The last firewall between democratic governance and raw authoritarianism in the United States may not be the courts. It may not be Congress. It might just be the quiet, anonymous bureaucrat with a master’s degree and a conscience, working behind the scenes at a federal agency. And that firewall is now under direct assault from a second Trump presidency determined to finish what it started.
That assault is named Schedule F.
Under the guise of “accountability” and “efficiency,” Donald Trump has revived and is now actively implementing a plan to strip tens of thousands of federal employees, those in policy-related or confidential positions, of the civil service protections that have long ensured neutrality, stability, and competence in government. The goal is chillingly clear: to purge the federal workforce of non-loyalists and replace them with political allies who will carry out presidential directives without hesitation, without objection, and without the friction of legality or ethical restraint.
Schedule F is not about draining the swamp. It’s about draining the government of dissent.
Federal workers targeted under this scheme are not elected officials. They’re not partisan players. They are analysts, policy advisors, economists, scientists, and legal experts. The backbone of governance. For more than a century, the U.S. civil service has been structured to function independently of party politics precisely so that the machinery of government could continue functioning regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. That continuity, call it boring if you want, is one of the unsexy foundations of democratic stability. Remove it, and the government begins to serve not the people, but the person in power.
Trump’s team knows this. They’ve said it out loud. Their plan is to reclassify up to 50,000 civil servants as “Schedule F” employees, a newly invented category that allows them to be fired without cause and replaced with anyone the president or his appointees choose. The idea isn’t just to weed out the allegedly “deep state” officials. It’s to ensure that future policy is shaped not by those trained to weigh facts and serve the public interest, but by ideologues loyal to one man.
Even experts within the system are raising the alarm. Kevin Owen, a partner at Gilbert Employment Law, described Schedule F bluntly: “It’s really going to be a spoils system.” He warned that the administration’s goal is clear, to clear out existing staff and “pick who they want to put into positions.”
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, echoed this concern. “President Trump's action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government's merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on,” he said.
The implications for policy are enormous. Imagine environmental regulations written exclusively by fossil fuel lobbyists. Imagine the IRS run by a donor who promised to look the other way for certain kinds of income. Imagine the Department of Justice executing political prosecutions without internal pushback. That’s not the paranoid projection of a partisan imagination, it’s a realistic depiction of what Schedule F enables.
Joe Spielberger of the Project on Government Oversight warned that this kind of purge would endanger not just ethics, but lives: “Replacing federal workers with unqualified sycophants would put at risk the services, benefits, and support that empower the public to live safer and healthier lives.” And Donald Kettl, a respected expert in public administration, has pointed out that the president does have legal authority to enact such changes, but warns that “mass firings could disrupt vital federal services, ultimately affecting public opinion and political stability.”
In practice, this reclassification eliminates the concept of a merit-based civil service. The protections that were put in place after the corruption of the 19th-century patronage system, when every new president brought a wave of hacks and flunkies with them, would be undone. Trump is not proposing reform; he is proposing a rollback to an era of government that served bosses, not citizens.
Even the Brookings Institution, not known for partisan alarmism, issued a clear warning: “Increasing politicization would reduce administrative capacity, government performance, and accountability to the public and Congress.” This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about breaking the very systems designed to ensure government works for everyone, not just the president and his allies.
Even more alarming is what this says about the trajectory of Trump’s political vision. His first administration clashed repeatedly with institutional norms, not just the media and the courts, but internal resistance within government itself. He was often frustrated that officials refused to carry out his more extreme or legally questionable demands. They slowed down the Muslim ban, they resisted political prosecutions, they leaked wrongdoing. In Trump’s worldview, that’s not professionalism, that’s sabotage. His response in a second term is to ensure that those people are gone.
In an authoritarian regime, the bureaucracy does not resist. It enforces. That’s what Schedule F is designed to accomplish. It is a bureaucratic coup in plain sight.
There is no legal or constitutional requirement that federal agencies operate as ideological echo chambers for the executive branch. Quite the opposite. A healthy government is one in which diverse perspectives and institutional checks prevent rash or autocratic decisions. But Trump’s political project has never been about healthy government. It’s about loyalty, control, and the dismantling of anything that stands in his way. That includes the very concept of independent governance.
Critics will say this is just hyperbole, that Schedule F is an administrative reshuffling, not a crisis. But crises in democracy don’t always come with gunshots or tanks. They come with procedural changes that quietly gut systems from within. They come with euphemisms like “streamlining,” “efficiency,” and “accountability”, words that sound innocuous until you realize they’re being used to justify the politicization of your government.
And make no mistake: if this plan succeeds, it will not be limited to Trump. The precedent will be set. Every future president, regardless of party, will have a template for turning federal agencies into personal instruments of power. That is how authoritarian structures endure, by embedding themselves into the rules.
The question for the American people is whether we are awake to what’s happening. Whether we will recognize that this is not about efficiency or draining a swamp, it’s about laying the groundwork for a presidency unconstrained by law, expertise, or dissent. It’s about engineering a government that cannot say “no.”
If you believe in rule of law, in neutral governance, in expertise, in the simple idea that your government should serve the public rather than a politician’s whims, then Schedule F should terrify you. Because if it stands, the government of the United States will begin to look a lot less like a republic, and a lot more like a tool of one man’s power.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
