We are back to 2016—deja vu all over again—and that means the federal bureaucracy is plotting how to defy the elected president.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Much of the federal workforce is on edge and bracing itself for the likelihood its ranks will be purged when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario.
And this does not mean they are job searching, pending their imminent firing.
Since all of this is being done in D.C., they are leaking their deliberations to the mainstream media.
Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.
This is not their job. They are not being paid to preemptively contemplate how they would respond to orders that have not actually been given or gone through the pipeline, especially when the entire purpose of the discussions seem to be about how to defy those orders.
Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
One defense official said:
We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet.
They are supposed to be wargaming scenarios in which China attacks Taiwan, not in which the president gives them an order.
Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.
This is not what employees who answer to a civilian government do. This is what a bureaucracy trying to protect itself and block the will of the people does.
And since Trump—who is known for keeping his campaign promises—promised on the campaign trail to reinstate his 2020 executive order, his purge could be the biggest change to the federal workforce since the late 1800s.
Former Trump appointee Ronald Sanders, who previously resigned, stated:
The objective is to create space to put loyalists in what were, what are still, career civil service positions.
One Energy Department employee said:
I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone.
An employee at the Environmental Protection Agency said:
We are absolutely having conversations among ourselves about whether we can stomach a round two.
Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement:
The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail.
He will deliver.
NOTE: The Obiden Regime erected temporary roadblocks at the federal Office of Personnel Management to safeguard career bureaucrats, but the rule was never codified by Congress and could easily be reversed.
According to a 2024 report:
Out of the more than 2 million federal employees working in the US and abroad, Schedule F could have a profound impact on the DC-Maryland-Virginia metro area, where nearly 449,000 federal workers live.
The District of Columbia itself has the largest individual chunk of federal workers in any state or territory, with more than 162,000.
In addition to Schedule F, the new administration is expected to use several other tactics to excise federal employees, such as mass transfers of senior executives and relocation of agency offices.
Trump did this in his first term, moving the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado—prompting 287 employees to either resign or retire.
In a 2023 campaign video, Trump promised to move “as many as 100,000 government positions” out of D.C.
Some federal workers and their unions are also warily eying Trump’s proposal for a government efficiency commission that would be headed by Elon Musk, who has promised it could slash $2 trillion in government spending.
Other former Trump officials have suggested entire federal offices should be slashed in addition to individuals being fired.
Mandy Gunasekara, the former EPA chief of staff, said:
If there are offices currently in operation that don’t meaningfully contribute to agency missions [under Trump] those need to go.
Unions that represent federal employees are gearing up for the fight, but in the not-too-distant future We the People can anticipate a much lower federal government payroll.
God speed to the Trump-Vance team.
