"Really scary": Experts alarmed by Trump plot to "weaponize" DOJ by mass firing career officials

Former President Donald Trump has again vowed to take on the so-called “deep state” with a mission laid out on his own website to “root out wrongdoers,” “fire corrupt employees” and “get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible.”

Trump has repeatedly railed against the "deep state" as a core theme of his rallies and promised revenge on his political enemies — including President Joe Biden and his administration officials.

Trump failed to eliminate the administrative state in his first term, and courts prevented many of his administration's attempts to flout settled agency law.

But Trump is poised to go farther than previous Republican administrations in his efforts to try to replace civil servants en masse with political appointees if he wins a second term, University of Illinois Chicago political science professor E.J. Fagan, told Salon.

"They want to fire lots of people, so lots of people working in expert roles in places like the Environmental Protection Agency, across the Justice Department, et cetera," Fagan said. "And that's kind of scary, right? Especially you think about those places like the Defense Department, Justice Department. You do a lot of bad things if you remove everybody who's willing to say no to you."

Conservatives have long argued that Ivy League, liberal-leaning experts in federal agencies hold far more power than Congress ever envisioned, and that their budgets are a burden on taxpayers.

Such ideology fit well with Trump's style of campaigning, featuring rallies where he rails against shadowy, deep state, elite and liberal enemies — whom he often refers to as a nebulous "they" — to raucous applause.

Pomona College politics professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky told Salon that Trump is "saying the quiet part out loud" about the modern conservative movement's decades-old fight against the administrative state.

"Since Reagan, I would say conservatives have tried to rein in what they saw as a largely unaccountable bureaucracy," Hollis-Brusky said.  "They rail against the civil service because they believe that civil servants are enacting their own mostly liberal agendas, and they're not able to be controlled through political accountability."

Trump's expected focus on loyalty above all as a requirement for his new administration could weaken the power and competence of federal agencies, according to Wake Forest University School of Law professor Sidney Shapiro.

"If loyalty really is the watchword, then competence isn't and that's a really scary prospect for everything the government does right now, whether it's delivering the mail or Social Security or you name," Shapiro told Salon.

Shapiro said federal agencies do everything from tackling complex issues like climate change to ensuring people get their mail.

"Politicians come, politicians go," he said. "But when we've had the right combination, and the country wants to make big improvements and do important things, it's really these folks that have driven all that. And I think it's really scary that the most experienced of them, the ones who really day to day make this work, could get replaced."

Over the past year, Trump allies have argued they have the plans and personnel to take Trump's fight against the administrative state to the next level.

Project 2025 – the 922-page manifesto backed by the Heritage Foundation, other conservative groups and scores of former Trump officials – outlines a plan to “remove thousands of bureaucrats” and replace them with Trump’s own appointees. The manifesto also calls for placing the Department of Justice and FBI under the president's control.

In his own Agenda 47, Trump promises he "will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them."

"The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left's political enemies, which they're doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible," reads part of Agenda 47.

Trump’s allies are also “drawing up lists” of loyalist, right-wing lawyers for his second administration, according to The New York Times. That's a stark contrast with the Trump administration's reliance on Federalist Society recommendations for executive branch legal roles during his first term — Trump often called his lawyers "weak" and "stupid."

Conservative nonprofits have said they're coming up with their own lists of loyalists who could serve as lawyers or fill the 4,000 appointments potentially available in a Trump administration.

THE THREAT OF SCHEDULE F

In Agenda 47, Trump also said he would "immediately reissue" a sweeping 2020 executive order that launched what he called Schedule F: a plan to make it much easier to fire federal employees in policy positions.

"First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats," reads Trump's Agenda 47. "And I will wield that power very aggressively."

Biden rescinded the order in the first month he took office.

But University of Cincinnati College of Law Dean Emeritus Joseph Tomain said talk of re-instituting Schedule F alone has "demoralized many civil servants already."

Trump's plan would have impacted an estimated tens of thousands of the more than three million civil servants who work in federal agencies from the EPA to the Department of Education to NASA.

"You take a job in government, which I think is a noble thing to do, historically, you've had a lot of freedom and civil service protections so that you could do your job as a professional," Tomain told Salon. "These agencies have an internal professional culture. I want to be a good economist, I want to be a good lawyer, I want to be a good scientist, and so that my reputation in the profession is respected. If I'm under the gun all of the time, that's going to put a real damper on how I could actually do my work."

Trump's executive order directed agencies to provide lists of all the civil service positions with substantial decision-making responsibility.

Trump sought to classify those employees as at-will workers and exempt them from civil service protections and processes include seniority and testing, according to Bowdoin College government professor Andrew Rudalevige.

"Trump folks would say that they were rooting out the deep state. Those more sympathetic to bureaucratic expertise would say it's really a way of making sure that there is no substantive pushback on the crazier things that they want to do," Rudalevige told Salon.

This year, the Biden administration issued regulations aimed at ensuring civil servants have protections including hearings and due process.

Congress, however, hasn't passed a law providing stronger protection against a renewed Schedule F.

It's unclear how long it would take Trump to fire or replace disloyal civil servants en masse.

"Now, would all those people all be fired immediately and replaced?" Rudalevige said. "I don't know, but maybe it would be potentially possible. It would take some time."

Rudalevige said the Biden regulations could "probably delay the implementation of a new Schedule F" if Trump tried again.

