Donald Trump Wants to be Andrew Jackson
Sid Shapiro
Frank U. Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at Wake Forest University Vice President Center for Progressive Reform
If elected to serve a second term, Donald Trump says he supports a plan that would give him the authority to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with members of his political party loyal to him. Under this plan, if he eventually deemed those new employees disloyal, he claims he could fire them too.
As Joe Tomain and I write in the Conversation, the United States has tried such a plan before. Newly elected President Andrew Jackson, after he took office in 1828, fired about half the country’s civil servants and replaced them with loyal members of his political party. The result was not only an utterly incompetent administration, but widespread corruption.
Senior Fellow, ACUS; President Emeritus, William and Mary; former Dean, Cardozo and Tulane Law Schools
4 个月political loyalty Trumps competence