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I think the intended difference is that there’s lists of appointees for a second trump admin who are competent and effective and who will have the ability to sideline resistance libs in the civil service.
To what extent that’s true I don’t know; my impression is that at least some of trumps issues with getting stuff done were just his tendency to ask for the impossible and fire high level officials for not doing it.
Except, isn't the whole argument of things like Michael Lewis's "Fifth Risk," and all the talk of "Trump-proofing" Federal hiring and firing that any right-wing appointee, by disagreeing with the existing left-wing "expert consensus," thereby proves himself "not an expert," thereby not "competent and effective," but a "partisan hack" who "has no idea how our government works," and thus whose appointment would constitute "a government under attack by its own leaders," to be resisted by any means necessary?
And how does anyone "sideline" over two million people?
There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?
To start with, there’s lots of janitors, low level auditors, air traffic controllers, secretaries, etc. employed by the federal government. Obviously these people don’t generate policy, and they don’t really enforce it either.
Then on the enforcement wing, you’ve got lots of cops who are mostly not resistance libs. Yes, there’s EPA permitting officers and DOJ lawyers, but you can tell a lot of them to sit in a corner by the simple expedient of not assigning them any work. Ken Paxton as attorney general brings with him an inner circle which can take over most of the DOJ lawyers’ jobs at the cost of some mild corruption- and the rest of it can be assigned to the compliant dozen or so. It’s a very small portion of people which need to be moved to rubber rooms, and there are already people listed to replace them.
I have worked in a federal government agency for about ten years which employs over 5,000 people. It is possible to strongarm policymakers with enough political will. But it’s not easy. This is how you might do it within one presidential administration:
Identify those individuals in charge of policymaking within the agency. At my agency it’s a small department within a small division, constituting about 25 people. Fire them all. Also, fire every high-ranking attorney in each of the major offices as well as headquarters. This would be another 50-100 people. Don’t fire the executive leadership—they got there because they follow orders well. All you need to do is rewrite the orders and they might grumble but they know well how to fall in line.
Immediately abolish the public sector union associated with the agency. Do not negotiate, strip employees of all collective bargaining rights and grievance processes. Every single federal government agency’s union is captured by the PMC Left. The only exception is perhaps for those representing law enforcement and border patrol, because those are Red Tribe heavy. (I suspect this is why some people want to reclassify agency employees as contractors.) The unions have long been captured, they must be destroyed.
Loosen hiring procedures to de-emphasize college degrees as a requirement to apply for federal government jobs. These are just credentials designed to benefit academia, which is also hopelessly captured by the PMC Left. Do this on day one. After four years the effects on employee hiring and attrition will be evident.
Identify all agency employees who have ever donated to establishment Democratic or Republican political campaigns. Fire them all. Thankfully it’s easy to do this courtesy of the FEC and ActBlue and other PACs that publish donor information no matter how small.
I can attest that more federal government employees than you think are Republicans, perhaps even conservative/MAGA types. Problem is they don’t hold the power. A lot of it depends on where the agency offices are located. People who work in DC are much more likely to be Blue Tribe than people who work in Texas. That’s why the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of relocating headquarter offices outside the DC beltway. The power centers of these agencies—the headquarters—are in DC, and it takes a certain kind of slug bureaucrat to live in DC or choose to work there. Move the headquarters to Billings or Pensacola or Nashville and you’ll get a different crop of loyalists for sure.
And critically, we know that Trump's people are actually preparing to do this - Schedule F removes civil service protection from policy-making civil servants across the Government, and during the last 3 months of the Trump administration the system appeared to be co-operating with the process of drawing up a list of affected posts. And Project 2025 is drawing up a list of reliable MAGA Republicans to replace anyone who needs firing.
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This has long been one of my favorite reform proposal, but it's hard to make it stick. Every agency out there feels like their highest imperative is to ensure that their overlords "understand" what they're trying to do, finds value in their organization, and keeps the resource train flowing. So it is not uncommon that even when the bulk of an agency is actually located elsewhere, their leadership either all have offices in DC or spend significant amounts of time "traveling" there. So, one likely immediate consequence is that this "travel" to DC will ramp up even more, such that agency leadership essentially all have "temporary offices" there that become less and less temporary. They'll delegate more internal power down the chain as their jobs become more "externally-focused". The result may be a bit of a rift between agency upper/lower-upper management. In the balance, how does this actually affect the day-to-day operation of the agency? It probably depends a lot on agency specifics and how much their upper/upper-middle layers cohere through the process.
In sum, I sort of thing that just firing and turning management into political appointees accomplishes a certain amount, while relocation sort of severs upper management from agency operations, which may actually reduce the effectiveness of turning those folks into political appointees. The permanent bureaucracy already does a lot to isolate political appointees to make sure they can't "stir up too much trouble", and that may actually be a bit easier to do if they can just ship them all off to DC all the time, while they take the real reins of power over day-to-day agency operations.
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Thank you, AACQ’d. The main thing I want to add is that from connections to Texas state politics, I’m pretty sure that at least the border patrol union is solidly pro-red tribe. IIRC local/state level law enforcement unions frequently are as well, it would stand to reason that at least some other federal law enforcement unions are red tribe/Republican.
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