Donald Trump vows to root out the uncooperative public servants who constrained his first term and replace them with loyalists. “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,” he told rallygoers in March last year. Bringing the sprawling federal bureaucracy to heel is necessary if he’s to realize his agenda: shutting down the southern border, building “vast holding facilities” for migrants facing deportation, and prosecuting his political enemies.
Under current law, the vast majority of the 2.1 million-member federal workforce are “career” civil servants. The president can only fill about 4,000 political appointment positions across the federal bureaucracy. The rest serve in their role regardless of who occupies the White House and cannot be fired for political reasons. To “restore government that is controlled by the people,” as Trump put it, he plans to bring back “Schedule F,” an executive order he issued in the waning days of his first term that Joe Biden rescinded before it could go into effect. Trump officials planned to use Schedule F to convert as many as two-thirds of protected civil servants into political appointees who could be fired and replaced by executive fiat. Out with the nonpartisan experts loyal to the law; in with the cronies loyal to Trump.
Under the early spoils system of the American government, jobs were awarded based on loyalty to a party or president rather than qualifications. The system was eradicated after aspiring diplomat Charles Guiteau shot and killed newly-elected President James Garfield in July 1881 for the slight of refusing Guiteau a consulship in Europe. (Guiteau had played a small role in getting him elected and felt entitled to a prominent position in government.) In response, Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, enacted the Pendleton Act of 1883, which mandated that federal positions be granted based on merit instead of patronage, and the federal civil service was born. By 1909, merit-based appointments constituted two-thirds of the federal workforce.
Schedule F could functionally restore the old spoils system. A federal bureaucracy loyal to Trump would give him unprecedented power over the government, including the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and other departments and agencies historically run with minimal political interference. And unlike four years ago, Trump now benefits from a reserve corps of loyalists ready to fill the tens of thousands of would-be government vacancies. Right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation are pouring millions of dollars into building databases of recruits and training programs to prepare them for loyal service.
These plans may sound like the fevered scheming of a singularly authoritarian leader and his cultish supporters. But such plans have a long history in the conservative movement. If Trump succeeds, it will be the realization of the Republican Party’s decades-long crusade to seize control of the civil service.
Richard Nixon intensely distrusted the permanent government when he entered the Oval Office in 1969. The former representative, senator, and vice president fretted to his staff about liberal bias among civil servants and fumed about the supposed “Jewish cabal” of “liberals” and “academics” in government undermining his authority.
So began a secretive political purge. Civil servants deemed untrustworthy were reassigned to obscure roles and replaced by loyalists. The purge was led by the late Nixon aide Fred Malek, who suggested in a memo later obtained by investigative journalist Jack Anderson that they “stop calling it ‘politicizing the executive branch’ and, instead, call it something like strengthening the government’s responsiveness.” That gave the program its euphemistic title: the Responsiveness Program. (For his many revelations about the administration’s misdeeds, Anderson was the target of a failed assassination plot ordered by Nixon in 1972.)
The Responsiveness Program was, for a time, successful. Under pressure from White House Counsel John Dean, the IRS began hounding Nixon’s political enemies with tax audits. The Small Business Administration awarded grants to Nixon’s friends. The Central Intelligence Agency kept at least one of the president’s enemies under illegal surveillance.
But other attempts to strong-arm federal agencies went nowhere—a telling sign of the resilience of civil service norms. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was an unlikely “bulwark against the president’s attempts to politicize and undermine the federal bureaucracy,” as his biographer Beverly Gage wrote. Not exactly a grand champion of civil liberties, Hoover nevertheless rejected Nixon’s insistence that the FBI further expand surveillance of civil rights and anti-war protesters beyond its already substantial forays into that area.
Watergate ended Nixon’s political career and his efforts to politicize federal agencies. “If he had been able to pull it off, it would have amounted to almost a coup against our existing form of government,” Anderson wrote. Evidence of the lawbreaking Responsiveness Program came to light in 1977, when Democrats took control of the Civil Service Commission, the agency responsible for protecting civil service workers (later replaced by today’s Office of Personnel Management), and uncovered evidence of this “Little Watergate.”
When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the fledgling Heritage Foundation issued its first “Mandate for Leadership”—a precursor to the organization’s “Project 2025” plan for the Trump administration. The paper did not go so far as to recommend the mass elimination of civil service protections the way “Project 2025” would. Still, it laid out a novel vision for downsizing government and aligning the federal bureaucracy with conservative goals.
With “Mandate for Leadership” as his governing blueprint, Reagan took unprecedented steps to ensure ideological conformity across his administration. “I will not accept the supposed ‘wisdom’ which has it that the federal bureaucracy has become so powerful that it can no longer be changed or controlled by any administration,” he declared.
The Reagan administration empowered political appointees to use all means to overrule and subvert the government’s career civil servants. “With personnel actions sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, it has put out a message that it expects ideological loyalty at the high levels of career service,” the Washington Post reported in 1983. “The political appointees, moreover, have brought a missionary zeal to their task, figuring that they have 50 years of history to reverse.”
Some examples: At the Department of the Interior, Secretary James G. Watt fired 28 career lawyers who opposed the development of natural resources under the flimsy pretense of budgetary cutbacks. When openings in the legal office soon opened up and one of the lawyers, Derb Carter, reapplied for his job, he was questioned about his political beliefs, which violated Civil Service rules.
