Trump’s first-term agenda was thwarted by bureaucrats. Here’s the conservatives’ plan to avoid a repeat:

For example, the often Trump-skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial page praised Trump’s first year in office, saying he was “taking control and rolling back the regulatory state at a faster rate than Ronald Reagan.”

But advisers to the former president say this push for deregulation could have been much stronger without a federal workforce that was ideologically opposed to Trump’s agenda and worked on all fronts to thwart it.

The federal workforce constitutes a “fourth branch of government,” usurping the powers of the president, Congress and the courts, according to Paul Dans, Trump’s former chief of staff in the personal office.

“This is a conflation of power among people who are absolutely not answerable to the will of the people,” Dans told MarketWatch. “They have a permanent base in Washington and essentially no one can remove them.”

Currently, Dans is the director of Project 2025 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. The project is an effort to recruit and train a new generation of Republican officials. This will ensure that if Trump is re-elected in November, “we will have a team of people aligned from day one. .”

So far, the effort has led to more than 7,500 Americans submitting resumes to form a second Trump administration, and Dans has organized a series of online training sessions led by conservatives with experience serving the federal government.

He is also part of a broader network of Trump administration veterans who are sounding the alarm about the federal workforce’s ability to thwart policies that displease them.

James Sherk, a former special adviser to Trump, outlined an extensive list of policies that he said were obstructed by officials, including career staff in the Justice Department’s civil division refusing to investigate a case charging Yale University with racial discrimination against Asian Americans and career lawyers. Written. He said the National Labor Relations Board refused to draft a precedent-changing decision if it disagreed with its conclusions.

“A president elected by the people has very little say in policy,” Dans said.

DOJ declined to comment. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo told MarketWatch in an email that the agency’s “career staff are using their considerable talent and expertise to carry out Congress’s mandate, regardless of who is in the White House.” “I condemned the Sherk for hurling baseless insults at these loyal members of the public,” he said. servant.”

destruction of administrative state

Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said in 2017 that the administration’s goal was “the destruction of the administrative state,” a complex of departments, agencies and regulators that implement and enforce the set of rules that govern American economic life. .

The mission of Dans and other activists involved in Project 2025 is not to destroy the administrative state, but to hold it accountable to American voters.

“Let’s restore democracy,” Dans said. “Far from attacking it, we are trying to give people a say in their own government again.”

To that end, the conservative movement is counting on the Republican White House to reinstate a policy known as Schedule F. The policy exempts about 50,000 federal workers in policy-making positions from civil service regulations, making it difficult to fire workers who refuse to follow legal directives. president.

Trump issued an executive order creating the Schedule F classification for federal employees in his final months in office, but he had little time to take advantage of the new rule and President Joe Biden quickly rescinded it after taking office.

Democrats, union leaders and public policy experts argue that Schedule F reforms would hinder government performance and actually reduce democratic accountability by replacing career experts with inexperienced ideologues.

“Increasing the number of political appointees will create a new arena for political polarization to replace moderates with extremists, thereby reducing the quality of governance,” Georgetown University political scientist Donald Moynihan wrote in a recent Brookings analysis. I wrote it.

These proposed civil service reforms dovetail with the conservative movement’s strategy to use federal courts to rein in the power of regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates greenhouse gas emissions, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The U.S. Supreme Court, overhauled by three Trump appointees, has struck down numerous regulations put forward by the Biden administration, and the conservative movement’s hope is to accelerate this trend of deregulation by overhauling the 2 million-strong federal workforce.

root and branch reform

Schedule F reforms can be implemented by executive order, but they only affect a small percentage of federal personnel, and the conservative movement is eager for more fundamental changes.

Last year, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, both Republicans, passed the Public Service Reform Act to protect unionized federal workers from being fired from their jobs. ) was introduced.

The law would eliminate the Merit Systems Protection Board, one of several agencies federal workers can appeal to claim they were wrongfully terminated, and make it easier to fire federal workers in general. .

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy recommendations go further and argue that Congress should reconsider whether federal employees should be allowed to unionize because, unlike in the private sector, there is no threat of unionization in government. Relieve demands for higher wages, better benefits, and job protections.

“When civil service reforms took place in the late 19th century, only about 10 percent of workers had protection; today, 99.8 percent enjoy a de facto career,” Dans said.

“This should be an issue for both parties,” he added. But trends in polarization mean the federal workforce is increasingly comprised of partisan Democrats, he argued.

“Now this is a per diem issue,” Dans said. “A conservative in the White House is looking down on an administration full of people who oppose his agenda.”

But Moynihan, the Georgetown political scientist, argues that further politicizing the bureaucracy could be problematic for Americans of all political persuasions. Studies have shown that political appointees tend to be less responsive to congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

“This decline in response has impacted policy-related requests as well as inquiries about constituency services,” Moynihan wrote. “That is, both elected officials and the general public are affected by politicization in terms of low responsiveness.”