In the campaign In a video from March 2023, Donald Trump outlined his goal: “Dismantle the deep state and take democracy back from corruption in Washington.” Even in 2016, such investigations were common. But this time, his incoming administration has a workable plan for how to do it.
This idea has been around for years and will likely be launched from day one as Donald Trump prepares to take office. It would make thousands of federal career civil servants “at-will” employees and, as a result, could be fired for not doing what the new administration demands. This would be the first step in fundamentally overhauling the federal government.
The newly elected president has repeatedly made it clear that his second term will begin with a purge. If a pre-verified document promotion mechanism is in place, internal resistance from long-term public officials will be reduced and policies will be promoted.
To understand the incoming Trump administration, you need to know Schedule F.
Schedule F, signed ahead of the 2020 election and promptly repealed by the Biden administration, would potentially reassign hundreds of thousands of policy-related jobs into new categories, effectively stripping career civil servants of employment protections and making it easier for them to get involved in politics. People appointed to fire them.
As we previously reported, one of the key defenders of President Trump’s first Schedule F was Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, avowed Christian nationalists sought to turn influential institutions into tools to pursue the president’s agenda, without regard for institutional knowledge and expertise, and sometimes with disregard for the law.
Vought and the rest of the (Heritage Foundation’s) Project 2025 management standby plan is to revive Schedule F and go over budget. Potentially 50,000 federal employees could be affected, their expert roles open to MAGA loyalists, a faction ideologically vetted to offer little resistance to Trump’s imperialist presidential project. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.
The Biden administration has since taken steps to strengthen performance-based protections for career civil servants, but some experts and observers have pointed out that the changes could end up delaying Schedule F implementation and may amount to little more than a preventative “speed bump.” Politicization of the workforce. Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will oversee government health agencies under President Trump, said 600 National Institute of Health employees should be fired and replaced.
Plus, it looks like Elon Musk is also involved.
This week, President-elect Donald Trump announced who he will appoint to his next government staff, beginning the process of choosing a new “border czar,” a critical national security role, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general. This was a sometimes bizarre choice, but it was still part of the traditional transition process. In other words, the president would say who would hold key positions.
In a less general way than usual, Trump said his ‘first friend’ Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the ‘Department of Government Effectiveness.’ The organization’s acronym DOGE alludes to the Tesla billionaire’s favorite memecoin. The committee, proposed by Musk himself, would work with OMB to reorganize federal agencies and significantly cut spending and regulations by the summer of 2026.
“It could potentially be the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump wrote in a statement. According to Musk, who previously advocated for a whopping $2 trillion budget cut, the group “will send shockwaves through everyone involved in the system and government waste. That’s a lot of people!”
Since the announcement, questions have been raised about possible funding sources and the extent of authority DOGE can actually exercise, since federal spending requires congressional approval. But the stated goal of reshaping the administration in the image of the MAGA movement signals what is likely to happen once Trump takes office: an all-out war on the federal bureaucracy and career civil servants in Washington.
