The Part of "Project 2025" We're Sure to See
If Trump wins the election, that is
Persuasion recently approached me about the possibility of updating a post of mine from April 2023 about Donald Trump’s desire to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with cronies and right-wing ideologues. The resulting essay seemed different enough from the original post to warrant simultaneous publication here as a new, unpaywalled post, especially given how much closer we now are to Trump returning to the White House and putting his plans into action.
In one of the stranger developments in a highly unusual presidential election year, former president Donald Trump has repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page plan for right-populist governance produced to much fanfare by The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank with numerous ties to Trump and his campaign. Many of these proposals have been on conservative wish lists for decades or been added more recently to such lists by MAGA-aligned activists. The agenda proposes a wide range of policy goals and structural changes across the executive branch, including a call for “the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support.” Trump perhaps fears that the extremism of such a plan will alienate the swing voters whose support he needs to win the election—and the plan itself seems to be in disarray, with the director of Project 2025 yesterday announcing that he is stepping down.
Yet there is one aspect of the plan we have every reason to believe a second Trump administration would pursue. That’s the firing of tens of thousands of career civil servants across the executive branch of the federal government and their replacement by political loyalists. This idea was hatched during the first Trump administration and finally implemented via executive order just two weeks before the 2020 election. President Joe Biden rescinded that order on his third day in office. If Donald Trump manages to make it back to the White House, he is all but guaranteed to try to reimplement it, having vowed to do so “on Day One.”
The Origins of “Schedule F”
Ever since the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, hiring and promotion for most civil service jobs in the federal government has been done on the basis of merit rather than political patronage. As Francis Fukuyama explains in an important essay on the topic, “The merit-based civil service system was created to deal with problems of patronage and corruption that had plagued American public administration since the 1820s, preventing the emergence of a high-capacity bureaucracy sufficient to meet the demands of a complex and rapidly-changing economy and society.”
From the 1940s through the 1970s, a series of laws, executive orders, and court decisions strengthened the position of these workers, empowering public-sector unions in the federal workforce and making it increasingly difficult to fire incompetent civil servants. That can be a problem, and is something that cries out for reform. But what the Trump administration implemented in October 2020 is very different from a good-government initiative.
Throughout the myriad departments and agencies of the executive branch, presidents typically nominate ideological allies and personal loyalists to the top jobs (secretaries, undersecretaries, directors, etc.), while most of those who work under them are nonpartisan career civil servants who remain in their jobs across administrations, ensuring continuity and competence in the running of the federal government. The Trump administration became aware very early on that some of its priorities were being blocked or slow-walked at various levels within the government. In his public statements, Trump liked to blame these supposed acts of sabotage on the work of an insidious “deep state.” But in truth Trump’s own appointees often dragged their feet implementing policies they considered foolish or gratuitously cruel—while proposals for drastic policy shifts sometimes raised legal and regulatory concerns among members of the permanent bureaucracy, slowing down their implementation.
A lengthy and illuminating article published two years ago in Axios lays out how frustration within the Trump administration over these delays led to the creation of Schedule F. According to Axios, it was James Sherk, a member of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, who fastened onto Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which exempts from firing protections employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.” In other words, unlike other civil servants, those who work on a president’s policy goals can be fired at will.
The idea was to have Cabinet secretaries and other political appointees redesignate under a new employment category—“Schedule F”—members of the civil service whose responsibilities could be described in this way. These Schedule F employees could then be fired at will by the president and replaced with anyone he wished. Because Trump didn’t sign the executive order creating Schedule F until October 21, 2020, very little was done on its basis. But Trump loyalist Russ Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget, worked to show what Schedule F could make possible. Just two months before Trump left office, Vought claimed that fully 88 percent of the Office of Management and Budget’s workforce could be redesignated as Schedule F and summarily fired.
