Former President Donald Trump may not have made an official announcement about a second run at the White House, but according to insiders he has already decided how he would gut the deep state if he does run and win a second term, a new report states.
Trump is eyeing a wave of firings, restructuring and cutting of the federal government that could see as many as 50,000 federal employees fired, the political news site Axios reported Friday.
One of Trump’s campaign aims in 2016 was to “drain ‘the swamp’” — a euphemism that has long been applied to Washington D.C. — and to reduce or eliminate the deep state full of perfunctory federal employees that costs the government billions and has enshrined the power of the unelected, unaccountable regulatory state.
Trump did a fair bit of that after he won, including causing hundreds of employees to quit when he announced he was moving their jobs in the Interior Department and Department of Agriculture government offices out of D.C. and out into the states.
As a Washington Post headline from May 23, 2019, showed, it was not popular with the D.C. apparatchiks: “USDA researchers quit in droves as Trump administration plans relocation.”
The former president also saved taxpayer money and diminished the power of the bureaucracy by cutting regulatory costs by 90 percent, saving the treasury $160 billion.
But just ahead of the 2020 election, Trump unveiled an ambitious plan that would go into effect, assuming he was going to win re-election, Axios reported.
He issued an executive order in October 2020 that created a whole new class of federal employees, workers who were already on the federal payroll but would lose their civil service job protections, according to Axios.
Trump intended to use the new classification, called “Schedule F,” to take a meat cleaver to the deep state and get rid of tens of thousands of biased, and often useless, employees from nearly every part of the federal state.
Do you think Donald Trump will fire thousands of federal employees if he wins the White House again?
The order was intended for release much earlier, according to a separate Axios report, published Saturday. It was developed in 2019 and expected to be unveiled in 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic upended those plans.
By the time it was released, as Axios reported, most of the country, even in the federal government, was too consumed with the coming presidential election to notice.
The Washington Post covered it, however, with a predictably hostile approach for a newspaper that caters to federal employees: “Trump’s historic assault on the civil service was four years in the making.”
However, Axios noted Saturday, “Most Americans have never heard of Schedule F, let alone absorbed its vast implications.”
One reason for that is that President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s Schedule F executive order three days after Biden was sworn in.
Now, Axios reported on Friday, groups like the non-profit Conservative Partnership Institute, the Center for Renewing America and America First Legal, among other groups, are already working to lay the groundwork for cleaning up the federal government if Trump wins a new term.
The campaign is brewing to review the federal government and to prepare lists of needless positions, biased actors and duplicate departments that are ripe for elimination, in sectors ranging from the EPA, the IRS, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Judiciary, the Pentagon and the intelligence sector, among other areas, Axios reported.
“These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court,” Axios wrote.
One of the most contentious elements of “Schedule F” will be the instant re-classification of tens of thousands of federal employees as “Schedule F” employees, which would take them out of their union-protected status and classifies them as “at will” employees. That, in turn, would mean their jobs are at the will of the president and he can then fire them without opposition. This is an extremely important step in cleaning the swamp.
According to Axios, Trump loyalists say the move would finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan federal workforce that leftists such as Obama and Biden have filled to the brim with hardcore, left-wing operatives.
But the plan is also more ambitious than mere clean sweeps of money-wasting employees. According to Axios, Trump and his allies are also already identifying all the officials they will need to quickly put in place to start swinging the Schedule F ax. After all, without the operatives in key positions to implement the plan, nothing could come of it.
This part of the plan is a big change from Trump’s first term. Unfortunately, the then-new president was unprepared to face the deep state and lacked the key officials to put his policies into effect. Despite the fact that his desire to “drain the swamp” was why the American people elected him, the deep state thwarted much of Trump’s agenda the first time around.
For certain, Trump would have to act quickly if he intends to put this ambitious agenda into play. After all, he will be limited to this one, last term, so he won’t have the luxury of taking his time with the expectation of another four years afterward. But he also has a benefit to a single term: He also won’t have to worry about upsetting people because he won’t be running for re-election.
Axios added that Trump also intends to target the military and the intelligence services, sectors of the government that past GOP presidents thought of as friendly to a center-right agenda, but have been filled with supporters of both former President Barack Obama and current Biden.
The plan is to go “after the national security apparatus, ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the ‘woke generals’ at the Defense Department and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI,” Axios reported.
Finally, this isn’t just some shadowy, behind-the-scenes, secret plan, either. Trump is already out in the open about “firing the swamp,” Breitbart News reported.
For his appearance at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit this weekend, according to Breitbart, Trump’s prepared remarks included the lines:
“To drain the swamp, we need to fire the swamp. With schedule F, I took executive action to make it possible to fire federal employees who are bypassing our democracy to advance wokeism and corruption.
“We now need Congress to institute historic reforms to permanently empower the president to root out the deep state, and ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary can be told, ‘You’re fired.’”
Those could be magic words to millions of conservatives cheering the plan on as the country heads into the 2022 midterm elections, which will presumably strengthen the Republican Party and help set up the groundwork for Trump’s second run at the presidency.
