What could result from Trump’s fight on the “Deep State”: “A horde of incompetents”

TFD – Discover how Trump’s vow to confront unelected bureaucrats and the deep state resonates with his supporters, potentially reshaping the federal government’s operations and civil service roles.

“We will demolish the deep state,” is how former President Donald Trump elicits wild screams from his fans at every campaign rally. If elected to another term in office, he promises to carry out this pledge.

Essentially, it is a commitment to wage war on the federal government, changing its size and reach and subjecting it to the whims and worldview of the president.

According to the former president’s remarks, top officials’ policy blueprints from his first term, and interviews with supporters, Trump is prepared to implement more of the same executive orders from his first term that either failed or were prevented from being implemented.

The more than 140-year-old civil service protections are being targeted for elimination by Trump. Every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States” is what he has promised to do. Despite the fact that over 85% of government workers currently work outside of the Washington, DC, region, Trump has promised to “drain the swamp” and shift up to 100,000 jobs out of Washington. Under his plans, entire departments would be abolished or dismantled.

A careful examination of his previous, ineffective attempts demonstrates how Trump’s policies could severely weaken significant portions of the federal government in a future term.

Though many of Trump’s followers favor his proposals, policy experts caution that they will politicize and dehumanize the federal workforce, oust many of the most seasoned and knowledgeable workers, and pave the way for corruption and a system of political patronage that rewards patronage.

Consider this quote from Trump’s 2020 campaign website: “I will reissue my executive order immediately, restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.” And I’ll use that authority with great aggression.

Many civil service employees, whose positions are nonpartisan and protected, were reclassified by that executive order as political appointees, subject to arbitrary termination. At the time, the order was denounced by over forty-six officials, including those who worked for President Trump, from ten Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. They cautioned that it would “cause long-term damage to one of the key institutions of our government” in a joint letter.

Trump signed the order in the last few months of his administration, and President Joe Biden immediately revoked it after taking office, so in the end, it had little effect.

However, policy experts caution that if Trump follows through on his promise to convert thousands of civil service positions into politically appointed posts at the beginning of his second term, a large number of federal employees may be fired if they fail to place their allegiance to Trump before the needs of the general public.

“A horde of incompetents”

According to Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University public policy expert, “it’s a real threat to democracy.” “Every citizen should be extremely concerned about this, as it poses a threat to their fundamental rights.”

According to Moynihan, requiring political affiliation for the hiring of large numbers of positions would be “absolutely the biggest change in the American public sector” since the establishment of a merit-based civil service in 1883.

In a video released last year for the Heritage Foundation, one of the planners of that second term strategy for Trump stated as much. Russell Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, predicted that it would be revolutionary. He turned down CNN’s pleas for an interview. However, he spent a significant amount of time in the video discussing the strategy to destroy “the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy.” Vought discussed dismantling or remaking the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

Vought concentrated on a strategy he wrote to rescind Schedule F, Trump’s 2020 executive order. It would reclassify any government employees thought to have policy-making authority as political appointees. Reissuing Schedule F is part of a roadmap, known as Project 2025, drafted for a second Trump term by scores of conservative groups and published by the Heritage Foundation.

According to Vought, the federal government “makes every decision on the basis of climate change extremism and on the basis of woke militancy where you’re effectively trying to divide the country into oppressors and the oppressed.” This is why he believes the civil service reform is required.

In response to questioning from reporters over the paper, which spanned over 900 pages, a representative for the Trump campaign directed CNN to two remarks made during the latter part of the previous year. “None of these organizations or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign,” the campaign stated. External allies’ policy proposals are just that—recommendations. However, the Project 2025 recommendations largely follow what Trump has outlined in broad strokes in his campaign speeches – for example, his plans to reissue his 2020 executive order “on Day One.”

Reissuing Schedule F would ostensibly only impact jobs that make policy. However, records acquired by the National Treasury Employees Union and provided to CNN reveal that Vought’s list of jobs to be categorized under Schedule F during his tenure as Trump’s OMB administrator includes administrative assistants, office managers, IT personnel, and numerous other lower-level roles.

At the union’s annual legislative conference, Doreen Greenwald, the president of NTEU, informed reporters that the organization believed that over 50,000 employees across all government departments would have been impacted. “The definition of confidential or policy positions was stretched to the point of absurdity,” she claimed in reference to the OMB materials.

