Our Country's Most Valuable Resource

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As we witness the inexorable revelations coming from the House Intelligence Committee’s closed-door hearings, we are being introduced to a whole cast of characters that we never were aware were working for us:  Marie Yovanovich, Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, Phillip Reeker, Laura Cooper to name the most recent.  These people are apolitical, even though the Republican members of the House and Senate would have us believe otherwise.  Republicans and the President’s most ardent allies seem intent on focusing on unsupported accusations made on the loyalty and political leanings of career civil servants who took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, not the President.

These people are the bedrock of our civil service system.  Many of them have served through both Democratic and Republican administrations.  They are straight arrows; people of great integrity and honesty, and now they are being cast as ‘radical liberal bureaucrats’ out to bring down the President.  Republicans cannot dispute the facts they present in their testimony, so their alternative is to dispute the process of oversight.  I wonder if the American Public at large sees the hypocrisy in their protestations.

Elijah Cummings was Chairman of the Oversight Committee in the House, and he was the moral compass for the universe of civil service employees of our democracy.  In today’s Washington Post, there is a reprint of a forward that Cummings wrote for a book by Cedric Alexander entitled:  “In Defense of Public Service: How 22 Million Government Workers Will Save Our Republic”,  I would like to offer you some of what Cummings writes….

I am among those who have not lost confidence in our ability to right the ship of American democratic life, but I also realize that we are in a fight — a fight for the soul of our democracy.

 It was to our Constitution — and not to any political perspective or party — that I gave my oath when I became an officer of the court, when I joined the Maryland legislature and when I was elected to serve in Congress.  It is this commitment that I bring to my work as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the committee that has direct oversight over our federal civil service. From my more than two decades of experience performing this oversight, I can confirm that our nation’s federal employees deserve our respect, gratitude and support.

 When people in the leadership of the nation attack our courts, the members of our Congress, our civil servants and our media, they are attacking the glue that holds our diverse nation together as the United States of America.

And when these attackers do so on the basis of factually unfounded opinion, rather than verifiable evidence, they are engaged in demagoguery of the most dangerous sort.

This is why our civil service, committed to maintaining the rule of law and decision-making based on verifiable facts, is so important to maintaining the legitimacy of our government, both elected and appointed.

 I hold fast to this conviction because the functioning — indeed, the very legitimacy — of our democratic system has been under attack for some time. I am speaking, of course, of the continuing attacks on our elections — from sources both foreign and domestic — and of the failure of too many of my colleagues in Congress and the White House to adequately defend us against those attacks.

For the unity and future of our republic, our Congress must reassert its constitutional obligation of oversight, seeking and obtaining the answers to serious questions of governance that, until now, have gone unanswered. We must perform this constitutional duty so effectively and convincingly that those Americans who support this president and his administration and those who disagree will reach a shared and united answer as to how our nation must proceed.

“My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, [or] the destruction of the Constitution. I hope and trust that all Americans feel — and will do — the same.”

We have lost Cummings as our moral compass protecting what is perhaps our most precious resource as a nation— honest people of integrity with the desire to serve their country.  And even more treacherous are the actions of our President and his administration in their move to dismantle and restructure the independent OPM (Office of Personnel Management).   OPM exists to protect a nonpartisan civil service from politicization.   Plans are still being formulated for putting responsibility for personnel policy under the control of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an executive branch agency. 

From the Washington Post(May 26, 2019):  “Under the Trump plan, responsibility for formulating and approving rules about hiring, firing and more would go to a political appointee whose position would not require Senate confirmation. The government needs dedicated individuals to carry out its core responsibilities based on merit and expertise, not based on whether a president or anyone else approves of their voting preferences, yet this restructuring risks exactly that.  President Trump has sought to slash benefits for federal workers, treated their jobs as bargaining chips for a border wall and lodged countless “deep state” accusations. He has failed to nominate candidates for hundreds of important positions and nominated manifestly unqualified people for other important positions. It has been implicit in all these actions that those in the West Wing today do not value the people who serve this country by working for its government. Tearing up OPM would make their contempt explicit and risk far more than it would fix.

Cummings believed that these people are the ones who will ultimately save our democratic republic.  It is all of our responsibility to honor them for their courage, their honesty and their integrity as we all must search for the truth in the days ahead.