MAGA Plans to Capture the Civil Service

Soon after James Garfield was inaugurated in 1881, a disgruntled job seeker shot him at the train station in Washington, D.C. The assassin was angry because the Garfield administration had not given him a job under the spoils system. Two years later, Congress passed the Pendleton Act which required that candidates for federal government jobs must be selected on their merits as determined by competitive exams. Because these principles are now taken for granted, the Pendleton Act has slipped into the shadows of history.

If Donald Trump is reelected, he has pledged to turn back the clock 141 years to pre-Pendleton days and fire somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 civil servants. His advisers, funded by megadonors, are busily compiling two lists— a list of people who are disloyal to Trump and a list of their replacements.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has promised that “We will not go back” so often that it has become a memorable campaign slogan. But far back is where the country will go if even a small number of the proposals contained in Project 2025, the nickname for MAGA plans, become reality.

Staff working under the auspices of Conservative Partnership Institute, widely regarded as the next Trump administration in waiting, have already compiled a database of 20,000 potential MAGA candidates who would replace at least that number of civil servants when Trump fires them. As far as we know, this list has not been vetted to determine whether the pool is qualified. How far along the MAGA brain trust is on compiling an enemies’ list of civil servants is also unclear.

If Donald Trump is reelected, he has pledged to turn back the clock 141 years to pre-Pendleton days and fire somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 civil servants.

Conservative YouTuber Shawn Ryan recently hosted Trump for an interview about his plans for a new administration. Ryan said he had “zero trust” in “any government agencies…our Congress, the Senate, anything.” He asked the candidate how he was going to gain back the trust of the American people and whether “we [are] going to see any held accountable?”

Trump said the answer was yes, “they’ve got to be held accountable” because “[t]hey’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people.”

Who is the “they” MAGA policymakers are talking about? According to Trump and his MAGA followers, these federal employees comprise the “deep state,” those “unelected bureaucrats” who issue “burdensome” regulations during Democratic administrations, and obstruct “regulatory reform” during Republican administrations.

But in reality, the so-called “deep state” is composed of the attorneys, scientists, technical experts and others who implement the laws that Congress passed, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and who follow the leadership of whatever President is in office.   What they won’t do is pursue policies that are unethical or violate the law.  And that’s what has Trump and his followers so angry.

Most of these high-level federal employees have decades of experience managing complex organizations, helping to develop policy and enforcing the law. Government attorneys and watchdogs like the Inspector General and Government Accountability Office – as well as Congressional oversight – ensure that federal employees and agency operate ethically and legal.

Trump and Project 2025 are proposing to replace these experienced experts with MAGA political activists.

Schedule F Refuses to Die

Trump was serious enough about this plan to have issued Executive Order 13957 a couple of weeks before the November 2020 election. The Trump Order commanded agencies to identify all jobs that were “confidential” and involved “policy,” categorized as “Schedule F” employees. In the months between when it was issued and Trump left office, the agencies ignored it. Candidate Trump has promised to re-establish Schedule F on his first day in office.

Trump’s federal personnel enterprise rests on an interpretation of exemptions in federal law that remove civil service protections and allow the president to fire at will members of the civil service deemed to be disloyal. MAGA advisers argue that the law gives the president broad authority to select employees whose positions are of a confidential and policymaking, or policy-advocating nature.  Or in other words the Trump plans would implement a widespread witch hunt across the government, rolling the law back to when presidents awarded spoils to their political supporters.

The federal law Trump has appropriated, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, is quite vague and potentially open-ended, which is very bad news in an era when conservative judges dominate the Supreme Court and lean toward giving the president extraordinary new powers. Civil servants could be placed on Trump’s hit list if they have a job “has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”

But even if the job must involve policymaking, what is “policy” in this context, as opposed to mere administrative, scientific or expert advice that may contribute to, or be seen as “advocating” policy development?

Good arguments could be made to defeat Trump’s interpretation. But even if the job must involve policymaking, what is “policy” in this context, as opposed to mere administrative, scientific or expert advice that may contribute to, or be seen as “advocating” policy development? Are scientific findings and conclusions based on empirical research policymaking? Telling the difference between policy and administrative work is usually quite tricky and open to interpretation.