According to Trump’s remarks, there would be considerably more executive branch personnel in a second term if he were to have the ability to fire them all at once.

According to Moynihan at Georgetown, the president of the United States already has “many more political appointees than most other rich countries” (about 4,000 jobs).

Kenneth Baer, a former senior OMB official under President Barack Obama, stated, “Almost all Western democracies have a professional civil service that is immune from those sorts of partisan wranglings, but does not answer to whatever political party happens to be in power.” “They provide the work that the government needs to do with technical expertise, a sense of long history, and perspective.” It is risky to lose that knowledge by subjecting thousands of more roles to political change and bringing in “people who are getting jobs just because they did some favor to the party, or the president was elected.” Therefore, there’s a chance of corruption.

These issues transcend party lines. Under George W. Bush, Robert Shea, a top OMB staffer, identified as a devoted and fiercely conservative Republican. However, he claimed that employing people based only on their political affiliations would result in “an army of suck-ups.”

Removing senior public servants’ rights, he argued, “would change the nature of the federal bureaucracy.” This would imply that your employer may declare you disloyal and fire you if you informed them that what they were suggesting was against the law, unworkable, or foolish.

Biden has taken action to stop this. The federal government’s human resources division, the Office of Personnel Management, passed new regulations on April 4 that prevent career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or other at-will employees.

Reclassifying employees during a second Trump administration would not be entirely prohibited under the new regulations. But according to Baer, they would produce “speed bumps.” In order to abolish the regulation, several procedures would need to be taken, including a protracted proposed rulemaking period and a 90-day comment period. And after that, most likely, the legal proceedings.”

“Locations where patriots abound”

Trump has threatened to relocate federal agencies from “the Washington Swamp… to places filled with patriots who love America” in addition to criticizing “faceless bureaucrats.”

However, his previous attempts at such maneuvers had the effect of depleting those agencies’ expertise, skill, and experience. That’s what transpired in 2019 when Trump relocated the Department of Agriculture’s two departments to Kansas City and the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado.

According to Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, an organization that is nonpartisan and advocates public service, “the vast majority of (headquarters) employees left the agencies.” “Expertise that had been built up over decades” was lost as a result, he claimed. “It ruined the organizations.”

According to a Government Accountability Office investigation from 2021, the BLM transfer resulted in the departure of hundreds of the bureau’s most seasoned workers and significantly decreased diversity, with over half of the black staff in Washington, DC, choosing to retire or quit rather than relocate to Colorado. The GAO also found that the USDA’s choice to relocate the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and its Economic Research Service (ERS) to Kansas City was “not fully consistent with an evidence-based approach.

The two USDA agencies conduct analysis and research with statistics. The ERS focuses on a number of topics, such as farm welfare, the results of federal agricultural policies, concerns about food security and safety, trade policy consequences, and international competition. Among other things, NIFA sponsors initiatives that support US agriculture’s ability to compete internationally, safeguard food safety, and advance nutrition.

In October 2019, Verna Daniels and her coworkers learned that their agency was being transferred. Verna had worked for the USDA for 32 years, the most of which she had spent as an information specialist at the Economic Research Service.

“I had a great time at work. I put in a lot of work. Daniels remarked, “I never missed a deadline.” She claimed to be shocked by the announcement. “Everybody was afraid, and it was happening so fast… We were given three months to relocate to wherever it was or vacate the premises.” She quit rather than uproot her whole family. “It was heart-wrenching.”

Relocating the USDA agencies, according to the Trump administration, would put researchers in closer contact with “stakeholders,” or farmers. Thirty-five-year USDA Economic Research Service veteran and agricultural economist Catherine Greene deemed the proposal absurd. “Farming exists in every state that encircles Washington, DC. I was raised in southwest Virginia on a farm that dates back a century.

According to Greene, “we’ve all devoted our lives to studying American agriculture and food systems.” “I believe the intention was to uproot the agency in a way that would force the majority of individuals to move on, which is exactly what happened. It was incredibly foreseeable.