A Government Staffed by Cronies and Ideologues
How many civil servants could a future President Trump try to fire using a reimplemented Schedule F? Estimates run to somewhere around 50,000. Fukuyama is worth quoting at length on the implications:
It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.
I would go even further, since a Trump loyalist is more than just a run-of-the-mill hack or opportunist. Personal loyalty to the president would only be one consideration. John McEntee, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, favored hiring people who talked about having been “red pilled” into grasping the far-reaching “evils of the left.” Andrew Kloster, who worked in McEntee’s office, has meanwhile talked about the way he and others who’ve been tasked with developing a pipeline to staff a second Trump administration are thinking about hiring decisions. That’s worth quoting at length as well. From the Axios story:
[Kloster and his team have] deliberately sought recruits not chasing a long-term career in Washington. … A red flag went up if a prospective employee answered “deregulation and judges” when asked to name their favorite Trump policies. Kloster described this as “a shell of an answer.” It was a sure sign the applicant could be a weak-kneed member of the establishment. … Kloster wanted people harboring angst—who felt they had been personally wronged by “the system.” The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better. And if someone felt mugged, that was even better, as it would help drive their desire to break up the system. “It’s not just that being ‘canceled’ motivates a person; it’s also that being canceled indicates a person knows the kind of heat that is brought to bear by the media, by institutions, and the public, and is probably better able to fight when the time comes,” Kloster told Axios.
These statements make very clear the Trump 2.0-administration-in-waiting is screening not just for personal loyalty to the president but for commitment to an antiliberal ideology. They want people who will seize the administrative state for right-wing ends, with as many as 20,000 of them pre-vetted before the November election.
Seizing the Administrative State
Democrats might dream of expanding the size and scope of the federal government in various ways to address the nation’s many problems and to help Americans with their (mainly economic) struggles. But the Trumpified Republicans are far more radical in their aims. Instead of building on or modestly adjusting what the federal government has done since the beginning of the 20th century, they aim to overturn the very structure of the modern state, gutting the professional, merit-based civil service in favor of a patronage-based system that would hire and promote loyalists and right-wing ideologues.
The consequences of transforming much of the federal bureaucracy into what Robert Shea, a senior official under George W. Bush, called an “army of suck-ups” could be monumental. Say a future President Trump ordered the relevant government agencies to begin illegally shooting migrants when they attempt to enter the country, or to investigate media companies that report critically on his administration (both things he has talked about doing). As Shea noted to CNN, career civil servants today would probably respond to such requests by deeming them “illegal, impractical, [or] unwise.” But after the implementation of Schedule F, Trump-appointed Cabinet secretaries could declare such a response evidence of disloyalty and seek the immediate termination of the employee and his or her replacement with a loyalist willing to do the president’s bidding without hesitation.
It’s such considerations that led the Biden administration to issue a new federal rule in April 2024 that seeks to stymie the firing process and create an appeals system for employees whose jobs have been involuntarily reclassified. This likely means Schedule F, in its current form, would be impossible for a second Trump administration to implement right off the bat. But the former president will almost certainly attempt to unwind the new rule, which would involve a lengthy public process and legal challenges. Which is why it’s so difficult to specify in advance precisely what a second Trump administration might attempt to do, or succeed in doing, while in office.
All we can know for sure is that Trump seems determined to go down that route—and that anything wrapped up with Schedule F is unlikely to be good for the long-term trajectory of the country.
You hit the nail on the head. As bad as some of the actual policy goals are, the Schedule F proposal is by far the most dangerous. It's the equivalent of AIDS, attacking our political immune system. Too bad it's in the realm of "save democracy" that so far seems to not resonate with voters. Is it possible that Kamala can find a compelling way to do it that reaches voters at the margins?
Civil Service reform in the 1880's was essentially the first campaign finance law. Patronage was the political currency of the time that greased the wheels of government. Today of course it's unfettered PAC donations that greases our system today. Imagine the double impact of both unfettered patronage AND money into our political system?????