaks, because certainly in the span since last summer that's persisted. And we've seen numerous stories about other documents that had leaked and other conversations and email threads and things of that nature.
- [12:53]
Evan Osnos
So after some of these documents leaked in the spring of last year, at some point your superiors came to you and asked you to try to plug the leaks, is that right?
- [13:03]
Matthew Allen
Yes, there were a few conversations where first it was asked why I couldn't stop the leaks. And at the time, I had sort of framed it as, number one, I certainly don't have the resources to investigate information leaks. And second, I'm not sure if that's legal to do.
- [13:24]
Evan Osnos
So when you said that, what was the reaction then?
- [13:28]
Matthew Allen
The reaction shifted from why can't you stop the leaks? To veiled accusations that I was in fact, the one leaking the information.
- [13:37]
Evan Osnos
I mean, I gotta ask, were you the one leaking the information?
- [13:40]
Matthew Allen
I was not, no.
- [13:42]
Evan Osnos
So you'd worked in a lot of different parts of the government. You've got a lot of experience in communications. Had you ever been asked to try to plug leaks like this before?
- [13:52]
Matthew Allen
No, I had not. And what struck me was having just beforehand worked at the Department of Defense in what is probably one of the most sensitive current operations that the United States is undertaking. We would still have not leaks of that nature, but information still traveled. And we would address it as professionals, and we would have conversations with reporters, and we would have conversations with different units that were in those areas of Iraq and Syria. And in this situation at the BLM and with the Department of Interior, the level of concern, perhaps even borderline paranoia about the leaks didn't quite warrant the situation in my mind. If the administration or the secretary or the Bureau of Land Management is going to make a decision or take an action, Part of what we're accountable to the American people to provide is our rationale and our reasoning behind why we're taking that action. And it felt to me like there was a reluctance to do that.
- [15:02]
Evan Osnos
There was a reluctance to sort of talk about how they were reaching decisions.
- [15:07]
Matthew Allen
Correct.
- [15:08]
Evan Osnos
And what happened after that?
- [15:10]
Matthew Allen
In the midst of the leak to the Washington Post related to the Monuments Review, I was removed from my position and placed into a staff role at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
- [15:22]
Evan Osnos
Your experience, your training, everything that the government's invested in you over the years has been to help you become a communications professional. Are you now using those skills in this job?
- [15:33]
Matthew Allen
No, I am not.
- [15:34]
Evan Osnos
And is this a promotion, a lateral move, something else?
- [15:38]
Matthew Allen
This would definitely be considered a demotion.
- [15:40]
Evan Osnos
A demotion in Washington. As you know, there's an old saying that when they want to move a civil servant out of a job to get rid of them, in effect that they are turkey farmed, they're sent to a job that has no particular urgency or no sort of central role in the decision making, it sounds to me as if that's more or less what happened to you.
- [16:04]
Matthew Allen
I would say that the position they put me in certainly feels like the intention was that I would have no direct access or intersection with the media, with Congress, with external organizations or non governmental organizations who had received leaked documents from the building.
- [16:28]
Evan Osnos
Some people might wonder, as they heard you talking about your experience, they say, well, you know, the President won an election. This is his government. You took an oath. Why don't you just do what the President and his Cabinet wants you to do?
- [16:44]
Matthew Allen
I think in the circumstance we're talking about, we were there and prepared to do what the President asked of us. The challenge was that we never had the opportunity to do so. My colleagues and I were removed from our positions as soon as it was legally feasible for those types of movements to happen. And it was unprecedented that that sheer quantity of senior executives that was relocated last year and reassigned hadn't been done before. Never in mass, and never for what really appears to be politically motivated reasons.
- [17:25]
Evan Osnos
You know, Matthew, you've been now in a kind of confrontation with the department. Why haven't you quit? Why do you stay?
- [17:36]
Matthew Allen
You know, what's interesting is in eight months, nobody's actually asked me that question. I feel that I took my oath to the Constitution and not to an office and not to an individual. And I serve the American people. And what I've devoted my career to is communicating to the American people what actions their government is taking on their behalf. And I felt that if I were to leave just because things had become unpleasant or difficult, I would be doing a disservice because there are still ways that I can help communicate.
- [18:16]
Evan Osnos
Why did you decide to speak out publicly?
- [18:20]
Matthew Allen
Yeah. So one of my philosophies on communication is maximum disclosure and minimum delay. And it feels to me that I can't be in a position where I'm asking the agency I work for to do that and where I'm asking my employees to do that if I'm not willing to live that as well.
- [18:39]
Evan Osnos
Matthew Allen, thank you very much for talking with us.
- [18:41]
Matthew Allen
Thank you.
- [18:47]
Dorothy Wickenden
That was Matthew Allen talking to Evan Osmos.
- [18:55]
David Remnick
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [19:26]
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