WASHINGTON — Democratic senators on Wednesday asked a top Trump administration official for details on the salaries of President Donald Trump’s political appointees and raised questions about the administration’s urging of agency leaders to max out the amount of taxpayer dollars allowed for these jobs while ignoring the standard hiring process.
In a new letter to Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, eight senators asked for the salary information of all so-called “Schedule C” appointees, or people who Trump appointed to lower-level policy roles across federal agencies.
Led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the senators asked Ezell to justify an April 10 memo he issued to the heads of all agencies, reminding them of the “great flexibility” they have when setting the pay for Schedule C employees. In sending this memo, Ezell bypassed the authority of each agency’s human resources department to set the terms for these appointments.
Between the memo and the administration’s efforts to purge tens of thousands of career civil servants from the U.S. government, it “makes clear your intention,” the senators wrote to Ezell. “Fire dedicated public servants in droves, cut essential government services, and use taxpayer dollars to instead hire underqualified and overpaid political cronies.”