At OSHA, Dr. Peter F. Infante, the head of its Office of Carcinogen Classification, was almost fired by OSHA’s administrator, Thorne G. Auchter, after the industry-backed Formaldehyde Institute complained to Auchter that Infante had publicly disputed a government finding that there was insufficient evidence to call formaldehyde a carcinogen. (When Congress caught wind of the plan to fire Infante, Auchter backed off.)
At the EPA, Dr. Adrian Gross, the chief of the toxicology branch in the Hazard Evaluation Division, was transferred to an obscure post after Gross accused his superiors of improperly helping two chemical companies register an insecticide called permethrin that Gross said was a carcinogen.
Similar episodes played out at the Department of Energy, the Merit System Protection Board, and elsewhere.
In 2001, the Heritage Foundation issued a policy paper, “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel,” that warned George W. Bush’s incoming administration of the “immense power and political sophistication of the federal employee network and its allies and the intensity of its resistance to serious change” and implored Bush to take “managerial control of government” even further.
Bush did just that. The Texan led “a crusade to replace expert judgment in federal agencies with political calculation, to marginalize or eliminate longtime civil servants, to change laws without going through Congress, to silence dissenting views within the government, and to centralize decision-making in the White House,” a report from the magazine Government Executive found.
Bush empowered partisan appointees to stack the civil service with loyalists. At the State Department, one high-ranked appointee listed loyalty to Bush as a job requirement for a weapons of mass destruction program. A Pentagon appointee selected candidates for Iraq reconstruction assignments based on whether they’d voted for the president, effectively putting a team of young, underqualified partisans in charge of essential elements of Iraqi reconstruction. A Justice Department appointee screened applicants by running their names and keywords such as “guns,” “abortion,” and “Florida recount” through search engines to assess their feelings about those issues and identify “good Americans.”
Career experts at the CDC, EPA, NASA, and other agencies were cowed into silence by their partisan superiors. For example, when the chief Medicare actuary, Richard Foster, was preparing to issue a warning to Congress that proposed prescription drug reforms could cost more than the White House acknowledged, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Thomas A. Scully, a political appointee, threatened to fire him.
Others quit. The Washington Post reported that a “brain drain” of career experts at FEMA meant private sector contractors took over much of the disaster response and even policymaking. As a result, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the agency was caught unprepared and mounted a gravely inadequate response.
In 2016, Trump ran a similar playbook. The Heritage Foundation staffed his administration with thousands of recruits, and his deputies in the federal agencies routinely marginalized dissident officials with reassignments and demotions.
But veteran officials often publicly rebuked his agenda. Trump was infuriated by civil servants like scientist Anthony Fauci, who issued sober, unflattering reports on the spread of Covid; Sally Yates, a DOJ attorney who refused to enforce Trump’s “Muslim ban” order; and Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who testified in Trump’s impeachment inquiry. “Somebody said, President, what’s the toughest country to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea?” Trump told attendees of a fundraiser in the final weeks of his first term, the day after he issued his last-gasp Schedule F order. “No, the toughest country by far is dealing with the United States.”
A half-century of Republican—and sometimes Democratic—ridicule of “big government” has chipped away at the efficacy of the federal bureaucracy. For decades, the size of the federal workforce has not kept pace with the growth of the U.S. population. As Paul Glastris and Don Kettl reported in the Monthly, overstretched agencies like the IRS and the CMS have increasingly come to rely on private contractors, who are less accountable and less effective than civil servants. Contractors working for the federal government today outnumber civil servants at a rate of more than two to one.
But despite Republican efforts to overpower the federal bureaucracy, it remains largely nonpartisan and professional. Will that finally change if Trump retakes office?
Maybe. More than ever, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups are “laser-focused on the staffing challenge,” as former Trump official Troup Hemenway, the President of Personnel Policy and a founder of the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, put it. Heritage alone has poured $22 million into the effort. Plus, a second-term Trump could enjoy advantages in legal disputes that other Republican presidents did not. Members of the conservative Supreme Court supermajority have often expressed doubt about federal agencies, suggesting they might be inclined to sympathize with Trump’s argument that the federal bureaucracy needs to be constrained.
Another advantage is that Trump may not need to replace nonpartisan civil servants at all because private contractors now do so much of their work. Paving a lane for his agenda may be as much a matter of shifting certain contracts to loyalists. During his first term, he showed no scruples about doing so on a smaller scale: Companies or individuals with ties to Trump were awarded contracts to provide “strategic services” at the CMS and build portions of the southern border wall.
But a dramatic takeover of government is an uphill battle, and one Democrats are taking seriously. The Biden administration just finalized rules to guard against Schedule F. The rules guarantee that career employees who are reclassified as political appointees can retain their civil service protections. And Trump is capricious and distractible. It’s just as likely he’ll throw out Heritage’s carefully plotted plan as he’ll adopt it.
What’s more, past presidents’ progress toward taking control of the federal bureaucracy was often kneecapped by scandal and incompetence. If he wins a second term, the most scandal-prone and incompetent president in living memory could prove the exception. But the civil service has survived more disciplined political attacks than he’s likely capable of. Jack Anderson wrote that Nixon “found out that a seething enterprise like the federal government could not be compartmentalized, cordoned off and led from a glass bubble.” That’s as true today as it was in 1974.
