Column: Trump wants to turn the government into an ‘army of suck-ups’

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event.

By Doyle McManusWashington Columnist

Sept. 23, 2024 3 AM PT

Justice Department prosecutors would launch criminal investigations of those Trump views as enemies.
IRS workers would likely be ordered to audit prominent Democrats’ tax returns.

WASHINGTON — If former President Trump wins the November election, he says one of his actions on “Day One,” right after he begins deporting millions of undocumented migrants, will be enacting a radical plan to force the federal bureaucracy to bow to his demands.

Like any president, Trump would undoubtedly stock the top levels of the government with loyal appointees. But he also intends to enforce his will by making it possible to fire lower-ranking federal employees for their political views.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president,” Trump said early in his campaign. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”

The effects would be far-reaching.

If Trump gets his way, Justice Department prosecutors would immediately launch criminal investigations of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Obama and others who have incurred Trump’s wrath.

New appointees at the Internal Revenue Service would likely be ordered to audit prominent Democrats’ tax returns, an action Trump demanded during his first term.

Trump’s newest political ally, anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said last week that the nominee has asked him to oversee changes at the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and other public health agencies.

At the Pentagon, Trump has promised to fire senior military officers he considers “woke.” And he has vowed to purge the CIA and the FBI, accusing both agencies of “persecuting” conservatives and Christians in addition to investigating his 2016 presidential campaign.

Those jarring scenarios don’t spring from the imaginations of Trump’s critics. Trump has proposed them himself.

Underlying most of them is his promise to end civil service protections, a sweeping idea that has escaped public scrutiny because it is so wonky.

Trump said last year that he wants the authority to remove at will anyone he considers to be a “rogue bureaucrat.” “I will wield that power very aggressively,” he added.

Cabinet officials, agency chiefs and other political appointees are named to their jobs by the president and can already be fired at will.

But civil servants — officially nonpartisan officials who work under presidents of both parties — can be fired only for good cause, and they can appeal terminations to an independent review board.

The federal government’s civilian workforce of some 2.1 million includes only about 4,000 presidential appointees. Most of the others are civil servants, including FBI agents, NIH scientists, National Park rangers and IRS auditors — all of whom would be affected by the changes Trump has proposed.

‘An army of suck-ups’

Experts in federal administration say Trump’s proposal, known as “Schedule F” for the job category it would expand, is a bad idea.

“It would turn much of the civil service into an army of suck-ups,” said Robert Shea, a self-described conservative Republican who was a top official in the White House Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush.

Shea said he found civil servants’ untrammeled advice useful when he was a presidential appointee. “They told me when what I wanted to do was stupid. They advised me on whether it was legal or not,” he said. “But they also bent over backward to help me find better ways to do what we wanted to accomplish.”

The changes Trump has proposed, Shea said, “would mean that if you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical [or] unwise, they could brand you as disloyal and terminate you.”

Donald F. Kettl, a retired professor of public administration at the University of Maryland, noted that if a new Trump administration fired just a few employees in each agency, the rest would quickly get the message.

“You could get transformation by intimidation,” he said.

Making civil servants fireable at will might sound at first as if it could make the bureaucracy more efficient. But in practice, it would open the way to more politically motivated decisions and abuses of power.

An IRS for auditing enemies

“The IRS is a perfectly good example,” Shea said. “If a political appointee asks someone to launch an audit without apparent cause, a civil servant could push back. But if Schedule F were in place, the civil servant could be fired.”

Retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, said after Trump left office that the then-president had demanded that the IRS investigate several of his perceived enemies, including former FBI Director James B. Comey and Deputy Director Andrew G. McCabe.

The IRS, which was then headed by a Trump appointee, opened audits of both men’s tax returns after Kelly left the White House. A later investigation by the Treasury Department found no evidence that the audits were in response to Trump’s order.

Kelly told the New York Times in 2022 that Trump also wanted the IRS and the Justice Department to investigate former Secretary of State (and 2016 election rival) Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director John O. Brennan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other people he saw as enemies.

“In a second term, there would no longer be a buffer of principled appointees who would stop him,” said Donald Moynihan, a University of Michigan professor.

Kettl noted that Project 2025, a policy blueprint prepared largely by former Trump aides, proposes making the IRS deputy commissioner in charge of enforcement, now a civil servant, into a presidential appointee. Trump has claimed he knows nothing about the report, although its lead author says he briefed the former president on its contents.

An anti-vax agenda at the FDA?

Even specialized agencies like the Food and Drug Administration would be vulnerable to the pressures created by Schedule F, Kettl warned.

What happens to scientists and policymakers at the FDA and other health agencies if Trump installs Kennedy and the anti-vaccine crusader pushes his lifelong agenda?

“Anyone who touches policy, or whose behavior seems to conflict with RFK [Jr.]’s policy positions, could be replaced. That certainly would apply to FDA’s role in approving vaccines,” Kettl said. “The potential for a massive shift is enormous. Will I be able to get a flu shot?”

Kennedy has said he’d like to change the focus of NIH, the world’s largest public funder of medical research, toward his favorite cause of chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes. “We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” he said last year.

Justice Department

The Justice Department’s prosecutors have long prized a high degree of independence from political pressures. But Trump has said he wants the department to be “completely overhauled” and purged of anyone who participated in investigations of his past conduct.

“Since the Nixon administration, the department has made a commitment to pursue justice in a fair and evenhanded way, without political interference,” said Donald B. Ayer, who was the department’s second-ranking official under President George H.W. Bush. “But that commitment is a norm, not a law.”

“If you have a bad actor who wants to violate the rules, he can violate the rules,” he said.

Stripping career lawyers of civil service protections, he added, “could have a chilling effect on their willingness to give candid legal advice.” If those lawyers resign or are fired, he added, there may be no one left to object to Trump’s campaign of legal retribution. “Who’s going to stop him?” Ayer asked.

In Trump’s previous term, several of his top aides believed it was their duty to slow the president down when he proposed actions they considered illegal or unwise — such as his demand that the IRS audit his enemies, his suggestion that Army troops shoot unarmed demonstrators, or his frequent demands to pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Trump later denounced those aides as “RINOs,” Republicans in name only, and promised to appoint true loyalists in a second term. There will be no moderating influences this time.

Combine that with Trump’s plan to end civil service protections, making internal dissent a firing offense, and you have a recipe for unrestrained one-man rule.