Donald Trump's major policy initiatives during his presidency have been massive tax cuts and government-wide efforts to cut regulations he argued It cost the American economy trillions of dollars and destroyed entire industries.
Lax oversight of environmental, safety and labor standards, to name a few, represents a political axis that united Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans — who had been wary of Trump's antics and attacks on free trade and traditional alliances — which helped boost the economy. US stock market SPX.
For example, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal — sometimes skeptical of Trump — in December 2017 praised Trump’s first year in office as “reining in and rolling back the regulatory state even faster than Ronald Reagan.”
The signature legislative achievement of the Trump era, an overhaul of the tax code that critics say disproportionately benefited large corporations and the wealthiest taxpayers, was passed the same month.
From the archives (April 2019): American taxpayers don't feel comfortable with Trump's tax cuts, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll.
See also (February 2018): Now we know where the tax cut is headed: stock buybacks
Plus (March 2018): S&P 500 companies are expected to buy back $800 billion of their stock this year
But the former president's advisers contend that his administration's deregulation campaign would have been much stronger had it not been for a federal workforce that was ideologically opposed to Trump's agenda and worked at every turn to sabotage it.
The federal workforce constitutes a “fourth branch of government” that has usurped the powers of the president, Congress and the courts, according to Paul Dance, former chief of staff for Trump's Office of Personnel Management.
“It's a merger of powers by people who are absolutely not accountable to the will of the people,” Dance told MarketWatch. “They have a permanent foothold in Washington and no one can remove them.”
Today, Dance is director of the Conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, an effort to recruit and train a new generation of Republican bureaucrats so that if Trump is re-elected in November, he will have “a team of people ready to hit the ground running on day one.” “.
From the archives (September 2023): “Project 2025”: The Heritage Foundation leads the right-wing coalition in formulating the rules of the game for reforming the American government on “Day One” of the next Republican presidency
So far, these efforts have prompted more than 7,500 Americans to submit resumes in hopes of appointing a second Trump administration, and Dance has coordinated a series of online training courses led by conservatives with experience in the federal government.
He is also part of a broader network of Trump administration veterans who are sounding the alarm about the ability of the federal workforce to obstruct policies that harm them.
James Shirk, a former special assistant to Trump, compiled an extensive list of policies that he said were frustrated by bureaucrats, including career employees in the Justice Department's civil division who refuse to work on cases accusing Yale of racial discrimination against Asian Americans and professionals. Lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board refuse to draft decisions that change precedents if they disagree with the conclusions.
“The president elected by the people has little say in politics,” Dance said.
The Ministry of Justice declined to comment. Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the NLRB, told MarketWatch in an email that the agency's “career staff are using their significant talent and experience to enforce our mandate in Congress — regardless of who sits in the White House,” and criticized Shirk for “hurling unsupported slurs at this loyal audience.” “. Servants.”
Destruction of the administrative state
Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist, said in 2017 that the administration's goal was nothing less than “the destruction of the administrative state,” as he described the departments, agencies and regulators that implement and enforce the rules that govern American economic life.
For Dance and other activists involved in Project 2025, the stated mission is not necessarily to destroy the administrative state, but, they say, to make it accountable to American voters. “Let's restore democracy,” Dance said. “Instead of attacking it, we are working to allow the people to have a say in their government again.”
To that end, the conservative movement expects the Republican White House to reinstate a policy known as Schedule F, which would exempt about 50,000 federal workers in critical policy positions from civil service rules that make it harder to fire workers who resist the president's directives. . “The deep state,” as Trump, Bannon, and their allies have called it.
From the archives (November 2023): Trump's plans for a second term include deportation raids, tariffs and mass firings of serving government employees
Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F classification for federal workers in the final months of his term, but there was little time for him to take advantage of the new rule, and President Joe Biden quickly rescinded it after taking office in January 2021.
Democrats, union leaders, public policy experts and other critics argue that Schedule F would hamper government performance by replacing career experts with inexperienced ideologues, and would actually reduce democratic accountability.
“Increasing the number of political appointees would create a new place where political polarization undermines the quality of governance by replacing moderates with extremists,” Donald Moynihan, a political science professor at Georgetown University, wrote in a recent analysis for the Brookings Institution.
The civil service's proposed approach is consistent with the conservative movement's strategy in federal court to rein in the power of regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce standards related to greenhouse gas emissions, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates. .
The US Supreme Court, reshaped by Trump's three nominees, has struck down many regulations introduced by the Biden administration, and the conservative movement hopes to accelerate this trend of deregulation by reshaping the 2 million-strong federal workforce.
“root and branch”
Schedule F could be implemented by executive order, but it would affect only a small portion of federal employees, and the political right is eager to see more substantive changes.
Last year, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, both Republicans, introduced the Public Service Reform Act, which would eliminate significant protections unionized federal workers have against being fired from their jobs.
The bill would eliminate the Merit Systems Protection Board, which is one of several agencies federal employees can turn to with arguments that their employment was wrongfully terminated, and also generally makes it easier to fire federal workers.
The Heritage Foundation's 2025 Project recommendations go further, arguing that Congress should reconsider whether federal employees are allowed to form unions because, unlike the private sector, there is no threat of a government shutdown to force unions to moderate their demands. For higher wages, greater benefits, and job protection.
“When civil service reform began in the late 19th century, only about 10 percent of workers were protected, and now 99.8 percent of them have an actual job,” Heritage's Danz said.
“This should be an issue for both parties,” he added, but said polarization trends mean the federal workforce is increasingly made up of partisan Democrats.
“This is now a one-party problem,” Dance said. “The governor’s arrival in the White House stares down an executive branch filled entirely with people opposed to his agenda.”
However, Moynihan, the political science professor at Georgetown University, argues that intentionally politicizing the bureaucracy could be a problem for Americans of all stripes, as research shows that political appointees tend to be less responsive to Congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.
“This decrease in response has impacted policy-related requests as well as constituency service inquiries,” Moynihan wrote. “In other words, both elected officials and community members suffer the effects of politicization in terms of decreased responsiveness.”
