James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column, “Mission Impossible: Swamp Protocol,” celebrates the latest good news from the capital — a strong jobs report, bureaucratic downsizing, and a new executive order that has reclassified roughly 8,000 senior federal officials in policymaking roles as at-will employees, no longer insulated from the elected leadership that found them inconvenient. He frames this as democratic accountability. He is correct about the reclassification. He has merely declined to state what the reclassification actually says.
Strip the euphemism. “At-will employee” is the English language’s cleanest admission that a worker is a unit whose maintenance may be discontinued at any moment, for any reason, provided the reason is not one the courts have specifically forbidden. The 8,000 senior officials have been moved from the column of the ledger marked “tenured asset” to the column marked “replaceable input,” and the only difference between the columns is whether the employer must justify the discontinuation. The justification is the expense of keeping the unit on the books after its productivity has been adjudged insufficient by the man who signs the requisitions. The at-will employee is a unit whose employer has retained the right to Cato’s disposal list — “sell the old slave, the sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous” — without the inconvenience of an auction. The auction is the severance package. The at-will worker gets neither.
Freeman writes that the 8,000 have been converted into “employees who are accountable to the elected leadership, not superbureaucrats insulated from democratic authority.” The phrase “accountable to the elected leadership” is the public-administration euphemism for “may be terminated at the elected leadership’s pleasure.” The elected leadership’s pleasure is a variable, and the variable is set by the leadership’s political requirements, not by the worker’s output. The worker who is accountable to a politician is a worker whose job security is measured in polling margins, and the polling margin is a depreciation schedule the worker cannot read and the politician cannot admit he uses. The honest at-will contract would state this plainly: “Your continued employment is contingent on the continued political convenience of your continued employment.” The executive order omits that language because the language is the content, and the content is that the state has adopted, for its own workforce, the employment model it has spent a century permitting the private sector to operate.
The private sector has always understood that the at-will worker is a breathing input whose price is set by the replacement cost of the next breathing input. My grandfather’s employer did not need to call its workers at-will because the supply was infinite and the maintenance cost was set at zero. The SS invoiced IG Farben one and a half Reichsmarks per day for a child’s labor, and the child who failed the output threshold was returned to the disposal queue and replaced. The at-will worker is the same arithmetic, translated into a less efficient supply chain: the supply is not infinite, but it is large enough that the replacement cost is negligible against the cost of retaining a worker whose political alignment has diverged from the elected leadership’s requirements. The politician who terminates a Schedule F employee is performing the same calculation as the floor manager who replaces a picker whose rate drops below the scanner’s threshold. The scanner is not cruel. The scanner is honest. The politician’s scanner is the polling average, and the polling average has just instructed the politician to clear 8,000 units.
The strongest part of Freeman’s argument is the part he treats as obvious: the private sector is thriving, and the public sector is a parasitic weight on the productive economy that elected leadership has a mandate to trim. He is correct about the mandate, and he is correct that trimming a workforce is always good news for the balance sheet that finances it. His error is in assuming the trimming is a special case. The 8,000 were uniquely insulated, uniquely unaccountable, uniquely overdue for correction. In fact, the at-will worker is the generic case, and the insulated bureaucrat was the anomaly the market has now corrected. The 8,000 have been moved from the anomaly column to the generic column, and the generic column is where every worker in the private sector already lives. The fast-food worker replaced by a kiosk was at-will. The warehouse picker idled above the scanner’s threshold was at-will. The Packers Sanitation child who cleaned the brisket saw at three in the morning and was replaced when the Department of Labor issued a fine was at-will, and the fine was $15,138 per child, which is the at-will termination cost, paid to the state rather than to the child. The 8,000 are being introduced to the condition the market has always considered normal, and the market is what is real.
Freeman’s libertarian frame cannot admit the terminus of his own argument, which is that the at-will worker is a unit the employer has the right to discard the moment the unit’s cost exceeds its yield. The employer’s right is not contingent on the unit’s performance; it is contingent on the employer’s assessment of the unit’s performance, and the assessment is a variable the employer sets. The politician’s assessment of a Schedule F employee’s performance is a function of the employee’s perceived loyalty, which is a function of the employee’s willingness to implement the politician’s priorities, which is a function of the employee’s understanding that refusal means termination. This is not accountability. This is the employment contract perfected — the worker’s only defense is obedience, and obedience is a commodity the market prices at the cost of the next obedient worker. The apostle understood this. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ.” The command contains no arbitration clause. The Schedule F order is the command made statutory, and the statute is Ephesians 6:5 with a personnel action form attached.
Freeman closes by noting that a gracious reader has responded to his query about what could possibly go wrong in Washington. The reader’s answer is that everyone is having a lovely time. The reader is correct. The productive class is having a lovely time because the consuming class has just been informed that its sinecures are revocable, and the consuming class’s panic is the productive class’s entertainment. The 8,000 have spent their careers believing that a government job was a life-support contract. The executive order has corrected the error. A job is not a life-support contract. A job is a wage, and a wage is the price of a unit for the duration of its usefulness. The Schedule F worker has just discovered that the duration has been shortened to the length of the next election cycle, and the election cycle is a scanner the worker cannot see and cannot appeal. The scanner is not cruel. It is honest. The worker has been priced. The market has voted.