Trump Has Plans to Fix the Government. There Are Smarter Ideas.

Measures of the public’s confidence in the federal government continue to plumb the depths. Former President Donald Trump promises to do something about it. Unfortunately, his proposed solution would cause more problems than it would solve.

During his last few months in office, Trump issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” category of federal employees. This reclassified certain career civil servants — those defined as holding “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” — as political appointees, meaning they could be fired at will by the president. The number of roles affected would be determined after a review of federal agencies, but one of the plan’s architects estimated it to be about 50,000, out of a civilian workforce of almost 3 million. (The order was rescinded by President Joe Biden, but Trump says he’ll bring it back if he’s reelected.)