The Trump administration is moving to consolidate Federal employment/termination decisions in the OMB and out of the several separate Departments and agencies.

[DOGE personnel embedded in OMB began issuing] orders that have weakened other agencies’ control over their own workforce, in many cases bringing hiring, firing, and performance evaluation—which for some employees, will soon be based primarily on execution of the president’s agenda—under the purview of OPM.

Previously,

Most of the government is made up of mid- and low-level civil servants whose jobs have historically been sheltered from political hiring decisions.

That’s the problem that badly wants fixing.

Government hiring and firing, at any level of government, needs to be politicized to an extent in order to maximize the likelihood that government employees work to carry out the policies of the incumbent President, Department Secretaries, and agency heads. This does not require a return to full-up patronage, but it does require that what constitutes an assessment of merit include how hard and how effectively that employee works to execute those policies and how well a prospective employee can be expected to do so.