Key lawmakers back Trump's plans to remove federal workers

President-elect Trump and incoming members of his administration have big ideas for reducing headcounts at federal agencies, and key lawmakers with jurisdiction over the civil service are lining up to aid him in those efforts. 

Trump has spoken frequently of his desire to shrink the federal bureaucracy and has tapped businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with leading a non-governmental commission to accomplish that. He has also promised to revive his late-term efforts to remove merit-based civil-service protections from large swaths of the federal workforce. 

Trump can adopt the latter effort by executive order, as he did in his first term. President Biden has since revoked the order and, through the Office of Personnel Management, implemented regulations aimed at blocking such a system from taking effect. Congress has failed to take action to codify the rejection of Trump’s Schedule F proposal despite several legislative efforts to do so, however, so while Biden’s regulations will delay the Trump administration from reimplementation, they will not stop it.

Similarly, Ramaswamy and Musk have said their Department of Government Efficiency will focus on what it can accomplish through executive action. They plan to suggest and help implement large-scale layoffs of federal workers, as well agency relocations and reductions to telework, to drive employees out of government. 

Still, the DOGE leaders have conceded they will require congressional assistance to eventually fulfill some of their plans, such as eliminating agencies. Ramaswamy has insisted the president already has the capacity to remove broad segments of the federal workforce—and vowed the conservative Supreme Court would back up those efforts—but it could run into logjams along the way. Both DOGE’s reforms and Schedule F, which also is likely to encounter legal challenges, would benefit from legislative assistance. 

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is expected to retain his chairmanship of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, and said on Tuesday he would aid Trump in his efforts. 

“President Trump has pledged to take action to bring accountability to the federal workforce and ensure there are measures in place to appropriately deal with poor performers and those who actively resist implementing the policies of a duly elected president,” Comer said said during a hearing ostensibly on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “and he will have strong allies in the Republican members of the House Oversight Committee.” 

He added the current system “does not have strong enough mechanisms” to hold employees accountable and was instead designed by civil servants to protect themselves, though civil-service law has been codified by Congress via several pieces of legislation over the last 150 years. After the hearing, Comer told Government Executive he would follow the Trump administration’s lead on what civil-service reforms are necessary. 

“I assume they'll be doing some executive orders right off the bat, like most new administrations do,” Comer said. “We'll see what we have to do to codify some of that stuff.” 

Come January, Republicans will control the White House and both chambers of Congress, though it will likely prove difficult to find the 60 votes that have generally become necessary to pass legislation in the Senate. 

Comer said his efforts would initially focus on making it easier to fire poor performers in government, though he would eventually like to eliminate entire divisions within agencies. 

“We're talking about a major, major government reorganization,” Comer said, adding his agency has the jurisdiction to take that on without having to involve congressional appropriators. 

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will take over the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said his top priorities upon taking the helm of his panel will be to hold a hearing on a Trump-era policy to force migrants to remain in Mexico while they await hearings for their asylum cases, uncover more information on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and reining in government censorship. He also plans to help the Trump administration reduce the size of government. 

“Government's way too big, and we need to make government small,” Paul said. “And some of that means through employment as well. Every possible tool we can to make government smaller, we should.”

Paul, like Comer, said he has been in touch with Musk and Ramaswamy to share ideas on places to cut in government and will help them. 

The senator has also made clear he will provide oversight of any Biden political appointee converting into a career role, sending a letter to acting Office of Personnel Management Director Robert Shriver requesting an update on such hires. The ever-controversial practice known as burrowing is legal, but must follow a strict set of procedures to ensure political appointees are qualified for the career jobs for which they are hired. The most recent report from OPM to Congress showed seven examples of burrowing, five of which the agency had approved. 

The practice is relatively rare: OPM vetted 161 proposed conversions between March 2016 and Jan. 20, 2021, and rejected 20% of them. 

Elsewhere in the Capitol, Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., in line to chair the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees in the 119th Congress, respectively, have pushed to make the firing of VA workers easier. Trump has frequently heralded his signing into law similar efforts during his first term and VA Secretary-designate Doug Collins has suggested he has similar aims for his upcoming tenure. 

Current VA Secretary Denis McDonough last year ended the implementation of disciplinary provisions included in the Trump-signed 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, citing its repeated defeats in court, labor panels and elsewhere. The decision marked the second time in the last decade that Congress tried and failed to speed up firing at VA. In 2016, the department announced it would no longer use a 2014 law aimed at making it easier to fire career senior executives after it similarly suffered a series of legal setbacks.

Bost last year shepherded through his committee in a party-line vote the Restore VA Accountability Act, which would reinstate and strengthen many of the provisions of the 2017 firing law. Moran has introduced companion legislation.