The Coming Free-For-All Over Federal Policy and Management, With HUD As An Example
The Coming Free-for-All Over Federal Policy and Management, With HUD as an Example.
President-elect Donald Trump promised to disrupt as many aspects of the Federal government’s role in American life as possible. The status quo across many components of the Federal government, he asserted, was the evolved product of elitist, anti-democratic, and even anti-Christian demonic forces. These entrenched forces, he explained, were tearing apart the quality of life for ordinary American citizens. He vowed to fight against all these forces to “make America great again (MAGA).”
Even many of Trump’s ardent supporters admitted during the 2024 campaign season that his record from four previous years in the White House yielded only modest accomplishments from the MAGA to-do list. But both Trump and his supporters asserted that his second term would be dramatically different.
He told potential voters at campaign rallies that he had underestimated the strength of the entrenched forces he sought to rout. He had weakened his capacity to bring change by appointing too many “establishment” Republicans to his Administration. His “establishment” appointments, he argued, turned against him and refused to implement his own orders. They were beholden, he argued, to the same elitist, anti-democratic, and demonic forces – the so-called Deep State – that he claimed was destroying America. He would not make these mistakes again if he was given the keys to the White House for a second administration. This time, he would drain the swamp.
Many of Trump’s most loyal supporters have indeed spent much of their time over the last four years earning comfortable incomes by creating a network of non-profits that do not need to identify their doners and that are dedicated to vetting people and policies that could help the former President assert much stronger control of the Federal government if he ever had the chance. That chance is now at hand.
The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is perhaps the most influential organization in this network. The Heritage Foundation, by most accounts, ranks number two. Many of President-elect Trump’s announced nominees for prominent roles in his Cabinet and in other senior positions are directly affiliated with these two organizations.
In addition, each organization has invested millions of dollars to curate extensive lists of people whom Trump could nominate for the 1,200+ Federal executive positions that currently require Senate confirmation. Each person on these lists has been carefully vetted to assure they will be loyal to whatever policies are set by the President-elect and his senior advisors.
The unprecedented preparation of names for the full list of 1,200+ Senate-confirmed positions in the new Trump Administration will certainly add vigor to its first several months. This injection of energy may be enhanced by a speedy process of confirmations by the U.S. Senate. Although it seems that the Senate will insist on formal hearings for some prominent – and controversial – Cabinet choices, the Republican-controlled Senate may follow those hearings with expedited processes to confirm the rest of the President’s many 1,200+ nominees en masse.
One justification for this apparent abdication of Senate responsibility is that it would be consistent with yet another proposed increase in Presidential authority that the new Administration seems ready to demand.
In October 2020, as Trump’s reelection campaign was in full swing, he issued an Executive Order making an important change in the Federal government’s civil service rules. His order created a new civil service status named “Schedule F.” Schedule F would include all senior civil service positions that included “policy determining,” “policy influencing,” and/or “policy advocating” activities in their job descriptions. This would include about 50,000 positions within the career civil service (about 2% of all Federal employees).
Newly designated Schedule F employees would become “at will” employees. This means they could be fired at any time for any reason. It also means that Cabinet Secretaries, Agency heads, or their designees could hire new individuals for these positions directly, without the need to go through civil service hiring procedures.
President Biden ended Trump’s effort to establish Schedule F soon after he took office in January 2021. And he instituted new civil service protections that might make it more difficult to re-establish the new status. But Trump asserts he will have the authority to impose Schedule F by Presidential Order on “Day One” of his new term. And he seems ready to demand that Congress expand its coverage to include most of the 1,200+ positions that currently require Senate confirmation.
The proposed logic for this request is that the Senate’s Constitutional duty to “advise and consent” to Executive Branch appointments has expanded far beyond its original intent. Instead of confirming 1,200+ positions, Trump will assert that the Senate’s Constitutional duty is well-satisfied by focusing on a much smaller number of the most senior appointments for Cabinet Secretaries, Agency heads, ambassadors, etc.
The argument in favor of reducing the number of Senate confirmations is bolstered further by using key passages of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier in 2024 in Trump v. United States. That ruling greatly expanded the reach of Presidential authority by granting the President unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for actions that are part of exercising his Constitutional duties as Chief Executive. Not even a President’s motives for any action can be questioned if the action relates to his exercise of Presidential authority. Writing for the majority in this case, Chief Justice Roberts himself laid out his argument that the founders wanted the President to exert bold leadership, unfettered by too many restrictions.
Re-establishing Schedule F via a new Executive Order and expanding the new classification to include the great majority of positions that currently require one-by-one Senate confirmation votes would be consistent with the Supreme Court’s new turbo-charged vision of Presidential authority. After all, it has become political dogma since at least the Reagan Administration that “personnel is policy.”
Yet, as discussed in previous posts, most policy making processes within the Executive Branch involve an ever-changing, complex balancing act among outside interest groups, elected members of Congress & their committee staffs, politically appointed & Senate-confirmed Executive Branch officials, senior-level career civil service officials, and often the Federal courts.
For more than fifty years the bi-partisan professional training of career civil service officials in every accredited public administration program in the U.S. has focused on the role that career public administrators play in ensuring that the complex balancing act of policy making produces results that have “public value” by advancing the interests of the general public.
How would this system change under a turbo-charged President, armed with greater personnel flexibility from a new Schedule F, and a diminished need to win Senate confirmation for many heretofore required senior leadership posts in Departments and Agencies?
Let’s use the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as an example.
