Donald Trump’s administration, in true American style, is demanding that our unelected bureaucracy start to be a meritocracy again. This is likely to lead to yet more federal employees quitting since many of them collect paychecks at our expense without doing anything useful.
Imagine requiring people to be qualified for their jobs and efficient at carrying them out! Competency has long gone out of fashion in the federal bureaucracy, which is likely to be in for a rude awakening under Trump.
The Founding Fathers, from those with aristocratic backgrounds to those from the poorest situations, believed that merit was the most important standard, whether that merit was moral, physical, intellectual, or skillful.
We know the Founders believed in equality, but what does that mean? “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” says the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (emphasis added). Thus the equality of all men consists in the fact that we all have certain unalienable rights. It is not “equity,” where Marxists try to enforce the same outcome for everyone by redistributing money and privilege, regardless of merit.
In other words, every American should be allowed to try and be president or senator or CEO, even though obviously not every American will succeed in obtaining those positions or would be qualified for them (including some of the individuals who recently held or currently hold these positions). You’re guaranteed the right to pursue happiness, not the right to happiness. This is meritocracy.
In that same vein, the Trump administration's Feb. 6 order via the United States Office of Personnel Management stated:
Pursuant to the President’s direction in those executive orders, OPM is developing new performance metrics for evaluating the federal workforce that aligns with the priorities and standards in the President’s recent Executive Orders. To assist OPM in developing those metrics, no later than Friday, March 7, 2025, all agencies should submit data regarding their performance management plans and policies—including those contained in collective bargaining agreements— and identify any barriers to ensuring that 1) agency performance plans make meaningful distinctions based on relative employee performance and 2) the agency has the ability to swiftly terminate poor performing employees who cannot or will not improve. The data request is contained in Appendix 1. OPM will share a data collection template under separate cover. Please send these reports to [email protected].
The order then requests various details on federal employees, including name, job, title, agency, performance improvement plan, etc.
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Ultimately, the elites and their minions among the federal workforce are not worried about Trump‘s move toward meritocracy because it is unjust or unconstitutional but precisely because they know that too much of our bloated bureaucracy is actually peopled by lazy, entitled, woke individuals. The Biden administration specifically hired such people! But there is nothing more American than a push to make government employment at our expense once again a matter of merit rather than DEI wokeness.
