Schedule F Won't Tame the Deep State

... Today, the civil bureaucracy is not creative, accomplished, or even responsive to the president; it is stagnant and a drag on the country, and it is no wonder. Rather than being staffed with regular Americans chosen for their ideas or leadership capability by a duly enacted president, the bureaucracy of today is composed of credentialed box-checkers insulated from political accountability by undemocratic civil service protections. Of the roughly 2.2 million federal bureaucrats and 10 million federal contractors, only about 4,000 roles are political appointees accountable to the president. What is worse, this unaccountable bureaucracy is an active arm of the Left...

One can judge the bureaucracy by its controversies. IRS bureaucrats targeted "patriot" organizations for their conservative identity; the national security agencies wielded anti-terrorism authorities to investigate a rival presidential campaign and unmask its senior-level political advisors; bureaucrats across numerous agencies applied pressure to social media companies to repress conservative political speech with which they disagreed...

Federal civil service laws that protect and insulate the bureaucracy from the president’s control, contrary to the Constitution's demands. 

Reforming those laws must be a top priority of the next Trump administration, and the centerpiece of that reform cannot be the Schedule F proposal put forward in the first Trump presidency. That idea, which would at most designate a small proportion of the bureaucracy for greater presidential removal authority and control...

It is impossible to understand the Trump presidency, what it accomplished and what it failed to accomplish, without understanding these attributes of the federal bureaucracy. The President no longer controls the executive branch...

After battling administrative state intransigence and sometimes outright revolt for nearly four years, President Trump was well aware that something had to give. In October 2020, he issued an executive order often referred to now as simply “Schedule F.” Schedule F required agencies to designate which of their employees were “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” These employees would then be placed on Schedule F (Schedules A through E already existed), and because the order’s language mirrored the 1978 Act exemption for some federal jobs, Schedule F employees would lose procedural protections against adverse employment actions that originated in the 1978 Act...

First, Schedule F looks good on paper but is virtually impossible to actuate because it asks the agencies to determine which employees should be added to it...

Now is the time to dismantle the administrative state. Shutter an agency (or many); eliminate public employee unions; repeal civil service protections that insulate bureaucrats from presidential control...