Trump's Reelection Could Cost Many Federal Workers Their Jobs

In the latter stages of his first administration, Trump issued an executive order making it easier to fire workers in the civil service system and replace them with political appointees (see 2010300048). That initiative didn’t get far last time, but is expected to be relaunched early in a second administration.

Trump tried disowning the Project 2025 report, saying, "I know nothing about Project 2025" yet "I disagree with some of the things they’re saying," without specifying which.

Trump "didn’t rule out everything in it,” said Jeff Lubbers, American University administrative law professor. One part he didn’t distance himself from was reinstating what he called the “Schedule F” reclassification of employees in the executive order. That category existed only in the 2020 order. Lubbers said the administration had time before Trump left office to ask agencies to provide a list of employees in policymaking or advocating positions.

Russell Vought, director of the OMB under Trump, is one of the authors of the Project 2025 report, Lubbers noted. “I would think [Trump] would try to reinstitute his Schedule F proposal,” he said. “It would affect a lot of agencies in a similar way” and many federal employees would be scrutinized and likely replaced, he said. At the FCC, that would likely go well beyond officials like the general counsel and bureau chiefs, who are generally replaced at the start of any new administration, he said.

The Office of Presidential Personnel should identify “potential political personnel both actively through recruitment and passively by fielding resumes and adjudicating requests from political actors," the Project 2025 book said. The new administration should develop "programmatic political workforce needs early" and develop staffing plans," it adds, calling for "political background checks" for appointees.

If Trump wins, many supporters would seek jobs in an administration that “prize[s] loyalty over expertise,” Lubbers predicted.

Nathan Leamer, a former aide to Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, downplayed the likelihood of major staffing changes. "It's a fair question," but staffing “never came up in any conversations by the contributors around drafting the telecom chapter of the Project 2025 book,” he said. Leamer was part of the team that wrote the playbook.

“Aside from the fact that Trump has disavowed any relationship of his campaign to Project 2025, any meaningful changes in the civil service system would require congressional action,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May. “Even if Trump were disposed to slash large numbers of protected civil service positions, it’s very unlikely this would happen.”

Others note that under Pai the FCC was a relatively quiet agency, aside from net neutrality and a few other political issues. Moreover, the former chair moved numerous often bipartisan initiatives, like opening spectrum bands for licensed and unlicensed use.

New Street’s Blair Levin said it would be concerning if the FCC teams that run auctions and oversee the USF, data collections and equipment certification, are chosen “on the basis of loyalty” to the president. “One of the virtues of an office like the Office of Engineering and Technology is that it has the reputation of being [staffed by] outstanding engineers and public servants, not political loyalists,” he said.

Levin, former FCC chief of staff and manager of the 2010 National Broadband Plan, said when he hired employees at the FCC, "I never asked anyone their party affiliation or who they voted for.”

“The civil service would be demoralized and then decapitated” if Trump returns to the White House, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in an email. “It’s the heart and soul of our government, and politicizing it would be a perhaps fatal blow to government of, by, and for the American people.”

Trump “has a history of publicly presenting himself differently from his private far-right policy agenda,” said Carlos Figueroa, Ithaca College associate professor of politics. “Expect a return to machine politics reminiscent of the late 19th and early 20th centuries but worse -- where party loyalists and donors get access to policymaking processes and conversations,” he said. Trump would “reward the party loyalists, appease the broader GOP leadership, and place them in strategic federal positions to safeguard the implementation of Project 2025,” Figueroa predicted: “Prepare for the worst if Trump is elected.”

Rewarding Loyalty

“All I have seen suggests that the Schedule F threat remains,” said Peter Strauss, emeritus law professor at Columbia Law School. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity decision suggests the court’s majority is ready to add FCC commissioners to the list of employees who can be removed, he said.

Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld noted that the Republican platform offers almost nothing about communications or tech policy. When Pai took over at the FCC in 2017, “the first thing he did was to hold an agency-wide meeting to reassure staff that there would be no purge, despite his earlier rhetoric to the contrary.”

While Republicans in Congress “love to bash Democratic FCC policies” and "heavy-handed regulations," they don't usually go after FCC staff, Feld said: “They recognize that a lot of what the FCC does is highly technical, and that someone has to deal with things like spectrum management, giving out USF money, certifying devices and other stuff that makes your average [Congress] member's eyes glaze over.”

Feld said it’s also not as easy to “weaponize” the FCC as it is DOJ or the FTC. “Republicans don't generally want to cripple it the way they want to" with the EPA or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Living by chaos theory is exhausting, isn’t it?” said Shane Tews of the American Enterprise Institute: “Trump is really good at producing this effect in people.”