Ever since Election Day, much talk has focused on President-elect Donald Trump’s appointments – in record time – of his Cabinet, advisors, and agency directors. This new administration is a diverse mix, but they all have one thing in common: The returning president sees them as loyal to him and his outsized agenda. But what about all the other, more entrenched denizens of DC? Enter Schedule F – Trump’s bold plan to “drain the Swamp.”
Washington is abuzz with the extraordinary diversity of beliefs among the new designees. This is far from typical for incoming presidents, who ordinarily populate their administrations with political veterans in lockstep with their ideology. But after assembling a largely forgettable team upon his arrival in DC as a novice in 2017, the road-tested 47th president has broken the mold, as is his wont, by selecting Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, neoconservatives and populists, corporatists and unionists, insiders and outsiders.
Trump’s most famously ambitious objective, however, is to drain and ultimately empty the DC swamp of its unelected, unaccountable, and obstructionist bureaucrats who can thwart the will of the president, as they did so often during his first administration. The arrogance of these supercilious apparatchiks is due to the iron-clad protections they enjoy as civil servants. They cannot be fired no matter their behavior, except in the rarest of circumstances. Presidents come and go, they tell themselves, but we will outlast them all and can act accordingly.
Trump and the “All of Government” Edict
You may recall the so-called “all-of-government” approach to the DEI agenda during the current administration, where the goal of equity must be embraced and adopted not only in social planning and policies but across all agencies and cabinet departments. Well, the incoming president will employ that same broad, sweeping approach to weeding out the most unproductive and recalcitrant employees among the federal government’s 2.2 million-strong civilian workforce. And while DOGE – the newly formed non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – has been the talk of Washington, it faces severe limits in its attempts to affect systemic reform. No less than 60% of the government’s $6.8 trillion budget is “non-discretionary” and largely untouchable because it is devoted to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the exploding national debt, now more than $36 trillion. Another 13% is devoted to defense, which Trump has pledged to increase. Thus, Musk’s stated goal of cutting $2 trillion in unnecessary federal spending will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
However, taking an axe to the bloated budget ultimately figures to have less permanent impact than Trump’s audacious plans to alter the federal government's modus operandi and its entrenched culture. The linchpin for his game-changing reforms is reinstating the innocuous-sounding Schedule F, instituted by Trump in the waning days of his first term but immediately reversed by Joe Biden upon taking office. It will empower massive changes in the bureaucracy, re-classifying thousands of careerists as political appointees. It refers to a section of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, exempting some federal employees from civil service protections, specifically those "whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character." Under Trump’s plan, the number of such employees would jump from roughly 4,000 to about 50,000, signaling a sea change in the way Washington does business.
The outgoing Biden administration, deeply fearful of Trump’s bold plans to upend the DC establishment, is working overtime to “Trump-proof” (as much as possible) the federal government, hoping to minimize the damage to its familiar and comfortable way of life.
The Downside of Schedule F
The danger inherent in Schedule F is the likelihood that the next Democratic president could use the same expanded executive control over the bureaucracy to reverse course from Trump and bring in committed progressives who could do even more damage than the present embedded bureaucrats. So, to make these plans stick beyond Trump's next term, his administration might attempt to move one or more executive agencies out of Washington. This would wrench thousands of civil servants out of their comfort zone, likely leading to a significant number of resignations by those accustomed to life inside the DC beltway.
Despite setting a risky precedent that could backfire on Republicans in the years ahead, Trump is focused on the here and now, believing the addition of Schedule F will force permanent structural change on what has effectively become a fourth branch of government, namely, the administrative state. Everyday Americans have complained about federal bureaucratic hegemony for as long as we can remember, but now they will finally have a president in place with specific plans to do something about it.
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