Lessons About the Civil Service and Political Appointees
What does history tell us about how the executive branch can run the government?
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With a new Trump administration over the horizon, it’s a good time to discuss some facts about the federal bureaucrats and appointees who will be working with President Trump to bring about his administration’s goals.
Trump I Had Legitimate Loyalty Issues
Civil servants are nominally intended to operate in the interests of the United States rather than in the interests of president or party. But that is all too frequently not what they do. Many civil servants act in their own personal and ideological interests, at a cost to the nation, and in counterproductive defiance of presidents with whom they’re not ideologically aligned.
The first Trump administration (“Trump I”) was chronically frustrated by the difficulties it had staffing the government with loyal employees. As a result, disloyal civil servants exploited the opportunity to build up an impressive track record materially harming the operational integrity of Trump I. There are examples aplenty of how, but for this essay, a few James Sherk documented should suffice:
Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.
Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.
Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.
Career attorneys in the Environmental Protection Agency did not inform political appointees about major cases the agency was involved in or the government’s positions in pending cases. Political appointees had to monitor public court filings to learn what the agency was doing.
Department of Labor regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day.
Career staff impeded Trump I by withholding information, refusing to implement policies, intentionally delaying and slow-walking orders, deliberately underperforming, leaking private information to Congress and members of the media, and acting in an outright insubordinate manner when the opportunity to harm the presidency presented itself.
Political Loyalty Matters
Trump I produced enough anecdotes about civil servant disloyalty that a book on them could rival the tax code. But, does it matter? Yes. Trump I really was beset by historically extreme loyalty troubles, and a review of the evidence on this matter suggests it mattered a lot.
For starters, across several countries and throughout multiple decades of data collection, bureaucrats are more satisfied with their jobs and more motivated to career out the duties of their positions when the party in power is the one that they politically prefer. We should, at a minimum, expect this to affect how well bureaucrats do their jobs such that bureaucrats put in less (more) effort when they’re working for the opposition (party they support).
Consistent with the view that misaligned civil servants in fact do worse jobs, bureaucrats who are politically misaligned with the executive in power cost the government more in procurement (when governments purchase goods and services). Illustrating this relies on a few other things to keep in mind. Firstly, a slim majority of non-political civil servants have been Democrats since Clinton. This has remained true despite changes in the party of the president. Or stated differently, civil servants with a given party membership tend to remain employed between presidencies.
Secondly, the costs of bureaucrats having a different party come in multiple forms. One form is direct cost overruns, where projects cost more than they’re initially proposed to. Another is delays, where projects take longer than they’re projected to. By leveraging the consistency of civil servant political affiliation and the inconsistency of presidential party, researchers were able to determine that a procurement officer and a president sharing the same party was related to economically significant problems in both respects.
Misalignment increases costs by about 1% of initial contract values, or 6% of the average total overrun, which, in the sample, was about 19% on average. An aligned procurement officer overseeing a contract is also about 1 percentage point less likely to see a cost overrun at all. Similarly, when contracts are managed by officers who are aligned for longer durations, they cost relatively less. These alignment impacts are also concentrated where contracts are more valuable and potentially among more complex contracts. But—critically—the effect of misalignment is comparable in size for Democratic and Republican civil servants.
Misalignment also increases delays, but it does not do so in general. The reason for this is that many contracts are short-term, and the impact of misalignment on delays for short-term contracts simply isn’t there, perhaps because it’s hard for it to be in the first place. For longer-term contracts, misalignment generates explains about 4% of the average delay in contract completion, and contracts do tend to be delayed. Some of the reasons for delays help to explain why short-term contracts aren’t affected. Long-term contracts have more opportunities to be modified, and both the probability of any modification and the total number of modifications are significantly increased when there’s civil servant misalignment. Additionally, the most severe form of contract modification—a premature cancellation—is likewise related to misalignment, in the expected direction.
