The war has begun. It’s Trump, Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their new Department of Government Efficiency versus the Federal bureaucracy in a no-holds barred cage deathmatch. The first punches have been thrown; who will win? At stake are your tax dollars.
U.S. election night 2024 was a somber affair in Europe, as U.S. officials in most European capitals abandoned the usual watch parties. Watch parties used to be a long-standing American diplomatic tradition, held at embassies with invited local guests to watch the election results dribble in, showcasing our democracy. Great care was taken to make the party patriotic but not partisan; both candidates were featured and usually a mock election was held, with host country government officials voting one way or another. About the only bad part of the night was listening to American diplomats like me struggling to explain the Electoral College system in bad Mandarin or high school Spanish.
But there were few parties this year, thanks to what some call “The Trump Effect.” Many officials are still hurting from the 2016 election that left many top members of America’s diplomatic corps exposed as they absorbed the killer election results in front of journalists, foreign diplomats, and local officials. “I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” said a senior American diplomat based in Europe, adding that the 2016 embassy events had been “calamitous.” “The decision to nix election night festivities may also reflect the unusually politicized nature of America’s diplomatic corps. There is deep unease about the strength of the U.S. democratic system after disputes about the outcome of the 2020 election led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters,” says Politico.
With that as a scene-setter, Washington bureaucracy is preparing for war. Months before the election, in April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued new protective guidance to agencies as they implemented regulations strengthening “guard rails” on the conversion of career federal workers out of the civil service and into the excepted service. This refers to the infamous Schedule F planned by Trump as one of his Day One initiatives. OPM’s regulations establish a definition of “policy-related” jobs, whittling it down to escape Trump’s campaign definition by referring only to noncareer political appointments, and stipulating when an employee’s position is “involuntarily” converted out of the Civil Service, they retain “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued,” which would render the new rules of Schedule F moot. OPM’s version also grants federal workers the right to appeal any job reclassifications resulting in the loss of civil service protections to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a creaky-slow agency which could tie up Trump’s changes for years, case-by-slogging-case.
But despite Biden’s OPM efforts to protect the federal workforce from any upcoming Schedule F changes, analysts say there may be little the bureaucracy can do to stop them. Even the April 2024 rule could easily be rescinded, either after a 90-day notice-and-comment period or immediately with a new interim final rule. Schedule F fights can be expected to get deep into the weeds of how the U.S. government system works (or doesn’t work) through its tangle of regulations and laws. Never mind snatching returning rockets from the air and self-driving cars, Elon Musk will have met the most complex challenge of his time. Give Elon a hand by delving into the dense OPM’s guidance on Schedule F yourself.
So what is Schedule F anyway? Though it failed to go into practice, in Term 1.0 Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from many civil servants. This effort was labeled “Schedule F” because that is the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A–E already existed.) The administration created Schedule F based on language exempting positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants.
The civil service was once a good idea in theory to protect workers from politics and make sure the mail got sorted and the tariffs got collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy.
The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions to oppose the president’s initiatives. They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. This is what Trump wants to change in Term 2.0. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants at will. They will not go away easily. The terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon said.
Elon and Vivek are not fighting alone.
Some in Congress are already thinking ahead, anticipating the push-back from the affected civil servants. The Stop Resistance Activities by Federal Employees Act (STRAFE) would penalize federal employees if they obstruct a lawful order from administration officials. It requires agencies to report alleged violations to the White House every six months. Representative August Pfluger’s (R-Texas) Act directs OPM to craft new mandatory training for senior federal employees on the penalties imposed if they were to oppose, obstruct or impede directives from the president, vice president or any other political appointee. “Career unelected bureaucrats cannot be allowed to undermine the agenda of any future president,” said Congressman Pfluger.”We must ensure that the network of federal employees that brazenly carried out resistance activities under the first Trump Administration is not unleashed again.” The STRAFE Act is designed to mitigate resistance within federal agencies, ensuring a more cooperative and compliant federal workforce.
STRAFE has four components: 1) training for federal employees clearly outlining prohibited activities intended to obstruct or undermine the directives of the sitting administration; 2) penalties, on par with Hatch Act violations, for federal employees who engage in resistance activities (civil penalties can reach $1,000); 3) an external complaint reporting process, bypassing the traditional Inspector General channels within agencies, to ensure a more transparent system and 4) periodic reports from each federal agency to the Executive Office of the President, providing updates on complaints and status of actions taken against those engaging in resistance activities.
Needless to say, civil service advocacy groups oppose the STRAFE Act, saying STRAFE and Schedule F are just veiled efforts to politicize the federal workforce. “The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States is not the result our union was hoping for,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said “it feels different—in 2016, he was still something of an unknown. Now we have Trump’s first term anti-union executive orders and Schedule F on top of that, and we have Project 2025, the blueprint of exactly what they’re going to do. So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out exactly what they have planned. As a union that represents federal employees, we have to prepare to defend our members.”
Game on, Elon and Vivek.
Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com.
