



âȘ A coalition of conservative leaders and former political appointees has compiled a game plan for the next conservative president to restructure the federal governmentâs bureaucracy to make it more cost effective, high-performing and accountable to the people…
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FILLER
he greatest challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the Executive Branch to return power; including power currently held by the Executive Branch, back to the American people. So writes Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Donald Trump in the book âMandate for Leadership,â compiled by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Copies of his report on the Executive Office of the President and the report on âCentral Personnel Agenciesâ were provided exclusively for this article.
The Heritage Foundation helped to launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to avoid the pitfalls Trump faced in 2017. The incoming president struggled to keep his promises to the American people, facing stiff headwinds from a hostile federal bureaucracy Trump often referred to as the Deep State. The
The Heritage Foundation helped to launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to avoid the pitfalls Trump faced in 2017. The incoming president struggled to keep his promises to the American people, facing stiff headwinds from a hostile federal bureaucracy Trump often referred to as the Deep State. The
The Heritage Foundation helped to launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to avoid the pitfalls Trump faced in 2017. The incoming president struggled to keep his promises to the American people, facing stiff headwinds from a hostile federal bureaucracy Trump often referred to as the Deep State. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project aims to equip an incoming conservative president with a policy plan to rein in this bureaucracy.
While the Constitution makes it âabundantly clearâ that the executive power of the U.S. government âis not vested in departments or agenciesâ but in the president himself, Vought warns that âa president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferencesâor, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly âwokeâ faction of the country.â
Vought encourages changes be made to the Executive Office of the President of the United States; notably the elimination of the pro-abortion and pro-transgender Gender Policy Council. However, the bulk of his recommendations for combatting the Deep State appear in the report on âCentral Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy.â Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and director of Project 2025 at The Heritage Foundation co-wrote the report with Ronald Reagan-era OPM Director Donald Devine and Trump-era OPM staffer Dennis Dean Kirk, Project 2025âs associate director for personnel policy.
Dans, Devine and Kirk urge a future conservative president should reinstate many of Trumpâs executive orders and issue new ones. A future president should speed up the time it takes to discipline and fire employees; restrict the power of public-sector unions; bring the salaries of federal employees more in line with private-sector workers; reassign entrenched federal employees to âSchedule F,â thereby making them at-will and easier to fire; and work to prevent members of the outgoing administration from âburrowing in.â
The Status Quo
Dans, Devine and Kirk trace the problem of unaccountable bureaucracy back to the progressive movement of the 20th century, which aimed to elevate professional and scientific bureaucrats. This had serious âunintended consequences,â such as making it difficult to reward good employees, difficult to analyze applicants and âalmost impossible to fire all but the most incompetent civil servants.â
The authors warn Federal employees often win big bonuses, even amid scandal. For example, Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting of waiting lists for hospital administration during the administration of Barack Obama nonetheless received âoutstandingâ ratings. Pay increases for government executives have become automatic rather than performance based.
To make matters worse, management cannot screen job applicants for basic qualifications such as intelligence.
Under President Jimmy Carter, the Department of Justice and OPM lawyers signed a legal consent decree eliminating all civil service IQ examinations, based on the claim that IQ tests discriminated on the basis of race. âCourts have ruled that even without evidence of overt, intentional discrimination, such results might suggest discrimination,â the authors note. Congress or a future administration will have to end the doctrine of disparate impact to resolve this problem. An entrenched bureaucracy also hampers the will of the people.
While both Republican and Democrat administrations have aimed to âinfiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service,â Democrat efforts have tended to succeed because âthey require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left.â
The Project 2025 authors, who have extensive experience in government, warn that career staff reserve âexcessive numbers of key policy positions as âcareer reservedâ to deny themâ to political appointees. In practice, this means that Trumpâs appointees could not direct federal policy because entrenched staff from Obama undermined the duly-elected presidentâs initiatives. Career staff also dominate personnel evaluation boards and lead training efforts that can undermine an administrationâs goals.
A. Streamline The Firing Process
Firing bad government employees now requires a herculean effort. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project recommends restructuring the process of disciplining and terminating federal workers.
