Former President Donald Trump’s major policy initiatives during his first term were a massive tax cut and a government-wide effort to cut regulations that he argued cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars and “devastated entire industries.”
More lax federal oversight of environmental, safety and labor standards, to name a few, was a policy pivot that helped boost the stock market
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and united both Trump loyalists and more traditional Republicans who were wary of his nontraditional style and attacks on free trade.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for instance — often skeptical of Trump — lauded Trump’s first year in office for “reining in and rolling back the regulatory state at a pace faster than even Ronald Reagan.”
But advisers to the former president say this deregulatory push could have been far more robust were it not for a federal workforce that was ideologically opposed to the Trump agenda and worked at every turn to sabotage it.
The federal workforce constitutes “a fourth branch of government” that has usurped the powers of the president, Congress and the courts, according to Paul Dans, former chief of staff for Trump’s office of personal management.
“It’s an amalgamation of powers by people who are completely unanswerable to the will of the people,” Dans told MarketWatch. “They have a permanent foothold in Washington and in essence can’t be removed by anyone.”
Today, Dans is the director of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an effort to recruit and train a new generation of Republican bureaucrats, so that if Trump is reelected in November, he will “have a team of aligned people ready go on day one.”
So far the effort has led more than 7,500 Americans to submit their resumes in hopes of staffing a second Trump administration, and Dans has coordinated a series of online training sessions led by conservatives experienced in federal-government service.
He is also part of a broader network of Trump administration veterans who are sounding the alarm regarding the ability of the federal workforce to obstruct policies that offend them.
James Sherk, a former special assistant to Trump, compiled an extensive list of policies he says were stymied by bureaucrats, including career staff at the Department of Justice’s Civil Division refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian Americans and career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board refusing to draft precedent-altering decisions if they disagreed with the conclusions.
“The president elected through the people has very little say in policy,” Dans said.
The DOJ declined to comment. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo told MarketWatch in an email that the agency’s “career staff use their considerable talent and expertise to effectuate our congressional mandate — regardless of who sits in the White House,” and criticized Sherk for “casting unsupported aspersions about these faithful public servants.”
Destroying the administrative state
Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said in 2017 that the administration’s goal was nothing less than “the destruction of the administrative state,” or the complex of departments, agencies and regulators that implement and enforce and ever-growing set of rules governing American economic life.
For Dans and the other activists involved in Project 2025, the mission isn’t to destroy the administrative state but to make it accountable to the American electorate.
“Let’s restore democracy,” Dans said. “Far from attacking it, we’re working to let the people have a say in their own government again.”
To that end, the conservative movement anticipates a Republican White House reinstating a policy known as Schedule F, which would exempt about 50,000 federal workers in policy determinative positions from civil-services rules that make it difficult to fire workers who refuse to implement legal directives from the president.
Trump issued an executive order creating the Schedule F classification for federal workers in the final months of his term, but there was little time for him to leverage the new rule, and President Joe Biden quickly rescinded it after assuming office.
Democrats, union leaders and public-policy experts argue the Schedule F reform would impede the performance of government by replacing career experts with inexperienced ideologues and would actually reduce democratic accountability.
“Increasing the number of political appointees would create a new venue where political polarization would undermine the quality of governance by replacing moderates with extremists,” wrote Georgetown University political scientist Donald Moynihan in a recent analysis for Brookings.
These proposed civil-service reforms dovetail with the conservative movement’s strategy in federal court to rein in the power of regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations to implement COVID vaccine mandates.
The U.S. Supreme Court, remade by Trump’s three appointees, has struck down numerous regulations put forward by the Biden administration, and the conservative movement’s hope is to accelerate this deregulatory trend by remaking the 2 million-strong federal workforce.
Root-and-branch reform
The Schedule F reform could be implemented by executive order, but would affect only a small fraction of federal personnel, and the conservative movement is eager to see more fundamental changes.
Last year, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, both Republicans, introduced the Public Service Reform Act, which would eliminate the substantial protections unionized federal workers have from being dismissed from their jobs.
The law would eliminate the Merit Systems Protection Board, one of several agencies that federal workers can appeal to to argue they have been wrongfully terminated, and generally make it easier to fire federal workers.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy recommendations would go even further, arguing that Congress should reconsider whether federal employees should be allowed to form unions at all, because unlike in the private sector, there is no threat of the government going out of business to make unions temper their demands for higher pay, greater benefits and job protections.
“When civil-service reform was set up in the late 19th century, only about 10% of workers were protected, and now 99.8% enjoy de facto career tenure,” Dans said.
“This should be a problem for both parties,” he added, but argued that polarization trends mean that the federal workforce is increasingly composed of partisan Democrats.
“This is now a one-party problem,” Dans said. “A conservative coming into the White House is staring down an executive branch fully populated by folks who oppose his agenda.”
Moynihan, the Georgetown political scientist, argues however that further politicizing the bureaucracy could be a problem for Americans of all political persuasions, as research shows that political appointees tend to be less responsive to Congress and to Freedom of Information Act requests.
“This decline in responsiveness affected both policy-related requests as well as inquiries about constituency service,” Moynihan wrote. “In other words, both elected officials and members of the general public suffer the effects of politicization in terms of lower responsiveness.”