‘School For Bureaucrats’ Axed By Trump Executive Order

President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order Monday closing a federal executive staff development school.

Though not well-known to the general public, the Federal Executive Institute was terminated “to refocus Government on serving taxpayers, competence, and dedication to our Constitution, rather than serving the Federal bureaucracy,” according to the order.

The FEI was created by the Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 as a senior staff college “to endow the career leadership levels of the federal government with the capacity and motivation to bring proactive change to a huge enterprise” according to a history of the school. An alumni organization boasts some 600 members, and the institute claims to have trained around 30,000 senior-level staffers, as well as many more junior staffers and interested persons.

“But,” Trump wrote in his order, “bureaucratic leadership over the past half-century has led to Federal policies that enlarge and entrench the Washington, D.C., managerial class, a development that has not benefited the American family.”

The campus, located about a mile from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (with which it shared a working relationship), is located in a former luxury hotel. The bucolic campus sports architecture reminiscent of the White House. In addition to classrooms and offices, it features single-occupancy guest rooms, an outdoor swimming pool, and fitness gymnasium for program participants, in addition to an optional health training element.

The school was founded by Johnson due to a massive increase of federal workers following Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal and during Johnson’s Great Society plan. Government Employees Training Act of 1958 further underscored a move toward training this new army of bureaucrats the way military academies had done for officers. Prior to this, private-sector think tanks such as the Brookings Institution provided any outside training. Agencies such as the Civil Service Commission (CSC) had already begun building executive training facilities for rank-and-file staffers, but FEI, under the CSC at the time, would focus on management-level staff and executives.

More recently under the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the school offered various levels of federal employment courses in management, leadership coaching, and assessments. Higher-level classes focus on “Leadership for a Democratic Society” (the name of its four-week flagship program), constitutional theory, and global relations. “Built upon foundational public service values and competencies, our programs support federal leaders in understanding their role within the government’s constitutional framework. By encouraging introspection through small group work, participants build learning communities, where everyone is both a teacher and learner,” the website stated.

Much of the curriculum was designed to augment agency-level education programs, the FEI website stated. The school charged a fee for courses, but was eligible for reimbursement on a case-per-case basis.

The most recent newsletter article from the alumni association urged readers to “embrace grace” when it comes to Trump’s federal spending cuts — relating to the famed Kübler-Ross Change Curve progression of shock, denial, depression, and later acceptance. One wonders what the next article will suggest now that FEI has been closed?