In Fiscal Year 2023, HUD had a Congressionally authorized budget of $77.1 billion and 8,622 employees in its national headquarters in Washington, DC and its ten regional offices and other local sites across the country.
The current system requires Senate confirmation for thirteen senior appointments in HUD’s leadership. The list includes the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary, the General Counsel, the Chief Financial Officer, the President and the Executive Vice President of the Government National Mortgage Association, and seven Assistant Secretaries.
The seven Assistant Secretaries include: Administration; Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations; Housing & Federal Housing Commissioner; Community Planning & Development; Fair Housing & Equal Opportunity; Policy Development & Research, and Public & Indian Housing.
The Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs is already directly appointed by the President without need for Senate confirmation. In addition, there is an Inspector General, whose budget is independent from HUD but who also needs to be confirmed by the Senate.
When Schedule F was initially proposed in October 2020, HUD did not respond to the White House’s instructions to submit a preliminary list of senior civil service positions that fall into one of the three categories of “policy determining, policy influencing, or policy advocating” job duties. But we can get insight into the scale and scope of jobs that would likely be included in Schedule F by looking at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 chapter devoted to HUD.
The chapter was authored by President-elect Trump’s previous HUD Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, MD. Although Carson’s chapter does not address Schedule F directly, he urges the next Trump Administration to immediately redelegate all decision-making authority within HUD to “a cadre of political appointees.”[i] He then urges HUD to expand the number of internal offices that are headed by political appointees by including the Chief Information Officer, the Chief Human Capital Officer, and the Chief Procurement Officer.
Carson also identifies specific offices that fall within the scope of various Assistant Secretaries that should no longer be headed and staffed by career civil service officers. Rather, each should be headed by a political appointee. They include the Office of Departmental Equal Employment Opportunity, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, the Office of Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control, and the Office of Field Policy and Management.
Carson justifies these changes by asserting they are necessary to end “bureaucratic overreach, reverse the expansion of programs beyond their statutory authority, and end progressive policies that have been put in place at the department.”[ii]
The expansive definition of Schedule F to include all “policy determining, policy influencing, and policy advocating” job duties would likely include almost all staff positions in offices devoted to policy goals that the Trump Administration would disagree with.
For example, it would likely be policy influencing or even policy advocating, to work in an office devoted to enforcing fair housing laws. So too would any position that is charged with ensuring that Community Development Block Grant funds are spent in ways that encourage resilience with climate change. Field offices often have great flexibility to respond to local issues related to HUD’s housing and development programs. These positions could therefore be defined within the boundaries of Schedule F.
Schedule F would likely embrace hundreds of mid-level managerial and professional staff positions. All these positions would become “at will” jobs. And new occupants for each of these jobs could be hired directly by future HUD secretaries or their designees without civil service qualification requirements. All but the most clerical positions could be included.
Perhaps the most disruptive effect of an expanded Schedule F, however, would be the end of the system by which senior career officials assemble external, expert, advisory groups to help them sort through hundreds of proposals that come in for almost every Congressionally authorized grant & contract program.[iii] These review processes use merit-based criteria to pare down the number of eligible applicants for each round of funding so that the final choices, which have always been controlled by political appointees, exclude most of the proposals – whether politically connected or not – that clearly do not meet each program’s Congressionally authorized minimum eligibility requirements.
This system, which has analogies across most Federal departments, gives politically appointed HUD officials an arms-length relationship with external political supporters when needed. And it gives career civil servants a greater chance to create public value for taxpayers by creating specific merit-based criteria (which go through complex public comment procedures before being finalized) from vaguely worded Congressional spending authorizations.
The incoming Trump Administration has very strong political incentives to disrupt as many components of the Federal government’s status quo as possible before the Congressional mid-term elections are held in November 2026. By following the political wisdom that personnel is policy, the new Administration seems exceptionally well-prepared to put its most ardent supporters into the most senior policy-making positions with record speed.
Yet its ambitions go far beyond that. By imposing some form of its previous effort to create Schedule F within the Federal civil service structure, the incoming Trump Administration seeks to take unprecedented control of policy making and policy implementation deep within the halls of every Federal department and agency. By expanding de facto “employment at will” status to almost 50,000 career civil service positions, the second Trump Administration seeks to aggressively prevent any internal Executive Branch resistance to its policy and/or managerial decisions.
On its surface, advocates for this strategy assert it is needed to bring greater order and control to the political management of the so-called Deep State. Yet the political urgency of producing very short-term, dramatic changes in publicly visible areas of Federal policy is likely to create the greatest free-for-all we have ever seen within the Federal government.
Thousands of experienced senior officials, most of whom will object to new policy or management mandates on solid, non-partisan criteria, will likely be fired with great fanfare to make sure Trump looks tough on the Deep State bureaucrats. They will be replaced, at best, by marginally qualified sycophants who will be chosen as fast as possible by using whatever limited referral networks are easily accessed by Trump loyalists who are already inside each department or agency.
This cursory look inside the structure of one Federal department will be repeated throughout all parts of the Federal government. The results will certainly give the American public the scale and scope of Federal government disruption that 49.9% of voters endorsed in the 2024 Presidential election. It will be up to those same voters, as well as the tens of millions of voters who chose not to vote in 2024, to decide if this disruption gives them the perception of public value or not when the time comes for the 2026 midterm Congressional elections.
Bob Gleeson
[i] See Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation, p. 503.
[ii] Project 2025, p. 507.
[iii] See The Urban Lens post dated August 13, 2024.
Scary.