Trump's radical plan to purge the civil service
"It’s explicitly about retribution."
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Trump has been bloviating for nearly a decade now about his desire to “drain the swamp.” He finally has a real plan to do it.
In the final months of his first term, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F. It aimed at empowering him to wage war on the civil service by purging bureaucrats perceived to be disloyal and replacing them with MAGA true believers eager to do his bidding. Schedule F was rolled out too late to make an impact before Trump left office and was quickly rescinded by Biden, but Trump campaigned on restoring it and now is in a position to do so. (Schedule F, it should be noted, is also a key pillar of Project 2025.)
Almost two years ago, we spoke with University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan about Schedule F and how Trump could bend the federal government to his will if he returned to power. Here’s an excerpt of what Moynihan told us that remains relevant today (emphasis ours):
Trump 2.0 will be dramatically different from the first version. The first impeachment accelerated a learning process that already was taking place, but the impeachment made Trump focus on political loyalty above everything else. It’s not a coincidence that Schedule F, which had been kicked around for a couple of years, emerged after the impeachment when Trump brought back some of his most loyal supporters and vetted his political appointees in a way that was quite different from the past.
The Trump presidency-in-waiting’s big lesson is, “We did not go far enough. We did not have the tools that we needed to take control. We need to start by controlling the legal and national intelligence agencies to make sure that they are not a threat to us, but then we also need to control other parts of the bureaucracy.” There has been a great deal of learning.
A tool like Schedule F is a relatively sophisticated one. We’re moving past the amateur hour phase of the Trump era. If he gets back, I don’t think the institutions will hold in the same way.
So as Trump prepares to return to office and federal employees worry about their job security, we decided to check back in with Moynihan.
Moynihan made a case that while Schedule F may not seem like a pressing concern to most people right now, it will when the public sees the fruit of Trump tearing down a key guardrail that held him in check last time.
“As we start to see instances of policy implementation where Trump is able to do much more extreme things than he was in his first term because he’s able to threaten federal employees, then I think people will start to see why this matters to everyday government or to their lives,” he said.
A full transcript of Moynihan’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson