One of the goals of the incoming Trump Administration is to essentially dismantle administration.
With President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House and Republicans retaking control of Congress, conservative policymakers are hoping to deconstruct the “administrative state” – the collection of federal agencies, regulatory boards, public corporations, and the like that oversee everything from environmental protection to education policy.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to re-sign an executive order known as Schedule F, which could reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants into at-will political appointments, who Trump could fire and replace with loyalists. He’s also assigned billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to run the “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory board that will explore ways to slash the federal budget.
To understand how Republicans could disrupt the federal bureaucracy and what that could mean for government workers and the public, we turned to William G. Resh, Associate Professor at the USC Price School. Resh is an expert on executive politics and the federal bureaucracy. His answers were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Broadly speaking, what are Republicans trying to accomplish?
Movement conservatives, over the years, have really pushed back against the growth of the administrative state, which is essentially an extension of our political institutions. Federal administrators currently have policymaking authority to further articulate the intentions of Congress down to the specifics that only experts in that policy domain can provide. Congress cannot be expected to articulate the law down to the finest combed point.
Movement conservatives have put forward the premise that these agencies should be directly answerable to the president. They have a preference towards strong executive power. So, the agenda is to deconstruct the administrative state – which means stripping agencies of their regulatory power or their capacity to enforce regulations – and what is left of the administrative state should be directly responsive to the president.
What is motivating this effort?
A weaker regulatory apparatus or infrastructure allows business to do a lot more and have a lot more freedoms than it did previously, so business executives or those in the private sector may call this efficiency.
My response to that would be that anytime you hear the word “efficiency” bandied about in terms of public policy, the first and second question you should ask is: efficiency for what and efficiency for whom? Do consumers make more efficient decisions when they don’t have awareness of the chemicals that are put into a given product? Are homebuyers able to make more efficient decisions when they’re unaware of the pollutants that are being produced by nearby industry?
Somebody will find this more efficient for their own self-interests, but does that mean efficiency at a grand public level?
Can you explain what a Schedule F executive order would do?
Schedule F is the identification of career civil servants who are traditionally protected in their positions by merit system principles, meaning that you cannot fire them on the basis of their political preferences or as if they are at-will employees to the president. A Schedule F executive order converts potentially tens of thousands of positions across the civil service into at-will political appointments, meaning that the president can then fire the person.
Schedule F is supposed to focus on any given employee who has “policy making authority” within executive branch agencies and independent regulatory agencies. That is a fairly ambiguous term because implementation effectively is policy making.
It could be a couple thousands, depending on your definition, or could be tens of thousands. The overall number of the civilian civil service employees is 2.1 million across the United States – 85% of those, by the way, are not in the Washington, D.C., orbit.
How would such an order affect the federal workforce?
If the Trump Administration implements Schedule F, what we’ll have is a mass exodus of extremely competent and professionalized civil servants that are truly the envy of the rest of the world. Our administrative apparatus is second to none in terms of the expertise that we have within our federal government.
Schedule F will do nothing but enable Trump to put loyalists into place, but those loyalists are chosen on the basis of loyalty, not on the basis of competence within specific policy domains. Given that the position of the Trump Administration towards much of the administrative state is in dismantling it, this also means that, in many respects, you’re going to have people put into place whose objectives fundamentally fly in the face of the mission orientation of those agencies.
This is going to hurt morale. It will also damage the agency’s external reputation, if it’s not effectively tackling problems that the public expects it to help solve. With damaged morale and reputation, you’re going to see a mass exodus of talent that leaves the public sector for private sector opportunities. All it does, I believe, is diminish the capacity of the federal government to effectively implement law.
What do you expect from the Department of Government Efficiency?
Well, it’s not really going to be a department. It is an advisory body. But they will be working very closely with the Office of Management and Budget, which will formulate budget proposals to Congress likely based on the recommendations that are generated from those advisors.
What’s important, though, is the extent to which Congress follows through. If you have an administrative reform prescription, don’t forget Congress because Congress ultimately is going to write the appropriations.
What other impacts could we see from these efforts?
The Republican Party is generally and traditionally much more favorable to contracts as a policy instrument than direct government. What you have with politicization is also influence over where public largesse is directed in terms of who gets which contracts. So, you have an opportunity, then, for a presidential administration and a political party to award very powerful constituents large government contracts.
