What The Hell America!

In the waning days of the first Trump administration, the White House announced a plan to convert an estimated 50,000 government employees to a status similar to political appointees—meaning that they would become “at will” hires who serve purely at the president’s pleasure. Schedule F, as this plan was known, was never implemented then and was revoked immediately under Joe Biden’s presidency. But now the policy is back, formally resurrected by executive order on April 18. If this new-look Schedule F survives the inevitable court challenges, it will mark a major step forward in a MAGA quest laid out by J. D. Vance in 2021 to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” and “replace them with our people.”

President Donald Trump hyped the new order on Truth Social. “If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior,” he wrote, “they should no longer have a job.” In the interregnum before Trump’s second term, the original Schedule F proposal was kept alive in Republican policy circles, notably by the Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025 document. Now rebranded as “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” the order focuses on the president’s authority to remove traditional civil-service protections from about 2 percent of the federal workforce and terminate them at his discretion. (The policy allows exemption for certain classes of government employees, such as Border Patrol agents.)

Civil servants swear an oath to the Constitution, and are required to apply the laws of the United States as enacted by Congress. Their salaries are paid by all U.S. taxpayers. These obligations are every bit as important as loyalty to the president: Part of their job involves speaking truth to power, even when the facts they convey may be inconvenient and the policy choices difficult. The new order’s priority on personal fealty is clear in its grant of power to federal agencies to fire an employee for “subversion of Presidential directives.” If far more civil servants can be summarily dismissed, they’re less likely to risk frank conversations with senior administration officials. The quality of their advice will suffer, and their chief interest will be in preserving their jobs by pleasing their political masters. To an extent, the Trump administration is responding to legitimate concerns about performance and accountability within the federal bureaucracy, but replacing tens of thousands of people with political hires is highly unlikely to fix what ails the government.

Tom Nichols: The death of government expertise

A broad consensus exists among scholars and practitioners that federal personnel policy is fundamentally broken, with too many rules and too little flexibility. For example, the system for assessing whether government workers are doing their job well enough lacks credibility. A Government Accountability Office study of employee performance noted that 60 percent of federal workers received a rating of either “outstanding” or “exceeds fully successful.” Only 0.4 percent of them were ranked “minimally successful,” and just 0.1 percent were ranked “unacceptable.” This hardly seems plausible for any workplace.

A second challenge is that the termination of a federal employee requires numerous, laboriously documented steps, including notice periods, remedial efforts, a right of appeal, and so on. These processes can play out over a year or more. Faced with all of this hassle, many government managers either don’t bother or use unsatisfactory work-arounds. In a 2013 survey of federal workers, only 11 percent said they’d fire an employee who cannot or will not improve after counseling.

In principle, moving to an expanded system of at-will employment need not be the catastrophe that critics fear. States such as Georgia, Texas, and Indiana have already adopted this approach; by one 2015 count, more than 28 states use some variant of it. To date, however, the evidence for whether putting more employees on an at-will basis makes government work better is mixed.

A heavy reliance on political appointments can have significant downsides. Scholars have found that agencies with large numbers of political employees tend to be less successful. The average tenure of political appointees is about 2.5 years, whereas career managers tend to serve for longer periods, providing greater stability and continuity to see through major reforms. Career officials typically bring more in-depth expertise and institutional knowledge, and the agencies they lead tend to have more satisfied employees.

The United States, in fact, already has a much higher turnover among senior bureaucrats than other advanced industrial democracies. Some 4,000 federal government positions are subject to political appointment, and roughly 1,300 require Senate confirmation. Although the U.S. civil service is about four times larger than the United Kingdom’s, for example, it has nearly 28 times as many political appointees as the U.K., which has only a few hundred such posts. The cumbersome American system of recruiting and confirming these senior officials also results in long-standing vacancies and numerous acting assignments. To scale up at-will employment across the entire federal civil service would be at best premature without more analysis and planning.

Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again

The Trump administration could resort to other, less intrusive, less risky options to tackle the human-resource problems facing government agencies and improve accountability. But the White House has shown little interest in incremental reform or institution-building. With Elon Musk’s DOGE running rampant through the civil service, the administration is focused instead on exercising its new powers to intimidate the bureaucracy.

Trump has been quick to use the machinery of government to settle scores and go after political rivals. Dozens of senior civil servants have resigned under duress or have been demoted in apparent retaliation for previous work now disfavored. In addition, a number of officials at independent agencies and boards who could be terminated only for cause have been fired because of their political affiliation. A few appointees from Trump’s earlier administration even face federal investigation.

Opponents of the expansive new executive order have been quick to respond. Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, and Representative Gerry Connolly from Virginia, issued a joint statement: “President Trump has made it clear that he wants the power to hire and fire these workers based on their politics, not their qualifications—and that makes all of us less safe.” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the move an attempt “to corrupt the federal government and replace qualified public servants with political cronies.” The National Treasury Employees Union already filed a lawsuit arguing that such a reclassification of federal workers violates Congress’s intent to establish broad protections for civil servants. Various good-governance groups have also come out against the rebranded Schedule F rule; the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service characterized it as “both misguided and counterproductive.”

The American public likes the idea of pursuing government efficiency in the abstract but, according to polls, strongly opposes the moves that the Trump administration is now making. The most recent annual survey from the Partnership for Public Service found largely positive attitudes toward civil servants. About 95 percent of respondents thought that civil servants should be hired and promoted on merit rather than according to political beliefs, and 90 percent said that civil servants should serve the people more than any president. Only a quarter agreed that presidents should be able to fire civil servants “for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed. The public does not like what Musk and DOGE are actually doing, and believes that the cuts go too far and have put sensitive data at risk.

Should Trump’s remodeled Schedule F survive the court challenges it faces, it may suffer from guilt by association with the deeply unpopular DOGE. More directly, any restructuring of public employment will be judged not by its coherence with conservative theories of the “unitary executive” or the number of career civil servants replaced by political loyalists, but by whether these changes ultimately deliver more effective government for the American people.