If and when Trump proceeds, opponents will file lawsuits to stop the firings. MAGA lawyers will fight this litigation, likely rushing to Texas where Trump judges have established a bulwark against litigation unfriendly to MAGA policy. But it will take years for these challenges to play out.

The Biden administration finalized a rule designed to forestall the Trump plan and it will undoubtedly feature in challenges to Trump efforts to implement Schedule F. But, again, if conservative courts read the law as giving the president discretion to cancel civil service protections, the Biden rule won’t mean much.

It’s unclear how the Supreme Court would decide if Trump wins, carries through on his threats, litigation begins, and the cases work their way up the judicial ladder. But cynicism must be built into any prediction about that institution, especially given its recent decision that dramatically expanded presidential immunity from prosecution for carrying out “official duties.” Whatever the courts do, if Trump manages to fire even a few hundred civil servants on some hastily assembled enemies’ list, the retaliation would intimidate federal employees and wreak havoc with already fragile morale at virtually any agency that had run-ins with the Trump administration the first time around.

Ironically, no less a conservative than James Capretta, senior fellow and Milton Friedman Chair at the American Enterprise Institute has written bluntly about what pushing government back to pre-Pendleton days will mean:

Insulation of the professional civil service from political interference, along with promotion of expertise and competence in public administration, are characteristics of high-performing, mature democracies, including most of the U.S.’s closest western allies. In contrast, cronyism and rampant political patronage are seen in countries with ineffective public institutions and feeble democracies. Politicization of public services breeds cynicism and distrust, and yet also does not enhance the effectiveness of government as Trump loyalists claim it would.

Yet one more reason to head to the polls on Election Day.

Project 2025—a footnote

Jordan’s excellent article on MAGA’s Project 2025 plans for a second Trump presidency and the potentially grievous harm they could wreak on American workers was terrific. It was not only readable and informative on the subjects that preoccupy subscribers to Confined Space, it continued the work of leading Democratic candidates to publicize these disturbing ideas.

Project 2025 was originally sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, among the richest and most active of far-right think tanks. Its 920-page report entitled Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, was published in 2023 as an oversize 920-page book with the paperback version for sale on the Heritage website. At the Democratic convention, delegates and speakers waved their copies of the red, white, and blue book in the air, using it as a key talking point. As of September 10, 2024, the book was listed as “sold out.” (But never fear: you can still read it online.)

Once Democrats started publicizing the content of Project 2025, it did not take long for Donald Trump to muddy the waters by disavowing the Heritage project, claiming he knew nothing about it or its authors. As usual, the truth is far more serious.

Over the last few weeks, some excellent investigative reporting revealed that the effort to plan Trump’s second term is not limited to a big book of proposals but is actually staffed by some two dozen far-right groups organized, funded, and supervised by the powerful Conservative Partnership Institute and the Center for Renewing America. These groups are funded by millions of dollars in contributions from wealthy megadonors, and have spun off at least half a dozen other groups that take responsibility for the key elements of the plan, from debunking climate change to politicizing the civil service to prosecuting Trump “enemies.”

The groups include the key players who are likely to receive top positions in the next Trump administration. They include Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff; Stephen Miller, his top adviser on immigration, and Russell Vought, the former head of the Office of Management and Budge, policy director for the 2024 Republican platform committee and leading candidate for a new Trump administration’s White House chief of staff.

Vought made a name for himself in 2021 publishing an op-ed in Newsweek entitled “Is There Anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?” He wrote: [N]ationalists care greatly about maintaining control over our borders, strengthening our ability to protect ourselves from adversaries, avoiding foreign entanglements that both sap our strength and encroach on the prerogatives of other nations, and preserving a shared consensus as a people with a collective will to survive. … As for the Christian part of “Christian nationalism,” part of being a nation is a shared religious heritage. And in America, that historical heritage is, of course, Christianity.”

Donors have been so generous that the Conservative Partnership Institute was able to buy a three-story town house on Capitol Hill with conference rooms named for its most prominent contributors. Trump is very aware of this expansive network and has hosted key members of the group at Mar-a-Lago. The sprawling effort is the real Project 2025 in action, and it is poised to make conventional transition committees irrelevant.