Trump HR’s New Essay Question Risks Politicizing Federal Hiring

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.

The requirement means new hires for a range of typically non-partisan jobs, from food safety inspectors to wage investigators, may become foot soldiers in the Trump administration’s war on the regulatory state, those observers said.

“This will be challenged in the courts unquestionably, but if it is indeed successful, you’re talking about the pervasiveness of politicization that we see at the top of the current Trump administration seeping down to very quotidian interactions with the state,” said William Resh, an incoming professor of the administrative state at Georgia State University.

Many researchers and former agency officials said government staff should be selected solely on their expertise and qualifications, not their views on the president’s policy agenda. And some said new hires could be inclined to unconditionally carry out White House directives, even if they are challenged in court or cut against the agency’s mission.

“Asking individual employees as a criteria of their hiring to advance executive orders which are not necessarily legal—and we’ve some that have been patently illegal—is, I think, improper and contrary to the best examples of human resources in the federal civil service,” said Debra Shore, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden.

The Office of Personnel Management announced May 29 that applicants to a wide range of federal jobs, including many entry-level positions, must respond to four essay questions, including one about how they would “advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities.”

The new questions are part of the “Merit Hiring Plan” to streamline the federal hiring process spurred by the bipartisan Chance to Compete Act, passed last year under Biden. But critics said the questions, which were not included in the legislation, could allow agency leadership to weed out applicants insufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Hiring Overhaul

Any workforce shifts are unlikely to be immediate. A federal hiring freeze lifts July 15 and the Trump administration has spent months reducing agency headcounts.

Some supporters say the federal bureaucracy is already biased toward Democrats and argue that government employees ought to be carrying out administration priorities, especially when they involve combating inefficiencies or waste.

Donald Devine, who served as OPM director in the Reagan administration and co-authored the section of the Project 2025 plan on reforming the bureaucracy, said Trump is trying to hold the civil service accountable to the executive branch—similar to President Jimmy Carter’s goals with the Civil Service Reform Act.

“They’re trying to get the people who work for the government to do what they’re supposed to do from the leader of the executive branch, which is to work on his programs,” Devine said. “That doesn’t mean you have to like him.”

An OPM spokesperson said in an email that the questions have nothing to do with politicizing the civil service, adding that the overhaul will replace “DEI criteria, subjective self-assessments, and overlong resumes” with skills-based assessments and streamlined practices to allow agencies to “hire the most highly-skilled, patriotic Americans at speed and scale.”

“The four essay questions are not an assessment, a screen-out mechanism or a loyalty test, but an opportunity for job seekers to convey to the hiring agency who they are and why they want to work for the government,” the spokesperson wrote.

Critics of the move say workers in departments like the EPA do routine public health work of enforcing clean air and water standards—duties that should remain independent of partisan politics.

“The writing of regulations, how you enforce the laws passed by Congress—that’s meat and potatoes of a lot of agency work,” said Jacqueline Simon, public policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees. “What happens when that’s all politicized?”

‘Meaningless Paperwork’

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.

Other former federal agency leaders said the new application process threatens the professionalism of nonpartisan government work. Debbie Berkowitz, a former senior policy adviser to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama, said the change goes “a step beyond” the typical policy shifts between administrations.

“It’s a way to completely undermine the agency,” Berkowitz said, adding that the memo will “assure that you will no longer have expertise in the agency you need to keep workers safe.”

Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, said applicants for many positions may simply come up with standard, noncontroversial language to answer the essay prompt.

“Look at all the technical jobs of the government. If you’re an air traffic controller, what the hell does this mean? Is there a Republican or Democratic or a liberal or a conservative way to land an airplane?” Kamarck said. “It’s a lot of meaningless paperwork, frankly.”