Washington, D.C. –President Chad Hooper of the Professional ManagersAssociation (PMA) - formed in 1981 by IRS Managers as a national membership association representing the interests of professional managers, management officials and non-bargaining unit employees in the federal government- released the following statement regarding the Presidential Executive Order CreatingSchedule F in the Excepted Service:
“The President’s Executive Order effectively strips a significant number of federal employees of their rights by converting them from apolitical, merit-based positions to partisan positions based on loyalty to the President. At the IRS, like all federal agencies, policy positions are already led by a class of political appointees answerable to the President. This class is separate from the thousands of IRS employees in career positions, who simply enact the laws of Congress based not on presidential politics, but loyalty to theConstitution,” Hooper explains. “Already, the American people are provided little transparency into who these individuals are and what experience they bring to the roles they serve. Nonetheless, it is understood that our civil service requires both a political class to formulate policy and a career class based with the expertise to implement that policy.”
“The president is proposing an unnecessary expansion of the political class by converting merit-based positions into partisan positions. This threatens the very core ideals of a government accountable to the American people rather than a political party,” Hooper furthered. “Indeed our nation has seen the dangers of injecting partisanship into the IRS. When accusations of partisan tax enforcement rattled the IRS just 7 years ago, theAmerican people were deeply disturbed by the prospect of a partisan IRS targeting tax penalties on the basis of political affiliation. This executive order allows for these scandals to become common place with little accountability.”
“Career civil servants are the guardian of the equitable delivery of taxpayer services precisely because they swear to enforce the laws of the Congress as per theConstitution rather than the political will of the President. Converting these individuals to partisan positions are removing them at-will when they refuse to serve a partisan agenda is dangerous for our democracy,” Hooper concluded.
