Senators Roger Marshall and Eric Schmitt co-sponsored the bill.
Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) introduced a new bill Wednesday evening that would impose twelve-year term limits on federal employees.
The “Tenure Evaluation and Rotation Mandate Act,” if passed and enacted, would prevent unelected officials in executive agencies from making lifelong careers in the federal government. There are notable exceptions under the proposed legislation, however. Presidential appointees, federal law-enforcement officers, military-service members, and Department of Defense employees are all exempt, according to the bill’s text.
The “TERM Act” accounts for current federal employees who serve in one or more positions during their tenure, prohibiting them from serving past twelve years in most cases.
For example, if current employees serve at least nine years, they have a three-year window to find another job upon enactment of the legislation so that nobody is fired on the spot. In this situation, some current federal employees could technically end up working for more than twelve years. However, for others under nine years of service when the bill takes effect, they are capped at twelve years.
The bill also prohibits an employee from reaching twelve years, leaving service, and then returning to work; but if someone leaves service before the twelve-year mark, they can be rehired and serve the remaining time they are eligible for.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) co-sponsored the bill with Marshall.
“For too long, Washington D.C. has continued the status quo to the detriment of hard-working Americans. Look at where we are today: $33 Trillion in debt and paying $900 Billion in interest annually,” Marshall said in a statement exclusively provided to National Review. “D.C. ‘beltway insiders’ and bureaucrats are entrenched in this dysfunction and wield a lot more power than they should in negotiations, often oblivious to the cost of their decisions on American taxpayers. Washington D.C. is broken, and term limits on members of Congress as well as career-unelected ‘politicos’ would be a great first step in returning the power to the people we serve.”
Marshall is also an original co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment that would impose a twelve-year term limit for U.S. senators and a six-year term limit for U.S. representatives, which he has repeatedly supported since first becoming a congressman in 2016. With the TERM Act, the Kansas senator is now allowing term limits to extend into the nation’s federal bureaucracies.
The notion of imposing term limits on federal bureaucrats has gained steam on the national stage recently, in part due to an effort by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has publicly supported eight-year term limits for such individuals. If elected president, he plans on cutting 75 percent of the federal workforce by the end of his first term, 50 percent of which would be done by his first year, in an attempt to reduce costs.
Ramaswamy has also spoken of abolishing several federal agencies, including the FBI and Department of Education, to end the so-called “administrative state” based in Washington, D.C.