Trump’s second-term agenda: Breaking the bureaucracy

When Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, met reporters earlier this year at its annual legislative conference, he was blunt about how the nation’s largest federal employee union would have fared if Donald Trump were reelected in 2020.

“The previous administration was trying to kill us,” Kelley said. “I believe that if they had two more months, we might have been dead. We just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Though Kelley thought unions at federal agencies are now better prepared for a renewed onslaught—thanks in no small part to an expansion of bargaining rights under President Biden—he warned that the Republican presidential nominee still represents an existential threat to both organized labor and the federal civil service writ large.

Experts say Trump and his former staffers have similarly honed their plans and tactics during their four years in the wilderness. While initiatives during the first Trump administration were often hamstrung by poor preparation, slow filling of jobs for political appointees, or were launched too late to be implemented, Trump and his advisers have indicated that if elected this fall, they will hit the ground running with an aggressive campaign to remake the federal government in his image.

Trump would likely revive many policies from his first term that hence were rescinded by his predecessor, including a trio of executive orders undermining the power of federal employee unions and making it easier to fire federal workers and disbanding labor-management forums at federal agencies.

And as part of his presidential campaign, he already has vowed to relaunch Schedule F, a plan to reclassify tens of thousands of career federal employees in “policy-related” jobs into the excepted service, effectively making them at-will employees. The initiative also would exempt those positions from most federal hiring regulations and requirements.

“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said in March 2023. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”

He has mused about firing disloyal workers and prosecuting political foes as revenge for his ongoing legal woes. Indeed, the Republican party’s platform, finalized at its national convention in July, similarly makes overtures toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies or involved in his federal prosecution on allegedly retaining classified documents after leaving office and interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

“We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents,” the document states. “We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.”

But to understand how a second Trump administration might differ in both methods and results, one must look at how Trump’s former personnel policy aides have spent the past four years.

Making lists and checking them twice

Undergirding Trump’s official campaign to return to the White House next year has been extensive work by former White House staffers and other conservative operatives determined to avoid the disorganized 2017 presidential transition.

The most prominent example is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led $22 million project to establish both a policy roadmap and a database of 20,000 candidates for political appointments across government. Though Trump in recent months has disavowed the effort after Democrats seized on the unpopularity of its 900-page policy manifesto, the effort is led by former Trump aides, who in recent weeks have confirmed that their work on the potential transition remains ongoing.

In addition to making lists of people to hire under the next Republican administration, ex-Trump deputies also compiled a list of 50,000 current federal employees to convert to Schedule F and threaten with termination.

Democrats, good government experts and federal employee groups say the return of Schedule F would effectively end the 150-year-old merit based civil service system, first established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the spoils system. And some have noted similarities with an illicit effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy, with the key caveat that Schedule F proponents are seeking to implement the proposal through legal means.

“There is the possibility, as we see here, of not only an effort to try to completely transform the way in which accountability works in the federal government, but to be able to do it with the full consent of law in a way that the Nixon administration never had,” said Don Kettl, dean emeritus of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and cofounder of a working group of experts opposed to Schedule F. “It would remove all of the political, constitutional and legal checks that the system current has. It’s worth thinking about how we might try to improve the responsiveness and accountability of the federal government, but is the fix an effort to try to politicize it?”

The Biden administration has taken steps to try to make it harder for a future administration to reinstate Schedule F, including publishing new regulations barring federal employees from losing their civil service protections due to an involuntary job reclassification. But Kettl said that would be nothing more than a speed bump—an enterprising future Trump administration staffer could be preparing new regulatory proposals to roll back Biden’s for quick publication either as a notice of proposed rule making or an interim final rule.

And any effort to block Schedule F’s implementation will be both time consuming and probably unsuccessful.

“Of course, any effort to try to launch Schedule F again would immediately be met with an effort to stop it in courts,” Kettl said. “But my conclusion is that it is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will probably lose. That path also would require finding a plaintiff with standing—someone who can prove they’ve been injured. It would take time to find the right plaintiff and to wait for the Trump administration to take action that frames the issues in just the right way . . . and then it goes through a tremendous maze of a process. It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice.”

Robert Shea, CEO of GovNavigators and a former associate director at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush administration, said that part of the risk of Schedule F is not just the potential for government experts to be replaced by party loyalists—it is the overall degradation of federal employment as a career.

“I think that government already doesn’t have a lot of tools at its disposal to recruit and attract people, and talented, independent civil servants are critical to the success of the administration,” he said. “If you not only dilute the protections that they enjoy, but then start replacing them with less talented people—people employed based mostly on their loyalty—then I think you greatly diminish the capability of the government to do its job.”

One proposal that likely won’t be back was the effort to dissolve the Office of Personnel Management and divvy its responsibilities up between the White House and General Services Administration, Shea said.

“My guess would be that OPM is basically reduced to a rubber stamp for a lot of the proposals we’re talking about like Schedule F,” he said. “You’ll probably have a lot of people leave OPM, but I don’t think eliminating the organization is in the cards. It’s such a buzzsaw on the Hill on a bipartisan basis.”