All-in-all, these outcomes may sound unimpressive—a percentage point here, a few days there, etc. But, they add up. The Government Accountability Office reports that, in the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government spent $759 billion on contracts. If they all took 5% less time to complete, were prematurely cancelled 2% less frequently, and cost 1% less, the savings would already be in the billions of dollars, and those are just the direct savings: they don’t speak to the benefits to businesses from the government being more reliable, the costs that can be saved by firing unnecessary civil servants if these problems are fixed, or the ways other workloads can be better managed by cutting down on unnecessary work for existing bureaucrats. This direct number might be a drop in the bucket for the federal budget, but it represents so much more than that, because it is just one part of one route to slowing down the government and making it less effective and efficient. This one aspect of misalignment costs is a small fraction of the total cost we all must bear due to politically disgruntled federal employees.
Data from several agencies affirms that the importance of loyalty also goes beyond effects on civil servant work ethic and even permeates to the private sector. For example, at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the partisan alignment of the executive impacts investigations and Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER). Firms that are politically misaligned with the executive in power suffer through greater numbers of investigations and they face higher penalties. Otherwise comparable firms with different political alignments also have divergent fates when it comes to investigations after the SEC changes political hands. In one article, it was estimated that a change in partisan alignment led to a nearly 20% reduction in the odds of newly-aligned firms being targeted for enforcement actions. Findings like these have probably become stronger in more recent years as well, since the SEC has become a more partisan institution.
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Allegiances Change
Though most civil servants and, indeed, most people are politically faithful throughout their lives, loyalty to a given party is by no means universal. Some number of civil servants do change the party they’re loyal to over the course of their careers. Indeed, after a partisan shift in the elected principals of an agency, many existing agency leaders do reorient their partisan identities. Furthermore, the greater the contact with the elected principal, the higher the likelihood of a switch.
The finding of some level of allegiance instability may actually help to explain the graph of civil servant affiliations above as, in this dataset, “14.5% of civil servants change from either Democrat or Republican to Independent, or from Independent to Democrat or Republican” while the “remaining 1.9% shifts between the two major parties”. Not to oversell this, however, do note that individuals who switch to being Independents tend to remain ideologically aligned to their party of origin, they tend to just drop party labels.
At the broader, system level, civil servant allegiances change more through changes in the composition of applicant pools. Individuals who are perturbed by a given regime will tend to be less likely to seek employment in it, forgoing a government career for ideological reasons of their own. Over time, this adds up, and members of a party can be isolated from the government less because they were ousted or discriminated against in hiring from the outset, and more because they didn’t want to participate when the opportunity was there.1
Civil Service Protections Favor Democrats and Stasis
Civil servants currently enjoy a level of protection from firing for misconduct and poor work that’s practically unparalleled in history and certainly in most of the private sector. With that in mind, the aforementioned largely Democratic composition of the federal bureaucracy means Republicans are at a disadvantage when it comes to governing. The competitive career service is mostly Democrats:
The career Senior Executive Service is mostly Democrats:
And a plurality of nonpolitical excepted service officials are Democrats:
The unavoidable conclusion of this Democratic overrepresentation in the government and the inability to push them out is that, if Democrats (Republicans) want to govern, they’re more (less) likely to get their governing done, because the officials will tend to be more (less) compliant. Therefore, Republicans face a serious issue: if they cannot reform the civil service, they will never be able to govern as effectively as equally determined Democrats. Frankly, given the resistance Republicans are likely to face, that’s probably being too generous since it’s unreasonable to assume Republicans will manage to stay as determined as Democrats given the greater level of resistance they have to deal with.
Outgoing Administrations Stack the Books
After the Carter presidency, when a presidency ends, its staffers make every effort to flood the Federal Register with novel rules and regulations. The number of pages that are published in the period between losing an election and an opponent’s inauguration represents a staggering break from the trend during a given president’s tenure.
Recalling that Republicans are at a disadvantage in civil servant numbers, and civil servants who are misaligned act disobediently, it becomes apparent that the time required to purge or even to understand these regulations is going to be greater for Republicans. A new regime does not have the power to simply void each rule and regulation passed during the midnight period between regimes by fiat; they are constrained by the capabilities of the civil servants working for them, loyal or otherwise.
