Federal Insider: The faulty logic behind Trump's plan to freeze federal hiring

Freeze and fire — opposites in nature, but pillars of Donald Trump’s approach to the federal workforce.

The president-elect plans to freeze federal hiring soon after taking office to fight corruption. Freezes have been imposed before — although not with that contorted reasoning — with results ranging from ineffective to injurious. He also wants to fire federal workers faster in the Department of Veterans Affairs, and two of his top advisers are pushing fast-track terminations governmentwide.

There are serious problems with both positions. Depending on the rationale, the freeze plan defies good reason or is simply bad policy. Talk of accelerated firing is red meat for Trump supporters, but without careful planning that could threaten civil service protections for the public.

Let’s examine each proposition — freeze today, fire in a later column.

Trump’s “Contract with the American People” calls for “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)” as part of his first-100-day agenda. The contract promotes it as one of six measures “to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, D.C.”

The problem with Trump’s logic is obvious. To the extent there is corruption, it certainly is not the fault of those who have not yet been hired by the government. Yet that’s the main group a freeze would affect.

Trump’s transition operation did not respond to questions for this column, but last month Hope Hicks, his campaign spokeswoman, sent me this unconvincing argument for a freeze fighting corruption: “In the long term, a smaller federal workforce will mean a more honest and effective government, in which it is harder to hide corruption.”

Reducing the federal workforce long has been pushed by Republicans, but generally they provide more details than Trump has. House Republicans, for example, endorsed a 10 percent workforce cut through attrition over three years in their fiscal 2012 budget proposal prepared by then-House Budget Committee chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker. That document did not, however call for a hiring freeze. In 2010, a bipartisan commission on fiscal responsibility suggested reaching the 10 percent target with a hiring slowdown — two new employees for every three who leave federal service.