But, Rudalevige added: "I don't think it completely cancels it out, because, if nothing else, a new Trump administration could issue regulations rescinding Biden's regulations."

Kenneth Warren, a professor at St. Louis University whose research includes the administrative state, told Politico that it is ordinarily "very, very tough" for federal agencies to undo and replace regulations.

And the Supreme Court's string of administrative rulings limiting the power of federal agencies could also backfire for a renewed Schedule F effort. Berkeley Law School Daniel Farber told Politico that such rulings mean courts won't defer to agencies without clear approval from Congress.

In March, Trump's running-mate Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told Politico that if the Supreme Court tries to prevent Trump from firing scores of midlevel federal employees, he believes Trump should defy such an order.

"You need the bureaucracy to be responsive to the elected branches of government,” Vance told Politico. “The counterargument is, you know, ‘Aren’t you promoting a constitutional crisis?’ And my response is no — I’m recognizing a constitutional crisis. If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response."

Dartmouth College sociology professor John Campbell said he expects "a major battle in the courts" about whether Trump could invoke a new version of Schedule F.

"You can assume if he gets elected again, part and parcel of this Schedule F business, he would try to weaponize the Department of Justice by putting people in that he wanted," Campbell told Salon. "You can bet that there would be major pushback."

THE POTENTIAL FOR A WEAKENED CIVIL SERVICE

Fagan said modern civil service protections date back to Watergate and stem from concern about corruption and incompetence.

"Civil service protections were originally created because parties were given jobs to people who were unqualified in return for political work, in return for campaign work, campaign contributions, et cetera," Fagan said. "And that has created a professional class that has been very important to American policy making, regardless of who's president. Republicans have clashed with this class of people many times."

Fagan said federal employees have traditionally felt empowered to question the legality of executive branch decision-making.

Congress, he said, has intentionally provided checks and balances by delegating authority to agencies to roll out policy — rather than leave all the decisions to the White House.

But he said he questions whether federal employees could still serve that role under a Trump administration with weakened civil service protections.

"If it's illegal, the HHS secretary can say, or the Defense secretary can say, 'I'm going to resign if you make me do this.' The president can fire that person," Fagan said. "And eventually it gets down to a civil servant, who he can fire, and if it's illegal, they won't do it. And I'd worry about what Donald Trump will make people do or else they get fired."

Republican attorney George Conway said if Trump weakens civil service protections to make it easier to fire civil servants, they would face enormous pressure to fall in line or lose their livelihoods.

"You're going to see a lot of other people who are just going to say: 'That's enough, I've had enough. I don't want to do this anymore. I could make more money on the outside, or I'm just going to sit out quietly and hide out my next two years," Conway said at a July panel, later adding: "People who would have been respectable aren't going into this administration, and everybody else is going to have to basically choose between fighting or succumbing. And that's a scary thought."

In 2017, Trump's EPA head ousted scientists who had received EPA grants from key advisory groups, including the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee.

In 2019, the Trump administration purged Homeland Security Department leaders including general counsel John Mitnick, who The New York Times reported was replaced by an ally of far-right Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

And in January 2021, senior members of the Justice Department threatened to quit en masse if Trump followed through with his plan to install loyalist Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General and have Clark pressure Georgia to flip its vote for Trump, The New York Times reported at the time.

Clark – who served as acting head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division under Trump – faces a two-year suspension of his bar license for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

A series of Supreme Court rulings this year further reigned in agency power — a trend that Hollis-Brusky said could be amplified if Trump were to restructure the bureaucracy into a system of political appointees.

She said federal agencies increasingly must ensure their regulations are "exactly in line with the Congressional meaning" of statutes.

"It forces Congress to do the job of a civil servant and a policy expert, and if they don't, the judges are going to step in and become policy experts," Hollis-Brusky said.

PROMISES OF REVENGE

Trump would enter his second term with a longer list of perceived grievances he blames on the deep state: from his erroneous belief that he truly won the 2020 election, to his lengthy list of criminal and civil trials.

On posters lining the walls of Trump's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, one quotation stood out for capturing Trump's self-styled image as the selfless victim of a vast leftwing witch hunt who's vowed to fight to "obliterate the deep state" he claims is behind it all.

"They’re not after me, they’re after you… I’m just standing in the way!” reads the quotation.

Trump has said he will “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”

Trump has erroneously claimed that Biden had authorized deadly force in the 2022 raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

Last year, a D.C. federal grand jury indicted Trump on four charges in August 2023 accusing the former president of conspiring to thwart his 2020 electoral defeat and the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court's immunity ruling granted Trump immunity for talking to administrational officials such as his acting attorney general about investigating purported election fraud and sending states letters about such concerns.

The ruling also tasked the judge in that case with weighing whether Trump has immunity for other conduct that could count as official acts.

Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed his classified documents case last month, agreeing with Trump's lawyers that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith by the Department of Justice violated the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution.

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in her order, calling for Congress to specifically provide that authority.

Smith has filed a notice of appeal, and a spokesperson told The Associated Press that Cannon's dismissal "deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a special counsel."

Despite legal victories, Trump has promised he'll seek "revenge" against perceived deep state opponents.

"Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it would be easy because it’s Joe Biden," Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in June.

In a June interview with TV personality Phil McGraw, Trump offered his thoughts on whether revenge would impact his agenda.

“Well, revenge does take time. I will say that,” Trump said. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can."