POLITICS
Schedule F is destined for failure
The Heritage Foundation’s plan to overhaul the federal government just won’t work
The prospect of hiring 4,000 new employees in under three months would make any human resource officer’s head spin. Multiply that by five and you’re heading for real trouble.
Such is the plan offered last week to the country’s next conservative President by the DC think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Only by ballooning the number of federal employees appointed during the transition period in 2024, can that new President — whether it’s Trump, DeSantis, or someone else — expect to fulfill the promises of a conservative revolution and overhaul of federal policymaking. If Trump wants to reinstate the Muslim Ban or DeSantis wants to loosen gun laws, a compliant federal workforce is required.
Unfortunately for advocates of this plan, it’s bound to fail.
The Heritage Foundation offers these recommendations as a part of its Mandate for Leadership series which it first published in 1980 in advance of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The report also calls for dozens of major policy changes like eliminating the Departments of Education and Homeland Security. For Heritage, what has slowed the pace of conservative gains — despite winning the White House four times during the intervening years — has been disloyal federal employees with too much power to block bold conservative ideas such as the return of IQ tests for federal hiring.
Trump has largely agreed with this premise, regularly railing against the “deep state”. As political scientist, Don Moynihan, has written about extensively, at the tail-end of his presidency, he went so far as to issue an executive order to strip the protections offered by civil service rules. Heritage has called on the next President to re-issue Trump’s plan to create a new category of federal employment called Schedule F for federal employees involved in any aspect of policy-making. Estimates suggest the process of job-reclassification could increase the number of at-will federal employees who could be fired for disloyalty to the President by between 20,000 and 50,000 and possibly more. The practical implication of this would be a new President could fire and replace all of those employees during (or immediately after) the next transition of power, 5 to 10 times the current number.
When Trump first issued the executive order in 2020, federal unions challenged the legality of Schedule F before it was fully enacted and Joe Biden rescinded it days after taking office. But, at the end of last year, Congressional Democrats failed to shield federal civil servants from a future Schedule F threat when their legislative fix was cut from the annual defense spending bill at the last minute.
Consequently, there is a very real potential for the next President to take Heritage’s advice.
Taking this advice and meeting the underlying policy aims, however, are two different things. There are several structural flaws in the Schedule F strategy which would likely frustrate Heritage and its allies, dooming the plan to failure.
One premise of this plan is that it should start early, long before the inauguration. The window of opportunity for a new President to adopt a far-reaching agenda closes quickly, in part why the first 100 days of the administration garners such close scrutiny. This is probably the reason, 18 months before the 2024 election, Heritage is already issuing its report and compiling the names of those eager to fill these jobs. It doesn’t want the next President to waste a minute and will have a database full of resumes ready to share.
The problem with starting early, though, is keeping it quiet, a maxim during every transition. Campaign tradition holds that all attention should be on the candidate, not who is going to be appointed. Reagan’s team was secretly meeting at six in the morning at a Bob’s Big Boy in Northern Virginia to escape attention to its pre-election personnel efforts. More recently, recall the derision Ted Cruz faced when he announced Carly Fiorina as his running mate in 2016 and the reaction to Joe Biden’s suggestion that he’d name his cabinet before the 2020 election. Most agree one job candidate is hard enough for a campaign to manage.
Yet, to carry out Heritage’s plan, a massive, but largely covert, recruitment effort would have to transpire long before the election, likely starting during the late spring or early summer. To move quickly, tens of thousands of applicants would have be recruited, vetted, and interviewed, all without this leaking to the press. While in Reagan’s era, this may have been possible, the age of social media has made this unimaginable.
For comparison, based on interviews I’ve done for a forthcoming book, those involved in the Biden-Harris transition worried endlessly over keeping things quiet until after the Election. Many of those contacted to serve on the Biden-Harris transition team were barely told what they would be doing should Biden and Harris win and all were sworn to secrecy. Somehow the Biden-Harris team maintained a tight-lipped ship and little news got out, yet it was focused on a fraction of the openings that Heritage has in mind.
