What The "F" Is Going On Here?

Donald Trump's laziness and incompetence were the only things that prevented a coup in 2020. Given the chance, he won't make the same mistake again.

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If you pay any attention at all — and I’m not necessarily recommending that you do — you will be hearing about “Schedule F” and Donald Trump’s plan to really take over the government if he manages to get re-elected in 2024.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. There are about 9,000 federal government workers who are political appointees, chosen by the President or by agency heads. They typically cycle in and out with every change of leadership in the White House. If he wins in 2024, he will get to select those people.

2. There are a much larger cadre of workers — maybe 50,000 or more — who work in managerial or policy positions, but not as political appointees. They are part of the federal civil service.

3. While in office, former President Trump viewed these civil servants — and even some of his appointees — as part of a “Deep State” that was out to frustrate his policy initiatives.

4. In late 2020, he issued an executive order creating a “Schedule F” category in the federal bureaucracy. A federal worker reassigned to Schedule F would lose all his or her employment protections. Trump, or his agency heads, could then fire these employees with no recourse for the employee.

5. After Trump lost the 2020 election, President Biden rescinded the order. But Trump has promised to bring it back should he be reelected in 2024.

6. Meanwhile, a network of think tanks and conservative advocacy groups are working to assemble and vet lists of potential replacements for any federal workers fired under Schedule F. The key criteria for such replacements is neither management experience nor policy know-how, but loyalty to Donald Trump personally and to his America First program.

Campaigner Donald Trump loved to talk about “draining the swamp,” and his chief strategist Steve Bannon pledged “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” The federal bureaucracy was corrupt and dedicated to its own survival, the American people be damned, went the thinking. In four years, though, the Trump Administration did not make much headway, for three main reasons:

1. Trump himself was too lazy and undisciplined to remain focused on such a massive undertaking;

2. Some of Trump’s appointees were willing to put country over loyalty to Trump, and stood in the way of his more unhinged ideas; and

3. The rest of Trump’s appointees were people of such calamitous mediocrity and sleaziness that they could not accomplish even a modest role in the effort.

In the meantime, the Deep State soldiered on, keeping the government working.

But what if Trump is elected again in 2024?

Over the weekend, Jonathan Swan of Axios published “A Radical Plan for Trump’s Second Term,” and “Trump’s Revenge,“ a two-part series detailing ongoing planning to ensure that, if Donald Trump is elected in 2024, he will be able to bring the top levels of the massive federal bureaucracy to heel.

Both articles are must-reads, but here are some highlights:

Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.

The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

There are about 9,000 senior roles that are filled by appointment — some by the President and others by senior agency leaders. They are gathered in the so-called “Plum Book.” But the Trump plan would apply to as many as 50,000 workers. To accomplish this, “Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.”

To implement his vision to purge the federal bureaucracy of, well, bureaucrats, and replace them,

… sources close to the former president said they still anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale — of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel — to give them the capacity to quickly replace “obstructionist” government officials with people committed to Trump and his “America First” agenda.

In other words, a new army of political partisans planted throughout the federal bureaucracy.

As with most bad ideas in American politics, this effort to remake the federal bureaucracy has numerous Texas connections.

1. Trump confidant and Gollum Impersonator Stephen Miller heads America First Legal. “America First Legal was launched … less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.”

   In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.

   Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.

   Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.

   As of July 17, Texas had filed 33 lawsuits against the Biden administration, by far the most lawsuits of all the Republican attorneys general during the Biden administration, according to Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who tracks state attorneys general.

   A senior member of Paxton’s team, Aaron Reitz, outlined their mentality and strategy on the conservative “Moment of Truth” podcast in November. It is a blueprint for the mindset that would likely pervade a second Trump term.

   “Just blitzing in every front where you can,” Reitz said, describing the Texas attorney general’s approach. While he said they do not want to file bad lawsuits against Biden, “the sort of hyper-caution that I think too often Republicans demonstrate, not just in the legal space but political and elsewhere, the time for that is over. We need to understand what time it is and … fight our war accordingly.”

   Reitz said what animates himself and Paxton is “an abiding belief that we, as a movement, are at war with the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch.”

   At the Texas attorney general’s office, “our soldiers are lawyers and our weapons are lawsuits and our tactic is lawfare,” Reitz added.

2. The America First Policy Institute is working on itsown standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor. AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins, who failed upwards from her role as President of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

3. “Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government.”

   Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”

   They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.

   American Moment says it has, so far, around 700 “fully vetted” personnel to potentially serve in the next administration. Sharma’s goal is to have 2,000 to 3,000 “America First” would-be government staffers in his database by the summer of 2024.

   By then, the next Republican presidential nominee will be standing up their transition team and looking for staff to occupy not just senior jobs but the junior and mid-level positions American Moment wants to specialize in filling.

   Sharma is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list. He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the “culture war.” Credentials are almost irrelevant.

   “Reagan hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified,” Sharma said. “That gave him an enormous amount of soft power in the conservative movement for 40 years since, and many of those people are still in charge today.”

The Deep State — the fantasy that vast swaths of the government operate in highly coordinated fashion to frustrate the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans and even their political leaders — is a tempting illusion, and a good bogeyman for people whose interests are not those of good and decent Americans: polluters, swindlers, and others who long for the weakening of the administrative state. And everyone has some horror story involving the DMV or the IRS, and simply eliminating those agencies and their powers seems appealing to some longing for a simpler life.

But we live in a detailed, elaborate, 300 million-person society, and no one can navigate all the relationships necessary to survive, much less thrive, amid all that complexity. For that reason, we rely on institutions — families, churches, schools, civic associations, businesses, media, and, yes, even the government — to allow us to participate meaningfully and safely in that society. We endure some bureaucracy, even wrongheaded bureaucracy, for the chance to go to Yosemite or Big Bend National Park, or for our children to get a world-class education, or for us to get health care we need.

Donald Trump and his allies know exactly what they are doing. Let’s hope they do not succeed.