You know the federal government has a bureaucracy problem. In his first term, Donald Trump declared war on the Deep State, and created a path forward for removing “rogue bureaucrats” from the system. The Biden administration has sought to reverse Trump’s plans to protect the bureaucrats from accountability, but Trump has promised to move forward once he is reelected. In The American Conservative, Peter Van Buren explains:
Earlier formats of government were all appointees, leading to massive corruption in the hiring process and incompetent partisans being appointed to what should have been key jobs. As a result, the mail did not get sorted properly and the tariffs were not collected correctly, except if by chance a competent person squeezed through the system. There was no way a president and his team could monitor employees at the day-to-day level, either to ensure their minimal competence or to protect them from arbitrary firing to clear the way for the nephew of someone more important.
Creating the civil service was a good idea in theory—protect the workers from politics, and make sure the mail gets sorted and the tariffs get collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy.
The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” which might see them oppose the president’s plans and initiatives (think civilian Alexander Vindman types.) They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. Nobody voted for them; most people cannot name one of them. This is what Trump wants to change. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants (perhaps part of the deep state) at will. They would be “excepted service” employees under the new Schedule F. In addition to Trump’s first term nascent attempt, this has been tried before; an effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy failed. Schedule F proponents seek to implement the proposal through legal means.
“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said last year. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”
The Republican party’s platform makes similar claims toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies: “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents. We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.” Independent of the Party and Trump, the now disavowed Project 2025 advocates for much of the same things, backed up by a database of some 20,000 people whom it feels might fill the newly-opened former civil service jobs. The Project is not kidding around as to its goal with Schedule F—the aim is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
How many employees are we talking about out of the 2 million civil servants? A drop in the bucket. One Trump official who worked on Schedule F estimated it could apply to some 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies think it would not be necessary to fire anywhere near that many workers because firing a few would produce the desired “behavior change.” But other former Trump officials’ comments and actions led one professor to conclude that the 50,000 figure “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”
Action Line: There’s too much government, and the government itself is too protected from the reforms Americans know it desperately needs. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter. Read more about the Deep State below.