According to Tom Bewick, acting vice president of the union local for NIFA, the other relocated research organization, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, employed 394 people at the start of the Trump administration. Trump’s hiring ban resulted in open positions as employees retired or moved away. By the time the relocation to Kansas City was announced, NIFA was down to 270 employees. “Once it was announced they would move us, we were losing 10 to 20 people a week,” Bewick explained. “We had less than 70 people make the move.” Five years on, he said, “We still are not the same agency, and we’ll never be the same agency we were.”

According to the USDA, the taxpayer would save $300 million over a 15-year period by moving to Kansas City. However, the GAO claimed that the analysis failed to take into consideration the disruption brought on by the move, the expense of training new employees, the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise, and decreased productivity. The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association calculated that, after deducting these expenses, the shift actually cost taxpayers between $83 million and $182 million.

Rather than moving, Greene chose to retire from the Economic Research Service. The BLM and the two USDA agencies maintained their Grand Junction and Kansas City offices while moving their headquarters back to Washington following Biden’s election. Greene expressed concern for federal employees who could have to make the same decision should Trump win a second term. She said, “They mean business.” “They’ve been practicing for four years, and they’re ready to rock and roll.”

According to Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, there is a significant discrepancy between the public’s understanding and the actual function that the civil service plays nationwide. “We’ve been conducting surveys on public trust in government, and the numbers plummet when you include the phrase ‘government in Washington, DC,'” the spokesperson stated.

pursuing adversaries with the help of the government

Throughout the campaign trail, Trump has asserted repeatedly—without providing any supporting documentation—that Biden and the Department of Justice are orchestrating a number of legal actions against him, including state-level indictments for falsifying business records in New York and election subversion in Georgia. Trump has exploited that untrue assertion to argue that it would be acceptable for him to target his political opponents using the Justice Department. He has declared he would designate a special prosecutor to look into Biden if he were to win a second term. He said to Univision last year that if someone posed a political challenge, he could have them charged with a crime.

During his previous administration, Trump made repeated attempts to use the Department of Justice in this way, telling associates that he wanted prosecutors to bring charges against political opponents like Hillary Clinton or former officials he had fired, including James Comey, the director of the FBI. Additionally, he pressured then-Attorney General Bill Barr to make up a story about how the 2020 election was rigged, which Barr declined to do.

During that time, a few high-ranking officials from the Justice Department and the White House resisted the urge to bring unjustified charges. Their opposition was in line with the long-standing custom that the president should set general policy but refrain from getting involved in individual criminal cases, and that the Justice Department should function mostly autonomously.

However, if Trump were to win a second term, supporters like Jeffrey Clark—a former Justice Department employee who is facing criminal charges in Georgia and disbarment in Washington, DC—might assist him break with that tradition. Trump attempted to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in an attempt to hold onto the White House in his closing weeks in power. He only gave up on the idea after top Justice Department officials vowed to quit in unison if Trump proceeded with the appointment.

An essay titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent” was published by Clark last year for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit organization started by Russell Vought. In addition, Clark contributed to the creation of the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, which included a description of how the military may be used for domestic law enforcement under the Insurrection Act of 1807, as the Washington Post first revealed.

Trump has even mentioned subduing other branches of the federal government.

In a video from the previous year, Trump declared, “We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.” “The weaponized departments and agencies will be completely overhauled so that conservatives, Christians, and political opponents of the left are never again targets and persecuted by faceless bureaucrats.

According to Project 2025’s blueprint, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security will be dismantled, the Environmental Protection Agency will be disarmed by reducing or eliminating its regulations on emissions and climate change, the Departments of Education and Commerce will be completely abolished, and the independence of several commissions, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, will be terminated.

A personnel database for prospective workers in a second Trump administration is part of the effort. Should Trump be elected president, his campaign managers have not promised that he will carry out the Project 2025 objectives. But given the active involvement of Trump officials in the project, from Vought and Clark to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and many others, critics say it offers a worrisome roadmap to a second Trump term.

They now truly know how to use power, and they want to use it to serve Donald Trump as well as Republican partisans,” Baer claimed.

While on the campaign trail, Trump makes it clear what he intends to accomplish.

At a rally last autumn, Trump promised his supporters, “We will put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” “The threat from within is far more dangerous, serious, and sinister than the threat from outside sources.”