With some of President-elect Donald Trump’s allies promising to dismantle entire federal departments and the incoming administration laying the groundwork for mass layoffs, experts say Trump is likely to start with targeted firings aimed at making an example of specific civil servants as he tests the waters in his second administration.
While the incoming Trump administration is laying the groundwork to change the rules to be able to fire civil servants en masse, Don Kettl, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, told Salon that he expects them to try making an example of a few key targets first.
“Henry VIII didn't need to kill them all, he just needed to kill a few,” Kettl said. “He just needed some heads on spikes to make an example.”
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The Heritage Foundation has, for example, circulated a list of targets at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services that they believe are “in league with left-wing open border groups” and that would like to see removed from the civil service. Kettl said Trump’s allies probably have similar lists for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department and other agencies the president and his allies feel were insufficiently loyal in his first term.
“Only a fool would try to dismiss large numbers of federal employees,” Kettl said. “It’s one thing to throw sand in the gears of the federal government, it’s another to try to destroy it.”
However, the first steps towards either mass dismissals or targeted example-making will be the same — reviving a policy first instituted in Oct. 2020 by an executive order creating an employment category known as “Schedule F.”
In the federal government, civil servants are divided into different employment categories. In 2020, Trump created Schedule F as a new........