If Heritage has its way it would inevitably lead to news regularly leaking on who was being considered, not just for cabinet posts and high ranking sub-cabinet jobs, but for the thousands of new mid-level jobs made available by Schedule F. And, rather than just hundreds of people up for jobs, the candidate’s transition team would be juggling calls from journalists about thousands of job seekers. No candidate for the presidency would be comfortable with diverting press attention like this.
In the past, the solution to this problem has been to keep pre-election personnel planning limited and discrete, and then work tirelessly after the election to get a couple hundred staff interviewed and ready for Day 1. Starting earlier, moving faster, and greatly expanding the hiring targets is just unimaginable in today’s media landscape.
Nevertheless, assuming a future candidate could keep this plan quiet, there are even larger problems to consider.
Integral to Heritage’s plan is for the next President to immediately reinstate Trump’s Schedule F order. This much would be easy to accomplish and, if they agreed, the next President could do this within hours of taking office.
What comes next is where it gets really dicey.
When Trump instituted this the last time, it took months for agencies to report back which jobs qualified as policy-related. In the end, it seems the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was the only major agency that fully complied with the request, providing the White House with a list that amounted to 88% of its approximately 500 person workforce that could be reclassified. The OMB, an appendage of the White House, no doubt was eager to comply, but it’s a tiny federal entity, just a tenth the size of the Department of Education, which itself isn’t even considered large. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with 16,000 employees, said it needed more time and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) couldn’t find any of its 1,300 employees who fit the Schedule F definition, according to the GAO.
This, then, suggests the mere act of identifying who can be re-classified is terribly time-consuming and depends on the help of those very federal workers likely to lose employment protections; in neither case a formula for quick action.
Even more important than the shear size of the undertaking are the bottlenecks that will slow things down. Typically, the new president has total say over who is appointed to lead federal agencies, but great deference is granted to those Senate-confirmed appointees to choose their key advisors, many who also require Senate confirmation. As a result, while the cabinet secretaries are usually in place within days of the inauguration, because the Senate is slow to make confirmations, it takes months or longer for each agency to have even a fraction of its political appointees in place. The 9/11 Commission in fact pointed to this feature of presidential transitions as one reason why the Bush administration was unprepared for the attacks.
Joe Biden’s experience illustrates that this remains a problem.
After a year in office, according to the Partnership for Public Service, he had a little more than a third (355) of the 1,200 positions filled, surpassing Donald Trump, but lagging far behind George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It now takes over 100 days, on average, for the Senate to confirm an appointee, three times as long as when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
This means, even if a Schedule F executive order reclassified upwards of 20,000 positions, the vast majority of those appointments would be on hold until the until the Senate-confirmed appointees are at work. We already know this is the case with the current array of 2,800 or so non-Senate confirmed positions available to a new President. For example, 100 days into the Trump administration and just a third of political appointments (so-called Schedule C positions) were filled, and at the one year mark, Trump was still 500 short of filling all the potential positions. If we extrapolate from this to even a modest estimate of a future Schedule F world, one year into their administration and the next President would still need to fill 6,000 openings.
This all matters for Heritage plan because if the next President wanted to move quickly on an ambitious agenda to dismantle the so-called administrative state, they wouldn’t have the loyal officials in place fast enough. In the meantime, a government awash with thousands of officials working in an interim status, wouldn’t have the authority or legitimacy to do anything other than maintain the status quo.
Conversely, if they waited the 12 to 18 months for a majority of the appointments to be made, the window of opportunity afforded a new President would likely close. Patience will be met with swift Congressional action to fill the void, robbing the new President of the chance to drive the agenda.
None of this is necessary, of course. Presidential transitions are hard enough with the current arrangements — these changes will only make things riskier and more chaotic.
But more importantly, the civil service protections offered to thousands of federal workers involved in policy insure they faithfully carry out the laws adopted by Congress, not the will of the President. This is the lasting legacy of the Pendleton Act from 1883 which aimed to curb a corrupt spoils system and to promote stability in the federal government. Has there been a time in US history when good government and national stability have been as desperately needed as today?
So, future Presidents would be wise to rely of the wisdom and judgement shared by federal workers, whose long careers span administrations and changing political whims. Re-writing the personnel rules to fit the agenda of a future President would be unwelcome, unworkable, and largely unwise for these federal workers and the country, as well.
