Trump Lifts Federal Hiring Freeze in Move That Could Mean More Top-Level Hires at FCC
President Donald Trump lifted the federal hiring freeze Wednesday, even while the administration is pushing most agencies to cut staffing levels. Industry and FCC officials said the change means Chairman Ajit Pai has some additional wiggle room to staff up in areas with unfilled positions and to bring in his own people in some key positions. Some observers had expressed concerns that Trump’s Jan. 23 freeze could slow work on Pai’s agenda (see 1703220041).
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Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters the new Trump policy will affect different agencies in different ways. Mulvaney singled out the State Department and EPA as places that will see cuts. He didn’t mention the effect on independent agencies like the FCC and FTC. The FCC declined to comment.
The communications regulator hasn’t been on the firing line in the same way as the EPA and some other agencies, industry and agency officials said. Pai is casting himself as a team player, so he's unlikely to make a huge number of hires. So far, his leadership team is made up mostly of holdovers from the past administration, often holding positions on an acting basis. Pai has freedom to hire a handful of noncareer Senior Executive Service (SES) and Schedule C political employees even with the freeze.
The FCC has a lot of unfilled slots, with a number of staffers having left the agency before the start of the Trump presidency, said Gigi Sohn, a top aide to ex-Chairman Tom Wheeler. “It’ll allow the chairman to get his own people in there,” she said. “He’ll be able to bring in senior people, kind of the way Wheeler did. He’ll be able to bring in people he knows well or people he trusts. It’ll just allow him to have kind of a kitchen cabinet of senior people.” Sohn is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations.
Sohn said Pai likely has freedom to make hires without raising concerns at the White House. “He has been a pretty damn good soldier,” she said. “If President Trump is all about deregulation, you can’t really complain that Ajit Pai hasn’t walked that line. I can’t imagine the White House is going to begrudge him getting senior people to run his bureaus.”
The hires Pai makes are critical and details matter, said Mark Jamison, University of Florida professor and member of the Trump transition landing team for the FCC. “The challenge the FCC has faced for years is that it is easier to hire attorneys than almost any other discipline,” Jamison said. “The agency really needs economic analysis and an understanding of markets. If these actions have a way of increasing flexibility for the FCC, then the chairman and his fellow commissioners could make great progress in revitalizing the agency.”
“By focusing on long-run fundamental change, the White House is picking up where the transition left off,” said Jeff Eisenach, also a member of Trump’s FCC transition team. “The chairman’s early moves, especially his initiative to create new bureau of economics, seem fully aligned with the White House’s reform agenda.”
“There are going to be some places where [agencies] have the ability to reduce size immediately and they may be called upon to do that in order to line up with the president’s priorities,” Mulvaney said during the Tuesday briefing. “There may be other places where they don’t have that flexibility and they’ll have to figure out a way over the course of time to, through ordinary attrition, to get to where they need to be.” Mulvaney said all federal agencies should “look to the budget blueprint and fashion your hiring and the paring down of your workforce consistent with the budget.”
Mulvaney released a plan Wednesday instructing government agencies to look for areas for additional cuts. “Too often the focus has been on creating new programs instead of eliminating or reforming programs which are no longer operating effectively,” the plan said. “The result has been too many overlapping and outdated programs, rules, and processes, and too many Federal employees stuck in a system that is not working for the American people.”
National Treasury Employees Union National President Tony Reardon slammed the Trump plan. NTEU represents some FCC employees. “The guidance seems to be little more than opening the door to increased contracting out of agency functions and services,” Reardon said in a news release. “The functions of government need to be performed and when there are not enough federal employees to do the work, agencies simply shift it to unaccountable private-sector contractors.”