Schedule F Is Here

And it’s much worse than you thought.

Donald Trump and Russell Vought. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images.)

The second Trump administration is shaping up to be even more radical than expected. A large part of that is the ongoing war against the so-called “deep state.”

To shed light on this story, Francis Fukuyama and American Purpose at Persuasion are writing a series of articles to analyze the modern administrative state, understand its shortcomings, and critique undifferentiated attempts to dismantle it. We call it The “Deep State” and Its Discontents.

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In the year prior to November’s election, there were deep concerns among Donald Trump’s opponents concerning the agenda for attacking the “deep state” that was outlined in detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. These plans included resurrecting “Schedule F,” an executive order issued at the end of the first Trump administration that stripped virtually all bureaucrats of their civil service protections and placed them into an “at-will” category that would allow them to be fired without cause. During the presidential campaign, there was so much negative publicity about Project 2025 that Trump disavowed it and claimed he had never heard of the document.

Well, the new administration took office on January 20, and has now in effect revived Schedule F. What is remarkable is that the mainstream press has failed to pick up on this, or to inform the public of the likely consequences of this move. There was a lot of attention paid in the weeks after the election to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which was to cut $2 trillion out of the $6 trillion federal budget and downsize the bureaucracy accordingly.

It’s true that DOGE is now acting like a hired gun. This weekend it was given access to the Treasury Department’s payment system after David Lebryk, the career official in charge of managing it, was forced out for refusing access. Musk claimed that the Treasury was making “illegal payments” to Lutheran charities and abetting corruption, which he and his minions will try to stop. Yet decisions on how to spend money are not made by the Treasury but by Congress, and corruption is controlled not there but by the individual line agencies. The Treasury is simply a cash register that disburses money to designated payees, not a watchdog of the public purse.

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Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization

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It should be noted that if Musk uses his access to actually stop payments, he will be violating the law. Only Congress can appropriate money, and it delegates authority to individual agencies with detailed spending plans. It is clear that Musk still does not have the slightest idea how the federal government works, and thinks that his crew have the legal power to sift through several trillion dollars of annual spending to catch corruption.

The real driver of change in how the government operates, however, is not Elon Musk but Russ Vought, the presumptive new director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the personnel initiatives that are coming directly from the White House. There has been a blizzard of executive orders very cleverly designed to skirt the legal challenges that faced the original Schedule F. One of these effectively resurrects Schedule F and gives it a new name: “Schedule Policy/Career.” The order instructs Vought to “promptly recommend to the President which positions should be placed in Schedule Policy/Career,” though it is not yet clear who will be targeted.

The administration has focused its efforts on key leadership positions like the 8,000 or so members of the Senior Executive Service who constitute the experienced core of the permanent bureaucracy, as well as a number of officials with “for cause” protection like the head of the Internal Revenue Service, and 17 Inspectors General who were fired last month from different departments. “For cause” protection means that the official cannot be removed except under specific and severe conditions, like committing a crime or behaving corruptly. Now, many individuals have been moved in effect into Schedule F because they are said to serve at the pleasure of the president.

Consider what this may mean. If Trump hand-picks a new IRS chief, that individual can be pressured by the president to order audits of journalists, CEOs, NGOs and NGO leaders. Removal of Inspectors General will cripple the public’s ability to hold his administration accountable. If inflation returns as a result of tariffs and deportations, a political appointee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics may alter the official inflation stats. (This is exactly what happened in Argentina under the corrupt populist presidency of Cristina Kirchner, making official statistics worthless.)

Remember what happened during the first Trump term when the president asserted that a hurricane was going to hit Alabama, and was corrected by the officials at NOAA responsible for weather forecasting? Under the new regime, such officials will risk being fired for simply doing their jobs.

Presidents should have the ability to appoint leaders of different executive branch agencies. But certain government functions like collecting taxes and publishing statistics have been regarded as important apolitical tasks that should be carried out by well-trained professionals and protected from politicization. In other cases, Congress created multi-member commissions with bipartisan composition like the Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission to provide both political balance and continuity between presidents. The Trump administration has been busy sacking individual members of these multimember commissions, like the two Democrats removed from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

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Valuing the Deep State Part VI: Schedule F

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In addition to going after top agency leaders, the new administration is also trying to eliminate lower-level bureaucrats by offering buyouts, forcing them to come to the office five days a week, and urging people to snitch on co-workers who are not on the Trump team.

Any federal official taking this buyout offer may turn out to be a dupe. Trump the businessman, we need to remember, was famous for stiffing employees and contractors. The administration has no authority to pay them for not working until September, since Congress has not allocated the money.

Trump, under a theory of a “unified executive,” wants to do away with all of these constraints. Many of his recent executive orders are illegal and contradict the statutes that created the positions he is seeking to influence. For example, an Inspector General must be given 30 days’ notice before being fired, and the administration has to state reasons why he or she is being removed. Many of these executive orders have been or will soon be challenged in the courts. But while Trump may lose many of these cases, the litigation will involve months of effort—and in the meantime the administration will have its way with the bureaucracy.

So, for all practical purposes, Schedule F has been reinstated. It is part of a larger effort to undermine the “deep state” and disrupt the normal workings of government.

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I have argued in the past that executive agencies need to be given more discretion in implementing mandates set by Congress. The chief cause of bureaucratic dysfunction has been over-regulation of the federal bureaucracy, which makes a bureaucrat spend time complying with rules rather than seeking real-world results. Every agency in the U.S. government has to file annual reports mandated by Congress, which number in the tens of thousands, most of which will never be read by anyone.

So it is critical to cut back the rules constraining the bureaucracy. But this is done in the interest of giving nonpartisan, well-trained professionals the ability to use their best judgment to serve the public interest. What Trump is doing instead is to concentrate all authority in the office of the president, and to apply purely political criteria to decision making. Even if he had good intentions (which he does not), the White House does not remotely have the capacity to dictate the millions of decisions that come before the bureaucracy every year.

In my book Political Order and Political Decay, I wrote about how difficult it is to create modern, impersonal, high-capacity states. There is always pressure for “re-patrimonialization,” that is, the regress of a modern impersonal bureaucracy into a patrimonial one run by friends and family of the ruler. The United States is experiencing re-patrimonialization as we speak: citizens freely debating laws are replaced by supplicants begging the king to favor their interests. MAGA world, for some reason, thinks that this constitutes a return to constitutional first principles.

It actually means the exact opposite. The second Trump administration is turning into one of the most lawless presidencies in American history.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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