The combination of outgoing regimes stacking the books and Democrats having a greater ability to un-stack them, to stack them in the first place, and so on is a pernicious one, and it will harm Trump II like it harmed Trump I. This is much worse than it sounds on the surface precisely because of these compounding effects. Due to the regulatory morass that they face and the lack of institutional experience they have to contend with, Republicans are often left in total ignorance about what they are allowed to do. Consider this particularly jarring incident from the Department of Labor (DOL) under Trump I (via Sherk):
Career employees at DOL consistently told political appointees they could not take actions that were in fact within their legal discretion. One career employee repeatedly told political appointees that they could not issue Direct Final Rules (DFR)—a method of issuing rules without going through notice-and-comment proceedings. On the first day of the Biden administration, DOL used a DFR to rescind internal regulations governing DOL’s rulemaking process. That DFR was signed by a career staffer who repeatedly told Trump political appointees, “you can never do a DFR.”
Unfortunately for Trump and fortunately for this traitorous civil servant, there is no punishment for lying about how the government is run to slow down your ideological enemies.
Democrats Have Created Barriers to Trump Governing
Near the end of Trump I, a solution to the problem of structural Republican federal governance disadvantage was laid out by James Sherk and subsequently enacted by President Trump via Executive Order 13957 on October 21, 2020. The solution was to fully exploit a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. This provision exempts civil service protections from employees determined to be in confidential policy-making, policy-determining, or policy-advocating roles, creating a civil service that serves at the pleasure of the president. This new appointment classification was dubbed Schedule F, and it creates at-will employment in the excepted service.
The benefits of Schedule F to President Trump are immense. Instead of having to deal with disloyal bureaucrats, numerous policymakers who should be carrying out the will of the president but who instead resist his calls to action can be reclassified and let go. In effect, through the implementation of Schedule F, the federal government becomes more centralized under the direct control of the president, with much more power to both fire and hire employees to serve the regime.
Proponents allege that this brings the civil service back to the achieving the lofty goals of the Pendleton Act—that is, a civil service free of political interference, but nonetheless accountable to the people. But opponents claim it’ll be ineffective and subject to abuse.
Some Schedule F opponents contend that Schedule F effectively creates patronage networks and, indeed, that was the view expressed by Democrat representative Gerry Connolly when he tried unsuccessfully to sneak the “Preventing a Patronage System Act” into the National Defense Authorization for Fiscal Year 2023. Others hold that Trump will not realize the promise of Schedule F because his advisors Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita appear to have roundly rejected the various conservative staffing initiatives that popped up between 2020 and today. The claim there is that, without said efforts, Trump will not be able to fill the Schedule F slots he creates.2
Opponents have deluded themselves into thinking that Schedule F will be harmful because they maintain a rosy view of the existing civil service, seeing them as nonpartisan and productive, when that cannot be further from the case. But in line with this view, they have frustrated Schedule F’s existence and future implementation. The first such stab against Schedule F was when Biden repealed it in its entirety shortly after coming into office, with Executive Order 14003. This Order was effected without problem because, by that point, no one had been rescheduled.
In April 2024, Biden’s administration adopted a regulation to provide rescheduled employees with their existing job protections, making Schedule F classification meaningless. Fortunately for Trump II, this can be repealed, it will just take time. Unfortunately, the effort to repeal and implement will result in lawsuits aplenty from civil servants and advocacy groups, so Trump’s realized governance will emerge at a minimum several months after he has entered office. These roadblocks take the punch out of the ‘First 100 Days’ presidencies so often laud because Trump II will be handcuffed until these regulations are overturned and accompanying lawsuits are defeated.
Perhaps opponents of Schedule F have good news for Trump: many worry Trump II will be able to put Schedule F into place promptly!