Trump signed an executive order in 2018 requiring agencies to speed up the process of correcting, disciplining or firing employees who underperform, but Joe Biden later overturned that order. The report encourages reinstating it.
When a private-sector employee faces termination, they often have a simple two-step process to appeal it, while federal employees facing termination have a cornucopia of alphabet-soup options available for appeal. They can appeal to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the Office of Special Counsel. Federal employees often âshopâ for the friendliest venue.
The project report suggests a conservative president should streamline the process by making the Merit Systems Protection Board the exclusive reviewer of adverse employment actions
B. Curb Public Union Power
Public-sector unions are a large part of how the federal bureaucracy has become so entrenched. Even Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered federal government union representation incompatible with democracy, in part because their strikes amount to acts against the people. Yet President John F. Kennedy recognized federal union representation and President Jimmy Carter set public-sector bargaining in law as part of an agreement with Congress to pass the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, a reform that itself has been undermined.
Over time, federal agencies narrowed management rights, even though they still exist in law. A conservative president should reinstitute those rights.
Trump issued three executive orders to restrain union abuses: one encouraging agencies to renegotiate all collective bargaining agreements, another encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time for union activity and one more encouraging agencies to limit labor grievances and prioritize performance over seniority. Biden revoked all of these orders. The Project report urges a future president to reinstate them all.
C. Market-Based Pay & Improved Efficiency
According to a 2016 Heritage Foundation study, federal employees wages are 22% higher than the average wages for similar private-sector workers. With the value of employee benefits factored in, that ratio rises to between 30% and 40%. An American Enterprise Institute study found a 14% pay premium and a 61% total compensation premium for federal employees over that of the private sector. Federal employees also receive more vacation and paid sick leave, retire earlier (normally at age 55 after 30 years), enjoy richer pension annuities and receive automatic cost-of-living adjustments based on where they retire.
The Project 2025 report encourages moving âcloser to a market model for federal pay and benefits.â
Republicans in the House of Representatives supported legislation to increase the weight of performance over time-of-service in the federal bureaucracy, but fierce opposition from unions prevented these efforts from advancing. The report encourages a conservative president to âinsist that performance be made the priority.â
It also encourages a president to streamline the bureaucracy by acting on a Government Accountability Office report which detailed almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and eliminate duplicate functions across the administration. Congress did not approve the Trump administrationâs proposed consolidations.
D. Schedule F
The report warns a conservative president must counter the influence of leftist bureaucrats who have entrenched themselves within the government as career civil servants. The president, not career civil servants, has the duty to enforce the law, and therefore âcareer civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms.â
In October 2020, Trump created a new category of federal employee:Â Schedule F. His executive order directed agency heads to prepare a list of federal employees in âpositions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.â The order created exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, allowing agency heads to transfer them and make them functionally at-will employees, much easier to fire.
The report encourages a future president to reestablish Trumpâs Schedule F order. Biden reversed Trump’s Schedule F order.
The report also encourages a future president not to cut political appointees as a cost-cutting measure. It faults the Trump Administration for failing to remove political appointees leftover from the Obama Administration, instead relying on them and on career civil servants to run the government while Trumpâs appointees struggled to receive Senate approval. This âled to a lack of agency control.â
As a result, the Trump Administration appointed fewer political appointees; in part due to âhistorically high partisan congressional obstructionsâ but also because some officials claimed they limited the number of political appointees âas a way to cut federal spending.â
Whatever the reasoning, this had the effect of permanently hampering the rollout of the new Presidentâs agenda. Unfortunately in those early, critical years, much of the government relied on senior careerists and holdover Obama appointees to carry out the sensitive responsibilities that would otherwise be handled by the new presidentâs appointees.
The report recommends âa freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent âburrowing-inâ by outgoing political appointees.â
Any conservative president elected in 2024 or 2028 will face immense challenges from the bureaucracy and this report presents a concise roadmap for combatting any Deep State efforts to block his or her agenda. âȘ























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