Episode Details

Change is never easy, and it is especially tough when that change has to right the wrongs committed by opportunists, ideologues, and spendthrifts from times past. Such are the realities of the pains many in the federal government are realizing in the reformative measures being executed by the Trump administration.

This corrective pain will also be felt across our nation to some degree and by everyone, although it won’t be nearly as painful as the far-Left alarmists of the woke ilk are prognosticating.

To be frank, and if we are honest with ourselves, the federal government has turned into a bloated enterprise that—until now—refuses to operate within the constraints of the constitutional framework that created it, with its rank-and-file employees so sheltered from the realities of the world they have come to think they have a “right” to their positions. They do not.

Regardless of what the ideologues and opportunists of the public-sector union leadership and the encroaching judges of the judiciary contend, every federal employee existing under the Executive Branch—that’s every employee of every agency, department, administration, and commission—serves at the pleasure of the President of the United States in one form or another.

So, what does that mean?

To "serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States" means that a person holds their position—usually a high-level government job—only as long as the President wants them to. It’s a phrase rooted in the US Constitution and applies to certain officials, like cabinet members, ambassadors, or other appointees in the Executive Branch. These people don’t have fixed terms or job security in the usual sense; the President can fire them at any time, for any reason—or no reason at all—without needing approval from Congress or anyone else.

It’s tied to the President’s authority to run the Executive Branch as they see fit. The thinking is that the President, as the only leader elected by the whole of the nation, gets to pick a team that aligns with his agenda. So, if a cabinet secretary or an agency head isn’t cutting it in the President’s eyes, they’re out—no legal protections or formal process required, just the President’s say-so.

On the flip side, it also means these officials are directly accountable to the President, not to, say, the public or another branch of government. It’s a loyalty gig. You’re there because the President trusts you to carry out his vision, and when that trust is gone, so are you.

For rank-and-file federal employees—your everyday government workers like clerks, analysts, or technicians—the phrase "serve at the pleasure of the President" doesn’t apply in the same way it does to high-level appointees, but it still applies. These folks are part of the civil service, a system designed to keep the government running smoothly regardless of who’s in the White House. They’re supposed to be hired based on merit, not because of politics or ideology, and that affords them some protections that make their jobs far less shaky than, say, a cabinet secretary’s.

Civil service employees—think of the bulk of people at agencies like the IRS, EPA, or Social Security Administration—fall under laws like the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which abolished the US Civil Service Commission and replaced it with three entities: the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority, establishing a process for discipline and termination. This gives federal employees (civil servants) a degree of job security: they can’t just be fired on a whim by the President or anyone else.

Although the hyperbole of a federal employee be