The tech secretary Peter Kyle also said he wanted an "assertive" approach from the regulator, Ofcom.

Although the plight of America’s 2.2 million federal bureaucrats seldom elicits public sympathy, spare a charitable thought for their future. Not since the congressional elections of 1882 has civil-service reform received so much political attention. President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now face a fundamental decision: Will they listen to the loudest and most extreme voices in their party and be agents of chaos and disruption in upending the civil service? Or will they adopt a more measured, incremental approach that would deliver improvements and burnish their managerial credentials? The recent appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency is a clear signal that Trump is leaning toward disruption. But the risks are significant—and the president-elect has other reform options that could be more effective at a far lower cost.  

Few would argue that the current federal civil service is perfect. In 2017 and 2018, the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress, issued a two-part white paper describing the government’s staffing system as “fundamentally broken,” with too many rules and too little flexibility. Its authors argued that firing nonperformers and attracting new talent can be too difficult. Other observers have bemoaned the bureaucracy for its cost, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness. Change is clearly needed, and would in fact be welcome in many corners of the federal government.

Although distinguished bipartisan commissions may agree on a path forward, Republican and Democratic politicians—buffeted by the interests and passions of their bases—have been unable to come together to address these problems. Under pressure from public-sector unions, Democrats have shied away from even modest reforms of their own and have focused instead on resisting GOP proposals—which have centered on removing protections from federal employees. Some on the hard right are working toward “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “total destruction of the deep state,” as the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has put it. But most Americans—including many moderate Republicans and Democrats—do not share this animus. They value government services and simply want to see them performed better.

Efficient and effective institutions are easy to degrade, difficult to build. The United States needs to retain the benefits of technical competence and impartial advice from a meritocratic civil service while ensuring that federal employees are accountable to political oversight. There are more constructive ways to achieve the objectives that both Republicans and Democrats claim to want, while retaining a high-performing, meritocratic civil service.         

[Read: Brace for the storm]

Late in his first administration, Trump used an executive order to introduce Schedule F, which sought to remove civil-service protections from any career official with a policy-making role, giving the White House much greater discretion in hiring and firing. Currently, there are about 4,000 political positions, out of which some 1,200 are subject to congressional approval. The number of positions that could be designated as Schedule F is unknown, but estimates suggest it could be 50,000 or higher. Trump’s campaign pledged to “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” and he himself has promised to wield this power “very aggressively.”

He will have broad support from his party, which has sought to reap political benefit from stoking public hostility toward civil servants. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a presidential primary candidate, claimed that he would start “slitting throats” of federal bureaucrats from day one. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have indicated their openness to Schedule F. During the primaries, Ramaswamy denounced the administrative state as “an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” and proposed firing more than three-quarters of federal employees. He later revised this mass-termination plan to cover just half the federal workforce, selected randomly: “If your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.” More recently, Ramaswamy has expressed admiration for Musk’s drastic staff cuts at X (formerly Twitter) as a template for reducing the federal government.

In the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott has been the Republican most aggressively pressing for a radical restructuring of the civil service. In 2022, he rolled out his 12-point Rescue America plan, which included a proposal for many government agencies to either move out of Washington or shut down entirely. Although about 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the greater Washington, D.C., area, the idea of moving staff out of the capital has caught on in Republican circles—the Trump campaign said he would move as many as 100,000 civil-service positions “to places filled with patriots who love America.” Cutting civil-service protections is also popular with the MAGA base: The Public Service Reform Act, which Scott introduced last year, proposed to place the entire workforce in “at will” employment status, allowing them to be terminated “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” (The bill has not yet passed through committee.)

And then there is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Tonally, the document is uncompromising. The federal government is a “behemoth” deployed against American citizens and conservative values; federal bureaucrats are “underworked, over compensated and unaccountable.” The project argues that the entire edifice of civil-service protections is a legacy of the American left: “Progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific and politically neutral administration.” That statement is partly accurate but woefully incomplete. Republicans have historically been at the forefront of reform efforts, and the last major one, during the Carter administration, was a notably bipartisan affair.

Rhetoric aside, the project’s analysis of central agencies and federal personnel policy is more subtle and nuanced, grounded in a careful review of the relevant institutions and legal and regulatory frameworks. What influence Project 2025 will have on the second Trump administration remains to be seen. Tactically, the president-elect chose to distance himself from it during the campaign, but in office Trump may draw heavily on the document—as well as the personnel who drafted it.

As Francis Fukuyama has argued, the reintroduction of Schedule F will make the federal government “less competent and vastly more politicized.” The United States already has a much higher number of political appointees than any other advanced-industrial democracy—nearly 28 times the number in the United Kingdom, for example. Political appointments stretch down four or five levels of bureaucracy in some agencies (such as the Department of Defense).  

Republicans would be unwise to view Trump’s reelection as a mandate for completely uprooting the civil service. The most recent survey of public confidence in government by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service found disturbing evidence of reduced trust in government. Yet attitudes toward federal employees remain positive. A majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the statement that most civil servants are competent; a similar proportion agreed that most are committed to helping people “like me.” Only a quarter of respondents said that presidents should be able to fire “any civil servants that they choose for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed with this statement.

[Read: Trump takes aim at Republicans]

Several measures could improve responsiveness, accountability, and performance at a much lower cost and risk than the ideas currently circulating in Republican circles. Departments and agencies should have more flexibility in managing their human resources, and be empowered to tailor their personnel policies to their particular business needs. The allocation of political appointees across the government needs regular review: A bipartisan commission should examine the current 4,000 such posts and make recommendations to the administration about streamlining and redistribution. Performance management is a key area for improvement: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the federal workforce is rated “marginally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” which at best stretches credence and at worst damages public trust. All government agencies ought to evaluate their staff’s performance on a standard curve, so that poor delivery is consistently identified and addressed. (Adjustments could be made so as not to penalize high-performing agencies and units.) Lastly, labor relations in the civil service need an overhaul: The processes and paperwork surrounding termination should be simplified; the window for appeals should be narrowed; and the role of unions in the grievance process for individual employees should be curtailed.

Such measures may disappoint the more fervent anti-government voices in today’s GOP. But a sober assessment would view Musk’s experience with X as a cautionary tale. Although the platform has functioned as a megaphone for its owner, it has also shed users; experienced repeated and embarrassing technical glitches; witnessed steep declines in advertising revenue; and may now be worth as little as a fifth of what he paid for it in 2022. In the private sector, such failures fall primarily upon owners and investors; in the public sector, they would affect us all. Do Americans want vital government services such as food inspection, air traffic control, or Social Security payments to suffer similar breakdowns? Dislocation and deconstruction may have a visceral appeal among elements of the MAGA base. But once the new Trump administration is in office, the American people will expect it to deliver the public goods and services they rely upon—and do so smoothly, fairly and efficiently. Disruption may sound trendy in Silicon Valley or tough in conservative think-tank circles, but delivery is what will ultimately determine the success or failure of these reforms.

Social media posts are claiming that millions of votes are missing and the 2024 election was stolen. Not true.

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

[Read: The night they hadn’t prepared for]

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party]

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.