DOGE Was Bad. Schedule F Will Be Worse.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-civil-service-schedule-f/682609/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/o4tFj

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 Schedule F, as this plan was known, was never implemented then and was revoked immediately under Joe Biden’s presidency.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.

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.

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[UTUSN]

1. K&R