By Josh First
Much talk going on now about how President Trump is supposed to get a stranglehold on the lawless and insubordinate federal bureaucracy if he is elected to a second term this November. As a former seven-year federal policy bureaucrat who fled the belly-of-the-beast U.S. EPA in 1998, here are my suggestions. These are based especially on my witnessing the changing of the Senior Executive Service (SES) guard from the Bush I administration to the Clinton administration, and all of the cascading management changes that followed.
Step One: Enter the White House with a clear and specific staffing plan and the prospective personnel to implement it. Ground Zero is the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which processes all federal personnel hiring and firing. From 2017 through 2020, OPM infamously held up a high percentage of Trump’s selected future staff to be seeded across the bureaucratic horizon, where they were supposed to implement Trump’s agenda. But many of Trump’s prospective picks had their paperwork deep-sixed and “lost” in obscure file drawers throughout OPM, their hiring process dragging on so long that they had to find other jobs after having put their current employers on notice of their imminent departure for the Trump administration. When you control OPM, you can get all of your staff quickly seated and working throughout the bureaucracy. If you don’t control OPM, well, your hard won second term won’t add up to much.
Step Two: Take no prisoners. Treat every at-will federal position as the at-will position it really is, and work hard from there to drill as deeply as possible. Treat all management positions as targets for immediate change. On Day One, be prepared to immediately terminate every single SES and political position, and have in hand their loyal replacements, with OPM processing them at record speed. The marching orders for all new loyal SES employees is to replace as many senior staff as they each can, as quickly as they can, with extreme prejudice. It goes something like this:
New SES manager: “Hi, Mary. Good morning. You have been a division chief in this agency for, gosh, twelve years. And yet here I find you late to our meeting this morning and dressed unprofessionally. I am issuing you two written warnings right now, one for each infraction.”
Division Chief Mary: “What are you talking about? I was only one minute late! And I have had a casual dress policy here since—”
New SES manager: “Mary, being unprofessional and insubordinate to your boss is a third violation of the OPM standards of conduct. I am writing you up right now with a third warning, which means that I am now beginning your termination and separation process from the agency as soon as we are finished here. You have three minutes to pack up your personal items, and then Officer Jones here will see you out of the building.”
This “direct action” between new senior executive and entrenched senior managers must happen at every level throughout every federal agency, every day, until every senior manager has been replaced with a loyalist. And each new, loyal senior manager will have the same directive for dealing with D.C. swamp subordinates, down to the bottom of the civil service staff level. Anything less than this admittedly tough hands-on style means that the enormous communist rat warren continues to host a zillion rats, each one quietly gnawing away and illegally stopping the implementation of your presidential agenda and the will of the American people.
How well do I recall an EPA biologist sitting on a huge stack of biological tests done to study the effects of Chlorothalonil, a highly useful insecticide. He personally opposed the company that owned Chlorothalonil, and so he just sat on their studies. He was unwilling to meet the statutory deadline for agency review and approval or rejection. And his superiors did nothing to compel him to act. And so the company’s expensive research went nowhere, floated in purgatory, and their expensive chemical unnecessarily languished outside the market. This story times a million threatens America right now. If it doesn’t end by 2028, then American government is no longer of, by, and for the American people. It will have become something utterly of and by for itself. It is the end of representative government.
For those who might shed tears about all the sad Marxist bureaucrats being cut loose to find jobs in the private sector they mocked, cry me a river. No bureaucrat is owed a job. They have these public service jobs solely at the will of the people and their chosen chief executive, the president of the United States. With OPM under new management and this tough-love approach to running the federal government, this is the democracy the D.C. bureaucrats say they are so worried about protecting.
Josh First worked at the U.S. EPA in Washington, D.C. from 1991 to 1998, doing primarily agricultural chemical policy and legislation. He now makes his living logging and running a sawmill — no lie.