In September 1993, months after newly elected President Bill Clinton put Vice President Al Gore in charge of “Reinventing Government,” Gore presented a report titled, “From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less.”
Thirty years later, a remembrance of it was published in “Government Executive,” an online news daily that describes its readers as “high-ranking civilian and military officials responsible for defending the nation and carrying out the laws.”
“I’m most proud of changing the culture of many of the government’s regulatory and enforcement agencies,” wrote project director Bob Stone. “They were all a little different, but they changed from being adversaries to being partners with the businesses and individuals they oversaw.”
That’s exactly what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been telling us for years.
Newly re-elected former President Donald Trump has just nominated Bobby Kennedy to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Very soon, a lot of those “partners” could be walking out of their government offices carrying their personal items in a cardboard box.
Kennedy has vowed to put an end to conflicts of interest in federal agencies. He’s not a fan of regulators who act like ambitious future employees of the companies they regulate, instead of protecting the public.
A lot of government employees will need cardboard boxes for their belongings if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are able to pull off what Trump just appointed them to do: launch a Department of Government Efficiency to advise the new administration on how to conduct massive downsizing of the federal bureaucracy.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies — essential to the ‘Save America’ movement,” Trump said.
DOGE, the new venture’s acronym, is a reference to a viral meme of a cute dog with its thoughts and emotions expressed in the mixed-up English that humans imagine their dogs would speak. “MUCH WOW,” for instance.
The emblem of the new department should be a dog holding a scythe and a mop.
Musk predicted that cutting bureaucracy will be “tedious work” that will “make lots of enemies.”
But there’s a shortcut that could make DOGE “much easy.”
Every time there’s a down-to-the-wire budget fight and a government shutdown looms ahead, all government departments in the federal bureaucracy are required to prepare a list of essential employees. Those are the people who will have to come to work even if the government is closed.
Get those lists. Fire everybody who’s not on them.
Of course, most civil servants can’t be fired so easily. They could be transferred, or given lavish compensation in exchange for “separating” voluntarily. Musk has floated the idea of offering government workers two years of salary if they’ll leave.
What if they still won’t go?
Trump has another card up his sleeve. In October 2020, Trump signed an executive order implementing “Schedule F.” It transformed an estimated 50,000 civil servants into at-will employees who could be fired by the president.
Joe Biden reversed that executive order immediately upon taking office, but Trump has promised to restore Schedule F. All government employees who work in jobs with a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” would be subject to replacement as a result of a presidential transition, instead of having full civil-service protection against being fired.
Currently there are about 4,000 government jobs that are filled by presidential appointment. Schedule F would expand that number by tens of thousands, or possibly hundreds of thousands. In February, the National Treasury Employees Union said it had obtained documents from the first Trump administration indicating that the reach of Schedule F would have extended to many more federal employees than previously thought.
Government employee unions lobbied Congress for permanent protection from Schedule F, unsuccessfully. However, the Biden administration’s Office of Personnel Management finalized a new rule in April that gives employees more rights against Schedule F if any future administration were to bring it back.
It’s coming back, and the Trump administration can repeal the Biden rule or replace it with a new one very quickly. Typically, proposed regulations require notice and a period for public comment, but sometimes agencies can issue an “interim” final rule, which is effective immediately upon publication with public comment later. And the president can also sign an executive order requiring agencies to prepare for the implementation of Schedule F while rulemaking proceeds.
The argument in favor of Schedule F is simple: permanent government employees are not elected, and if they think it’s their job to block or slow-walk the policies of the elected president of the United States, the president should be able to fire them and replace them with people who will not try to stymie the will of the voters.
The argument against Schedule F is that civil servants are “guardrails” who take an oath to uphold the Constitution and must use their experience and expertise to serve the American people.
But there’s nothing in the Constitution that gives government employees a check on the elected officials of the United States. The civil service is not a fourth branch of government.
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This is a point the U.S. Supreme Court drove home earlier this year by overruling the 1984 decision in a landmark case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The now-revoked Chevron doctrine held that federal agencies had nearly unlimited power to interpret the laws they administered, and courts had to defer to the agencies’ interpretations. That, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, was “fundamentally misguided.”
So the incoming Trump administration will have the power and the tools to significantly reduce the size and the cost of the federal bureaucracy. Entire agencies could be eliminated. Even Cabinet-level departments could go. Musk and Ramaswamy are not government employees and will not be paid. Their deadline to finish the job is July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The fireworks start soon. Much wow.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley