Much has been made of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign promise to purge the federal government of officials unwilling to be loyal to his agenda. He's now positioned to make good on that promise during the next 10 weeks of his presidential transition.
Though he's denied it, this promise reflects the goals of one of Trump's main supporters, the powerful, far-right Heritage Foundation. At the center of the Heritage's Project 2025 playbook is a far-reaching, but meekly named, plan dubbed Schedule F. Loyalty to anyone other than the president, the organization claims, is a fireable offense.
If this all sounds familiar, that's because Trump tried this all before without much success.
In October 2020, he signed an executive order to create a new personnel classification for high-ranking bureaucrats with policymaking responsibilities. Anyone to get the new Schedule F label would be stripped of employment protections and be subject to easy dismissal. Despite the machinations of personnel officials, like John McEntee, the plan never really got off the ground, and the Biden administration plans to take office in 2021.
This past winter, Trump pledged that he'd reissue the same policy immediately upon taking office, with estimates of up to 50,000 officials up for reclassification. All could be fired within weeks of Trump taking office.
With unemployment in the Washington, DC, area hovering around 3 percent, it's a real head scratcher how the Trump administration would find 50,000 qualified applicants for these jobs. Nonetheless, loyalty will be the chief metric of how Trump will sift through all the resumes.
Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, who's co-chairing the transition team along with Linda McMahon, who headed Trump's Small Business Administration, reiterated this a few weeks ago. Job seekers will be judged based on “fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,” Lutnick told the Financial Times.
As Lutnick now knows, staffing a government as large as ours is a tall task, regardless of how you go about it, and given the disorder of the last Trump transition, asking for some help from somewhere other than Heritage would be wise. That's not just because getting rid of thousands of seasoned experts is just a bad idea. It's also because it was Heritage that oversaw much of that 2016 transition and is responsible for a great deal of the disarray that fall.
There is another option.
Though Trump and his supporters may be loath to do so, this is a case where they could learn from the outgoing administration. Trump's team opted not to do that in 2016 with the Obama administration, ignoring offers of assistance, but maybe it's wised up since then.
Just four years ago, Joe Biden's team faced the same challenge of how to quickly staff its government. It did so during the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the 1,000-plus person transition team was all working from home.
If Trump's team takes the time to ask, officials would likely hear from former Biden-Harris transition team members that loyalty to Biden also mattered in 2020. People I interviewed for a book published this summer who were involved in that transition attested to that point. It was Biden's victory and his agenda that the new administration would pursue. Few even mentioned the priorities of his Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, so central was the new president's vision for the country.
Yet, unlike what we heard during the 2024 campaign, this didn't mean anyone associated with the Trump administration was immediately out of a job. One person involved in staffing in 2020, said to me “the Biden team didn't come in and say all the political appointees have to go.” Instead, the attitude was, “We don't know if we want to keep any Trump appointees, but we want to talk to them and we want to figure out whether there's anybody there that's worthwhile.” The result was the Biden-Harris team carried forward some Trump administration officials who understood they'd now be implementing new policies.
Another person reiterated a similar point to me about a shift that happened after the 2020 election. Unlike during the campaign, “the work that we were doing as a transition team was bipartisan and inclusive,” the person said to me. They explained that “this was about everyone, not just Democrats, and making sure that Republican elected officials had a seat at the table, were also included and informed about the plans and intentions of the administration.” To do this, the team held closed-door meetings, no press invited, with President-elect Biden and state and local officials, including many Republicans.
All signs right now point to the Trump transition team's disinterest in asking for help, especially from Democrats. Its failure to sign a required memorandum of agreement (MOU) earlier this fall limits how much help the General Services Administration (GSA) can offer it. This problem could be solved by signing an agreement now, but such an agreement would likely oblige the Trump transition team to follow existing rules, including capping donations to the transition team at $5,000 and disclosing the names of donors.
Without those rules in place, the Trump transition team is free to seek advice from just about anyone other than the GSA, yet those given access are likely to be the deep-pocketed insiders who donate to the transition team. Who those insiders are exactly, we may never know. The absence of an MOU, then, increases the risk that the Trump transition will be subject to unchecked conflicts of interest and not receive the help it needs.
It may be too late to steer the incoming Trump administration away from the impulse to break the rules and go at this alone. Lessons from the recent transitions show this impulse will be highly risky for the American people who may have voted for a new president, but not a return to chaos and disorder.