Trump II Has a Critical Moment
There is a short period in which Trump II can prove to be highly-effective. The incoming administration must choose whether it wants to govern well immediately, because it only has one shot to do so. Specifically, Trump II has two years—until midterms. If President Trump cannot win or hold in the midterms, then it won’t become easier to govern; roadblocks will, if anything, increase, and the odds of a longer period of excellent governance under another Republican will drop in lockstep.
To seize the moment, Trump must rapidly wrest control of the Office of Personnel Management from the hostile actors standing in the way of Schedule F. The rhetoric on civil servants put forward by Russell Vought should become the standard line for this period. For the unfamiliar, Vought—the Office of Management and Budget Director nominee—has stated that he wants civil servants to feel “trauma” and to “wake up in the morning” not wanting to “go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” This is violent rhetoric, but it’s the sort of attitude that needs to be common in order to gain control of the government.
What this means in practice is less intimidation and harassment and more resolving principal-agent problems. Republicans need to learn from Democrats and create ways to gather data. Data is a precious commodity that allows problems to be detected and attacked. For example, reforming the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System would make it trivial to prosecute colleges and universities for discriminating against White and Asian students and violating the law on affirmative action. Similarly, creating data feeds that track the progress of the daily work of employees such as IT specialists and Freedom of Information Act officers could allow the discovery of misaligned employees in need of reclassification to Schedule F. Wherever these problems can be discovered through simple and cheap data gathering, they should be, accelerating the transition towards effective, drama-free governance.
Once the data is available to determine where problems remain, and the ability to handle it is implemented, it becomes time for Trump to hire and fire. Trump must leverage the enormous rolls of potential staffers that have been brought forward to his team, and he must fill the government with them. Once he does, he has to ensure his higher-level appointees do a good enough job directing them. This is critical: Trump must be like FDR, he must become a trusting and frequent delegator, even though his first term rightly led to trust issues with his staff.
From there, Trump has to push the big items that his team has on the menu so as to obtain as much short-term success as possible. The Trump team has plans that can be implemented immediately which could reduce Americans’ insurance premiums by double-digit percentages; the Trump team could score foreign policy victories aplenty that Biden’s team was afraid to touch; the Trump team could revive supersonic air travel by implementing a one-paragraph rule; the Trump team could ask the Department of Justice to settle cases in favor of deregulating important industries like nuclear power; the Trump team could immediately make America the shining light for scientific progress and openness with a handful of simple reforms at the NIH, NSF, DOE, and CDC; and more.
There is so much on the table that would materially improve Americans’ well-being overnight, and if the idea is to govern effectively for the whole four years and beyond, those items must come first and foremost. Or Trump II will be stuck, accumulating problems and resent, creating the same sorts of drama that befell Trump I.
But it needn’t be this way. Trump II can succeed, if it seizes this critical moment.
The dynamics of federal agency composition can also be driven by competition between Congress and the Presidency, but I suspect this has a smaller impact on applicants than the deterrent effect of being politically misaligned.
This is the strongest argument against Schedule F and, indeed, Trump II in general, succeeding. It cannot be taken lightly. If the Trump team fails to exploit the lists of staffers produced by the various pro-Trump staffing initiatives, it will almost-certainly fail because it will run into the same staffing issues experienced during Trump I. Given the limited number of conservatives willing, able, and volunteering to join the government relative to the number of slots already available for appointment much less those available after the more than 10-fold expansion with Schedule F in place, this is practically inevitable.
But, pace, because many of the appointees announced thus far are decidedly on board with various staffing initiatives and, indeed, in several cases, took part in them.
This is the most recent/updated version of the report, please link to this: https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_from_the_Swamp-_How_Federal_Bureaucrats_Resisted_President_Trump_-_Revided_1.8.2025.pdf
In the short term, what stops Trump and his cabinet from reorganizing depts like Labor and declare that DOL needs a field office (w/o remote work) in every state to "support the states" and send the bad actors packing with a relocation package and zero portfolio to Pierre ND in January and Columbia SC in July? Just sideline these people until they "feel the trauma."