Donald Trump and his allies want to shrink the federal workforce into a lean and efficient machine and install loyalists at every level of government.
They may soon find that those goals are incompatible, experts and former administration officials tell NOTUS.
“There’s no easy button here. There are limited ways to reduce large numbers, and they both have consequences,” said Ronald Sanders, the former director of the first Trump administration’s Federal Salary Council.
Sanders, who advocates for civil service reform, resigned his post during the first Trump administration after the creation of Schedule F, the plan to convert civil servants into political appointees, making it easier to fire them.
While Sanders believes it should be possible to fire civil servants who deliberately thwart the policy goals of the elected administration, he felt that the Trump White House wanted to go much further.
“My conversation with White House led me to conclude that Schedule F was going to be used to put loyalists in place, and used not just to achieve policy alignment,” he said.
In fact, implementing Schedule F and removing high-level employees willing to challenge Trump’s goals would likely be much easier than cutting down the federal workforce in a way that guarantees cost savings and agency efficiency.
Schedule F, a workforce classification created by the Trump administration at the end of its first term, removes the due process protections that federal workers currently possess.
It could be implemented as soon as Trump retakes office. Though the Biden administration created a rule intended to protect workers from reclassification, that is nothing more than a speed bump that could be removed within about six months, Sanders said. If the Trump administration follows procedural rules, it could clear a path for reclassifications before the year is up. And the administration could use the interim period to create an initial list of people they want to reclassify, Sanders said.
While it could be implemented quickly, Schedule F may actually run afoul Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s goals of making the government more responsive and efficient.
“You are just expanding the number of political appointments out there. They tend to turn over, come and go every four years. That level of turnover makes it really hard to keep efficient or effective services going,” said Jenny Mattingley, a former White House and Office of Management and Budget staffer under multiple administrations and a vice president at the Partnership for Public Service.
“People are talking about reform at a very broad level and in a way that will have negative impacts on how the federal workforce can deliver for the public,” Mattingley said.
Jennifer Pahlka, a former Obama administration official, one of the founders of the U.S. Digital Service and now a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center who advocates for civil service reform, said similarly: “Schedule F is just a loyalty test.”
It’s likely the people subject to Schedule F will mostly be high-level employees at the very top of the pay scale: The career civil servants who are responsible for directing how policy is made real.
And lower-level employees who have little actual power over implementation would not make good fits for Schedule F, which limits the number of people it would likely affect, Sanders said.
Trump’s allies don’t shy away from wanting more accountability to the president in the federal workforce. Craig Leen, a former Trump administration official and Trump’s final pick for inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management, described Schedule F specifically as an accountability measure.
“You can bring them out of the typical competitive process that exists with all of these due process components, and they can be treated more like attorneys and political appointees, so that they can be more accountable,” he said.
Musk, Ramaswamy and other Republicans have floated different ideas for shrinking the overall federal workforce beyond those high-level employees, from requiring in-person work to moving agencies outside of D.C.
But none of those would significantly shrink the number of federal employees. Jackie Simon, the policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, said workers might be unhappy about the end of remote work but probably would not quit as a result. And more than 80% of the federal workforce is employed outside of D.C.
For mass reductions in workforce, there needs to be mass firings or leave incentives, neither of which would necessarily retain the most skilled or hardest-working employees, Sanders said.
Congress could also decide to eliminate certain divisions within agencies, which would then lead to the removal of all of those positions. “You would eliminate those positions in a systemic or broad way, almost like a policy decision,” Leen said.
Firings would have to happen based on a rough “last in, first out” style policy where the most recent hires are the first to be fired. That group often includes young people and people with newer specialty skills, according to Pahlka. And if voluntary incentives were offered instead, the people with the most marketable skills and hardest work ethic would likely be the first to take advantage of those offers, Sanders said.
People are always saying they are going to clean up the government, but they almost never succeed, Pahlka said. Even if Congress wanted to get involved to change the rules of how hiring and firing work, there’s a constituency and a lobby for nearly every government role.
“In order to have a healthy civil service that enables a government that can do what it says it’s going to do, you need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. And we don’t actually have that today,” she said.
“But if Elon really cared about the long-term health of the civil service, I think he would go to Congress and say, ‘Let’s have reasonable hiring rules. Let’s have reasonable firing rules.’ That is very different from Schedule F.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.