Trump v. the Bureaucrats

(Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

The war has begun. It’s Trump, Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their new Department of Government Efficiency versus the federal bureaucracy in a no-holds-barred cage deathmatch. The first punches have been thrown; who will win? At stake: your tax dollars.

Watch parties used to be a long-standing American diplomatic tradition, held at embassies with local guests invited to watch the election results dribble in, showcasing our democracy. Great care was taken to make the party patriotic but not partisan; both candidates were featured, and usually a mock election was held with host country government officials voting one way or another. About the only bad part of the night was listening to American diplomats like me struggling to explain the Electoral College system in bad Mandarin or high-school Spanish.

But there were few parties this year. “I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” said a senior American diplomat based in Europe, per POLITICO.

“The decision to nix election night festivities may also reflect the unusually politicized nature of America’s diplomatic corps. There is deep unease about the strength of the U.S. democratic system after disputes about the outcome of the 2020 election led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters,” POLITICO reports in the same article.

With that as a scene-setter, Washington bureaucracy is preparing for war. Months before the election, in April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued new protective guidance to agencies as they implemented regulations strengthening “guard rails” on the conversion of career federal workers out of the civil service and into the excepted service. This refers to the infamous Schedule F planned by Trump as one of his Day One initiatives. 

OPM has redefined “policy-related” jobs to circumvent Trump’s campaign definition by referring only to non-career political appointments and stipulating that, when an employee’s position is “involuntarily” converted out of the career pool, “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued” still obtain. This moots the new Schedule F rules. OPM’s directive also says bureaucrats may appeal job reclassifications resulting in the loss of civil service protections to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a slow, creaky agency that could tie up Trump’s changes for years, case by slogging case.

But despite the Biden OPM’s efforts to protect the federal workforce from any upcoming Schedule F changes, analysts say there may be little the bureaucracy can do to stop them. Even the April 2024 rule could easily be rescinded, either after a 90-day notice-and-comment period or immediately with a new interim final rule. Schedule F fights can be expected to get deep into the weeds of how the U.S. government system works (or doesn’t work) through its tangle of regulations and laws. Never mind snatching returning rockets from the air and self-driving cars, Elon Musk will have met the most complex challenge of his time. Give Elon a hand by delving into the dense OPM’s guidance on Schedule F yourself.

So what is Schedule F anyway? Though it failed to go into practice, Trump issued in his first term an executive order stripping firing protections from many civil servants in an effort labeled “Schedule F,” after the new employment category the executive order created. (Schedules A–E already existed.) The effort used language exempting positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress had always understood this language to apply only to positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, rather than to civil servants.

The civil service was once a good idea, protecting everyday workers from politics and ensuring the continued day-to-day business of the government, like sorting mail and collecting tariffs. But today all sorts of bureaucrats, including many in policy organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Yet their protections against political interference have grown stronger, so that it is near impossible to fire them even for cause. Hence the “lifetime jobs” of legend most civil servants enjoy.

The problem: Some, even many, of those civil servants are able to stymie the president’s initiatives under cover of their employment protections. This time, Trump wants that to change. He wants to be able to fire some of these bureaucrats at will. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon said.

Elon and Vivek are not fighting alone.

Some in Congress are already thinking ahead, anticipating the push-back from the affected civil servants. The Stop Resistance Activities by Federal Employees Act (STRAFE) would penalize federal employees if they obstruct a lawful order from administration officials. It requires agencies to report alleged violations to the White House every six months.

The bill, proposed by Representative August Pfluger (R-TX), directs OPM to craft new mandatory training for senior federal employees on the penalties imposed if they were to oppose, obstruct, or impede directives from the president, vice president, or any other political appointee. 

“Career unelected bureaucrats cannot be allowed to undermine the agenda of any future president,” said Pfluger. “We must ensure that the network of federal employees that brazenly carried out resistance activities under the first Trump Administration is not unleashed again.”

The STRAFE Act is designed to mitigate resistance within federal agencies, ensuring a more cooperative and compliant federal workforce. It has four components: 1) training for federal employees clearly outlining prohibited activities intended to obstruct or undermine the directives of the sitting administration; 2) penalties, on par with Hatch Act violations, for federal employees who engage in resistance activities (civil penalties can reach $1,000); 3) an external complaint reporting process, bypassing the traditional Inspector General channels within agencies, to ensure a more transparent system and 4) periodic reports from each federal agency to the Executive Office of the President, providing updates on complaints and status of actions taken against those engaging in resistance activities.

Needless to say, civil service advocacy groups oppose the Act, saying STRAFE and Schedule F are just veiled efforts to politicize the federal workforce. “The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States is not the result our union was hoping for,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. 

Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said, “It feels different—in 2016, he was still something of an unknown. Now we have Trump’s first term anti-union executive orders and Schedule F on top of that, and we have Project 2025, the blueprint of exactly what they’re going to do. So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out exactly what they have planned. As a union that represents federal employees, we have to prepare to defend our members.”

Game on, Elon and Vivek.