Shea said that given the level of preparation done by conservatives since Schedule F was first rescinded, observers should not underestimate the pace with which they reimplement the initiative.

“On or about Jan. 21, 2025, the administration will file a proposed regulation to repeal the recent regulations governing the General Schedule and limiting things like Schedule F,” he said. “They will replace it with a policy that reinstitutes Schedule F, and that will probably take 90 to 120 days to get all that done, during which agencies will be inventorying individuals they believe ought to be Schedule F, and then my guess is they’ll start firing a bunch of people and replacing them with loyalists.”

But others say the actual number of career civil servants who are purged could be lower than expected.

“The idea could be ‘transformation by intimidation,’ where you just make the point that you can [fire them] if you want to, and that you will if you feel it’s necessary, and the others will get the message,” Kettl said. “If that’s the case, most federal employees there would feel a strong temptation to head to the foxholes and keep their heads down. That’s bad and dangerous management, but it’s an effective method to carry out the goals of Schedule F.”

And if the goal is intimidation, Kettl said that could make it difficult for journalists and oversight organizations to monitor the program.

“To what degree are we going to know what’s happening out there?” he said. “To what degree are we going to have anything approaching real-time information? Will agencies report on it–and if so, to whom–about who is placed in Schedule F and how many have been eliminated and replaced? And how will we know that? It’s hard to have accountability without some measure of transparency, and there were no signs of it last time.”

Leaning on Labor

A second Trump administration would likely see the revival of an aggressive playbook to undermine the role of unions in the federal workplace. At minimum, Trump likely would sign executive orders reimplementing policies like forcing union officials out of agency office space, capping official time at 25% of the employee’s work hours, as well as rescinding Biden’s “worker empowerment” agenda.

Union leaders like Kelley say that they similarly have learned from their battles with management during the Trump era. Many labor groups have signed new contracts with agency management with terms that extend past 2028 or with additional provisions spelling out employees’ and the union’s rights. Many governmentwide policies are effectively held in abeyance until a union contract can be reopened or renegotiated.

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency’s collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which was ratified in May and is set for implementation this fall, creates a new arbitration process by which employees can appeal disciplinary actions that they view as retaliation for pursuing science-based work.

“Our entire contract was taken away by the Trump administration, so we are very concerned that they will, again, target EPA employees for retribution for doing their jobs,” said Nicole Cantello, legislative and political coordinator for the council and a president of its Chicago local. “That’s why we tried to take the determination as to whether or not science is being practiced out of the hands of the agency.”

But other tactics, such as stacking the Federal Service Impasses Panel with conservative activists without mediation experience, shuttering labor-management forums at federal agencies and general adversarial relations would resume. Rich Couture, president of AFGE Council 215, which represents employees at the Social Security Administration’s Office of Hearings Operations, said that his union ensured that its contract would remain closed until October 2029 when the parties did limited renegotiations last year, though not all of its provisions would be immune.

“When we reopened parts of our contract, we were able to get a cooperation council process similar to the labor-management forums,” he said. “So the concern that we’ve got is if the Biden-era pro-union and pro-cooperation executive orders are rescinded under a second Trump term, these vehicles for cooperation, collaboration, teamwork and mutual problem solving will disappear, and we’ll find ourselves in a situation not unlike the first Trump administration where the relationship, such as it was, between labor and management was downright hostile.”

At SSA, which is struggling to overcome a customer service crisis brought on by decades of budgetary neglect and a projected 50-year staffing low by the end of this year, cleaving the relationship would mean ending ongoing joint labor-management efforts to improve operations, including revamping how the agency trains new employees in a bid to reduce attrition.

“Those projects, like the revised training model and some of the other things we’re working on, if they’re not completed, they’d likely be abandoned, depending on the tack leadership takes under a second Trump administration,” Couture said. “And those things that were accomplished—we may find ourselves back in a situation where the agency largely seeks to impose working conditions unilaterally on workers regardless of their obligations under the statute. And if we find ourselves in a situation where the entire federal sector labor-management apparatus is now arrayed against unions like it was under Trump . . . you know the prospects for making progress under those conditions are rather grim.”

Experts also expect a revival of efforts during the Trump administration to make it harder for unions to collect dues from employees. And ideas that never came to fruition, like Trump’s flirtation with outlawing unions at the Defense Department, could make a comeback.

“I think you’re going to see a more aggressive push,” he said. “I always say, ‘If I ever went back in time knowing what I know now, I’d be dangerous.’ At the beginning of an administration, you’re like, ‘What can I do? What can’t I? What happens if I do what I’m not supposed to?’ And you sort of find out that the risks on the management side that you’ll get in trouble are pretty low, because so few people give a shit about it . . . So issues targeting the civil service and unions in particular will be quicker and more stringent, because they’ve also done a lot more planning in that regard. And the Trump campaign tried to disassociate itself from Project 2025, but the people who will staff his administration wrote it, and I’m confident they will use that as a blueprint for dismantling the administrative state.”