It may have looked like President Donald Trump did nothing for the last two years except shuttle between rallies and trials with an occasional stop at McDonald’s, but that’s not the case.
The blizzard of executive orders this week was the culmination of years of work by the Trump team to develop policy, recruit political appointees to implement it and nuke the bureaucracy’s ability to block the president’s agenda.
Axios reported that in late April 2022, wealthy donors and Trump allies gathered at Mar-a-Lago. They were there to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit founded by Trump’s former deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, now nominated as OMB Director. The crowd heard stories about Trump and Vought’s fights with “a deep state that had tried to thwart them.”
The events included a panel discussion titled, “Battling the Deep State.” Kash Patel, now nominated to be FBI director, was one of the panelists, as was the senior attorney at OMB, Mark Paoletta.
When Trump was re-elected, they were ready.
On Jan. 20, President Trump signed an executive order to implement Schedule F, a change to the civil service that allows the president to fire any of the tens of thousands of government employees whose jobs are of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character,” as determined by the president.
Schedule F was originally created by an executive order during the last month of Trump’s first term, but President Joe Biden rescinded that order on Day Three of his administration.
Biden’s action reflected the wishes of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents hundreds of thousands of federal workers. AFGE National President Everett Kelley called Schedule F “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes,” claiming it would “politicize and corrupt the professional service” if the president and his appointees could “hire and fire these workers at will.”
The government has been running independently of the elected officials sent to Washington by the voters, staffed by federal workers who can’t be fired.
For example, in the first month of Trump’s first term, State Department employees revolted against the new president’s policies regarding refugees. The Washington Post even published a story about the “growing wave of opposition from the federal workers” whose job, supposedly, was to implement the president’s agenda.
Something similar happened during the Biden administration. In an April 2023 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Joe Manchin described an agreement he had with the president about what the Inflation Reduction Act would do. “It would give us energy security, it would bring manufacturing back to America as quickly as possible,” he said. It would also pay down debt and reduce reliance on materials from China. But their agreement was ignored by the bureaucracy.
“Different parts of his administration [were] basically administering it and writing rules and regulations that are totally foreign to what we did,” Manchin told NBC News. “I’m hopeful that the president will step forward and tell his administration, ‘We will follow the law. We will do what the bill was intended to do.’”
You see the problem.
The American people elect the president and the Congress, but the permanent federal workforce is the government, accountable to nobody.
Why should an elected U.S. senator who agreed to vote for a costly bill have to be “hopeful” that the president will “tell his administration” to follow the law?
Why should a president who campaigned on a promise to enforce immigration law, and was elected to do it, be stuck with a federal workforce that won’t implement his policies?
According to a new statement from Everett Kelley of the federal workers’ union, efforts at “undermining the apolitical civil service” turn the federal government into “an army of yes-men loyal only to the president, not the Constitution.”
Not really. The Constitution makes the president the head of the executive branch of government, and it doesn’t give federal employees a veto over his policy choices.
Kelley was complaining about a Jan. 21 memo from the Office of Personnel Management ordering the closure of all “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) offices” in the federal government.
The memo followed a Trump executive order on Jan. 20 terminating all DEI programs. “Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements,” the order stated.
When an entire government department is shut down because it’s no longer needed, the usual employment protections don’t apply to federal workers in that department. It’s called a “reduction in force.” Employees may be able to move into other positions, but there are no guarantees.
That’s a key part of the Trump plan. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, can identify regulations to eliminate, then terminate the departments in charge of those regulations.
And Schedule F will allow the president and his appointees to implement their policies, firing any policy-making bureaucrats who try to block them.
Then there’s another Trump executive order signed on Jan. 20 that makes changes to the performance reviews of members of the Senior Executive Service. It’s titled, “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives.”
The Civil Service was created by the Pendleton Act in 1883 in the belief that a professional, nonpartisan workforce was better than a political patronage system. However, when this workforce was combined with the “administrative state” that evolved out of the New Deal in the 1930s, with ironclad employment protections layered on later, the result was an ever-more-powerful government that never had to answer to elected officials or to voters.
Until now.
Less than a week into the new administration, it appears that President Donald Trump has built a path out of the bureaucracy’s quicksand, or a spectacular bridge over it.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley