President Donald Trump, recall, is moving to reclassify Federal senior-level civil service employees into a new category (Schedule F for those following along) that would facilitate their hiring and firing outside the existing Federal employment rules that generally serve to keep those employees on the job regardless of their performance quality. That protection tends to obviate the hiring part by reducing the number and availability of slots into which to hire: they’re already (and still) occupied.

That last—ability to hire—is little talked about, as the focus, especially by public unions, has been on job protection rather than job performance.

I said all that to point out all this. One of the beefs about making it easier to fire senior civil servants is this:

Without the existing protections, civil servants in policy-making roles could be replaced by less experienced and knowledgeable staff who more closely subscribe to the administration’s political goals, public-employee advocates said.

What these self-serving advocates omit to say is that, alternatively, civil servants in policy-making roles could be replaced by just as experienced and just as knowledgeable, if not more so, staff. The new staff’s experience, too, would necessarily be broader, as they’d be coming in from outside instead of continuing the hot house echo room (not to mix metaphors or anything) mind set resulting from an extended career buried in the civil service. That increased breadth of experience is dispositive.

Even more dispositive, though, is that more closely subscribe to the administration’s political goals part. Federal employees exist to carry out the administration’s policies and goals, not their own. If they can’t keep up with changing administrations, or choose not to, they’re unfit for continuation.

Full stop.

Oh, and here’s a hint on the breadth of the problem that wants correction [emphasis added]:

The Office of Management and Budget, which played a lead role in crafting the [reclassification] order, submitted its own preliminary list last week, recommending that 425 positions at the office—more than 80% of the entire staff—be categorized as Schedule F[.]

…in our energy-related industries.  A letter in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section laid some out for Louisiana.

…the oil-and-gas industry supports 260,000 jobs in the state, and each industry job generates 3.4 Louisiana jobs in other sectors

That work out to an aggregation of 884,000 jobs in Louisiana alone.

The National Association of State Energy Officials estimates for 4Q2018 that the Traditional Energy sectors (a broader look at our energy industry than just oil-and-gas) employed 2.4 million Americans. Using (albeit naively) Louisiana’s multiplier of 3.4 jobs in other sectors generated by the energy industry, that works out to 8.2 million jobs. That’s 5% of our then-employed Americans.

This is what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to trash with his “transition” away from hydrocarbons as the source of our nation’s energy—the source of our businesses’ and homes’ production and heating/cooling energy.