Trump and DeSantis Are on a Mission to Destroy the Civil Service

The FBI would be a definite target for decapitation to get rid of “deep state” personnel. Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency

In 1883, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was signed into law by Republican president Chester A. Arthur, putting an end to the so-called spoils system that allowed presidents to reward political supporters with appointed offices and eject federal employees who had not sworn loyalty to them. It was probably the peak achievement of the progressive reform movement of the late 19th century and has largely stayed in place via the civil-service system for well over a century.

It’s not terribly surprising that Donald Trump wants to tear that system down. His idol, after all, is Andrew Jackson, who championed the “spoils system” as a populist revolt against the emergence of a cadre of professional administrators who remained in federal offices for multiple administrations. But for all his talk of “clearing the swamp” and replacing “deep state” civil servants with his own loyal supporters, Trump didn’t make the destruction of the civil-service system a key first-term priority. Not until October 2020 did he issue an executive order creating a new Schedule F classification of political appointees to include most policymaking positions in the higher levels of the bureaucracy. Like a lot of alarming things Trump proposed, Schedule F didn’t get implemented, and Joe Biden quickly revoked the executive order and restored the traditional civil service.

But now Trump is making it clear that in a second term, partly as a matter of unfinished business and partly as an act of vengeance against his enemies, he intends to revive and fully implement Schedule F, as Government Executive reported in March:

Former President Trump on Tuesday renewed his pledge, made a year ago, to revive an initiative to strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil-service protections and “shatter the deep state” if elected again. 

In a video message posted to Rumble, a YouTube alternative popular among members of the right that also hosts Trump’s Truth Social social-media platform, Trump, who declared his candidacy for president last year, vowed to revive Schedule F immediately upon his return to the White House and to remove bureaucrats in national security and law-enforcement agencies, whom he claimed without evidence are “persecuting” conservatives.

Trump advisers have a clear and pretty large target for those they want to purge, Government Executive observes:

Those involved in the effort to revive Schedule F told Government Executive last week that they have identified 50,000 federal employees that could be fired under the proposed new authority, although they hope to fire only a fraction of that total to create a “chilling effect” to keep the rest of them in line.

This isn’t just a Trump preoccupation. As part of his ever-intensifying effort to emulate and surpass the radicalism of the 45th president, Ron DeSantis is articulating his own assault on the civil service, as he explained to conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt:

I don’t buy this idea that the president cannot remove a “career” person. When they’re abusing power, and they’re going outside of what is appropriate, they absolutely should be terminated, and terminated swiftly. So we’re going to be doing that. I think we’re going to do it in a big way.

Like Trump, DeSantis believes federal law-enforcement agencies are abusing power systematically whenever they get in the way of conservative policy initiatives or prosecute Republican officeholders. So his makeover plan will focus on decapitating the FBI and the Department of Justice generally, according to Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a “Day One” strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system.

The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

It’s unclear whether DeSantis intends to legitimize this assault on the civil service via an instrument like Schedule F. But both DeSantis and Trump have talked about institutionalizing their “reforms” by breaking up Washington-based bureaucracies and scattering administrative functions around the country. The Trump administration made a few gestures in that direction in 2019 by moving selected Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Land Management personnel out of Washington. And DeSantis has even bigger demolition plans, Wegmann tells us:

“We’re not going to let all this power accumulate in Washington; we’re going to break up these agencies,” DeSantis said during a private strategy session over the weekend, excerpts of which were obtained exclusively by RCP. He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”

So a Republican Party that once invented and then championed the idea of a nonpartisan civil service is now fighting to dismantle it. That means a new class of federal appointees charged with a partisan agenda will arrive, along with a new GOP president, in positions of authority. It’s one of many underestimated implications of the 2024 presidential contest.