Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Bloomberg Law, in “Trump HR’s New Essay Question Risks Politicizing Federal Hiring,” by Elias Schisgall. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
A new mandate that federal job applicants demonstrate their commitment to the Trump administration’s policy agenda could tie day-to-day enforcement and compliance work across federal agencies to the White House’s political goals, civil service researchers and former federal officials say. …
Paul DeCamp, a former administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division under President George W. Bush, noted that approaches to enforcement change with each administration and the DOL will not likely see “significant amounts of new employee hiring” under Trump, blunting the policy shift’s impact on the labor agency.
Nonetheless, he said the essay question about the president’s policy agenda raises “red flags,” especially for applicants who “perceive some measure of daylight between the agency’s mission and the articulated policy preferences as stated in the executive orders or elsewhere—that’s where it may start to sound like a political litmus test.”
“From the administration’s standpoint, it seems to try to be aimed at rooting out people who will use their political preferences to undermine the administration, but at the same time, it can also be seen as putting people who don’t necessarily share the administration’s goals at a disadvantage in the hiring process,” DeCamp said.
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