With his re-election as president-elect, Donald Trump has better chances of securing more control over the civil service than he does slashing its dimensions. He has pledged to do so in response to his “deep condition” of unelected bureaucrats that thwarted his first-term plan.
He frequently criticized the federal government as being in the president’s power on the plan road.
Accordingly, at the top of his plan is a plan to expand the government’s control over job officials and impose fresh requirements on civil servants.
Similarly, he has called for reducing the government’s footprints and compressing firms — up to eliminating the Department of Education. Elon Musk, the investor and the country’s richest man, has stated that Trump will establish a government efficiency system to reduce spending and clutter. Musk has suggested that, with his lawyers, Trump had cut around$ 2 trillion in investing. That would be about 30 % of fiscal 2024 total spending.
In the secret market, Musk has succeeded in lowering staffing. After purchasing the app, he claims to have eliminated about 80 % of X’s team.
However, it is entirely unique to drastically reduce the number of federal workers.
The Trump administration will have to deal with one fundamental point: the federal labor has n’t expanded in decades. As of this year, there are about 2.3 million professional tree civil people, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Put in the Post Office, and the range is about 2.9 million. There were also 2.9 million federal workers in 1967, almost 60 years earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump, in his first name, called for privatizing the postal services.
Setting that away, though, it’s worthwhile noting that the federal labor has shrunk considerably, in relative terms. It was about 4 % of the total U. S. labor force in the 1960s and less than 2 % today.
According to Donald Kettl, a teacher at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas,” the general style of federal workers is that it’s been sluggish for a few years at this point.”
More than half of the federal civil labor is employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Department of Defense. Trump has fought for more expansion of the military and better veterans ‘ care than cutting back on those sections.
Of the majority, not all are vital, of course. But finding efficiency will be hard.
A staff reduction of about 4,200 may result from the Department of Education being completely abolished, which is not a drop in the bucket.
Republicans favor the repeal of the Democrats ‘ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s boost to IRS money, which is another decrease. The revenue collection agency received$ 80 billion in additional revenue from that act, but Republicans eventually reclaimed some of it.
In recent years, the company has been adding people. In portion because Republicans fought ferociously against IRS money in the midst of the Lois Lerner targeting scandal, its workforce decreased from 84, 133 in 2014 to 73, 519 in 2018.
But, Steven Mnuchin, the Trump Treasury Secretary, was more willing to grant the organization more funding, so it resumed hiring staff members in the early times of the Trump administration. With the innovative Inflation Reduction Act money, its workforce has grown above 90, 000, and the company now plans to include 102, 500 people by 2029.
With Republicans now projected to control the workforce in 2025, there are potential slowed or reversed staffing increases.
However, those cuts are often in the thousands or tens of thousands. Additionally, Trump and Republicans want to relocate employees.
Trump has demanded that the agency be given the go-ahead for the southern border crisis and that 10,000 Border Patrol agents be hired to solve its staffing issues during the Biden administration. Additionally, he intends to use significant amounts of tariffs to start a trade war, which would require more staffing at the Department of Commerce and elsewhere.
Bottom line: Offloading government employees will prove challenging.
In his first term as president of the federal workforce, Trump figured out that lesson.
The ranks of the bureaucrats swelled even though the Trump administration, in its early days, imposed a freeze on federal hiring.
The issue with blunt restraining federal employment is that it is too difficult to avoid making exceptions. High-ranking officials will inevitably find it difficult to leave without the ability to hire, whether it is for Border Patrol agents or other high-priority hires like those for air traffic controllers.
The Partnership for Public Service’s CEO, Max Stier, stated that the Trump administration added employees despite attempts to freeze the government because “it removes judgment from the management of our government” and that it is a” symbol rather than a meaningful change.
But there’s an even greater obstacle to cutting the size of government, one that has cropped up over the course of decades. That is that restraint in federal hiring has, in the past, translated into the growth of federal contractors, a sort of shadow government workforce.
This shadow government is less directly accountable to the public, to the extent that there is no up-to-date, accurate, official measure of its size. According to a consultant outside the organization, there will be 5 million contractors by 2020. How big is it right now, exactly? However, the Government Accountability Office reports that contractor total spending has increased from$ 665 billion in fiscal 2020 to$ 759 billion in fiscal 2023, which indicates that it has only increased.
So, to sum up, efforts to reduce the federal workforce have failed over the years to reduce headcounts, instead transferring work to outside contractors who are less accountable to the president and the general public.
Trump’s plans to change the workforce’s composition are perhaps more realistic than reducing its size.
The reimposition of a rule change known as” Schedule F” is at the center of his reform plan. Trump signed an executive order in 2020 that would create a new category of federal employment that policymakers would be exempt from certain hiring regulations and who would be more susceptible to dismissal. Before President Joe Biden took office, the Office of Personnel Management reversed and put the rule into effect.
The rule has been pledged to be reinstated, and supporters have suggested that it could apply to as many as 50 000 workers. Many of those workers who are presuming to be liberals or otherwise opposed to Trump’s agenda would be replaced with those who would advance his objectives.
He has also called for moving parts of the bureaucracy out of Washington, D. C., suggesting that up to 100, 000 positions could be moved.
Chris Edwards, a fiscal policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute who edits the site Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​. org, said the best way to improve the government’s performance would be to eliminate programs to make bureaucracies more manageable. He pushed for the adoption of Schedule F, though.
According to him, “making it easier to fire federal employees would be a step forward,” given that the government’s firing rate is only about one-sixth of that of the private sector.
Reimposing Schedule F could be procedurally difficult or time-consuming for the new Trump administration, thanks to Biden’s efforts to block it via regulation.
If Trump were to implement the rule, though, it could backfire in some ways.
Stier said civil servants should be chosen on the basis of their expertise, not their political loyalties. He noted that there are already far more political appointees in the United States than in other democracies, where the average number of appointments is in the tens rather than the thousands.
He claimed that the president and high-performance standards should be held accountable for the career workforce, but a partial reverse of the late 19th century’s bureaucratic reforms, which mandated that positions be awarded on the basis of merit, would lead to a return to the” spoils system” of government. In that era, positions with major influence over decisions about contracts, rules, and personnel were granted to allies of the president as a form of reward, resulting in corruption. ” We should not make that mistake again”, Stier said.
Paradoxically, an increase in the number of politically appointed positions could create pressure to grow the federal workforce, he noted. The president might find it helpful to establish positions to be distributed to allies so that such positions are seen as rewards for political support.
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Kettl suggested that Trump might concentrate on replacing key officials in organizations that previously obstructed his agenda, such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, rather than starting a comprehensive reorganization of the bureaucracy. Trump’s efforts to reorient policies on the border, foreign policy, and crime could be greatly impacted by replacing several hundred bureaucrats in key positions.
He claimed that presenting an example of recalcitrant bureaucrats would convey a message to others. Some organizations, particularly those that are trying to put heads on spikes and make the case to other feds that it’s dangerous to cross what the administration has in mind when it comes to policy, would make an effort.
The Washington Examiner’s policy editor is Joseph Lawler.
