by Tim Donner, Liberty Nation:
It is arguably the most audacious of the president-elect’s bold promises.
Ever since Election Day, much talk has focused on President-elect Donald Trump’s appointments – in record time – of his Cabinet, advisors, and agency directors. This new administration is a diverse mix, but they all have one thing in common: The returning president sees them as loyal to him and his outsized agenda. But what about all the other, more entrenched denizens of DC? Enter Schedule F – Trump’s bold plan to “drain the Swamp.”
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Washington is abuzz with the extraordinary diversity of beliefs among the new designees. This is far from typical for incoming presidents, who ordinarily populate their administrations with political veterans in lockstep with their ideology. But after assembling a largely forgettable team upon his arrival in DC as a novice in 2017, the road-tested 47th president has broken the mold, as is his wont, by selecting Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, neoconservatives and populists, corporatists and unionists, insiders and outsiders.
Trump’s most famously ambitious objective, however, is to drain and ultimately empty the DC swamp of its unelected, unaccountable, and obstructionist bureaucrats who can thwart the will of the president, as they did so often during his first administration. The arrogance of these supercilious apparatchiks is due to the iron-clad protections they enjoy as civil servants. They cannot be fired no matter their behavior, except in the rarest of circumstances. Presidents come and go, they tell themselves, but we will outlast them all and can act accordingly.
Trump and the “All of Government” Edict
You may recall the so-called “all-of-government” approach to the DEI agenda during the current administration, where the goal of equity must be embraced and adopted not only in social planning and policies but across all agencies and cabinet departments. Well, the incoming president will employ that same broad, sweeping approach to weeding out the most unproductive and recalcitrant employees among the federal government’s 2.2 million-strong civilian workforce. And while DOGE – the newly formed non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – has been the talk of Washington, it faces severe limits in its attempts to affect systemic reform. No less than 60% of the government’s $6.8 trillion budget is “non-discretionary” and largely untouchable because it is devoted to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the exploding national debt, now more than $36 trillion. Another 13% is devoted to defense, which Trump has pledged to increase. Thus, Musk’s stated goal of cutting $2 trillion in unnecessary federal spending will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
