Trump Likely Faces Roadblocks in Reshaping Federal Workforce

It’s “insulting” when “Silicon Valley gazillionaires are saying, ‘this is what you need to improve government,’” Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, said of Vivek Ramaswamy and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whom Trump picked as DOGE's leaders. DOGE isn’t a government department and will likely operate from office space within OMB, she added.

“There is a fundamental difference between government and for-profit society,” Tenpas said: “The principles are inherently different. … My hope is they realize how complex our system is, [and] that they actually start to appreciate that there’s a reason for the complexity.”

If DOGE is headquartered at OMB, that’s already “a step ahead of where we are,” with it operating now out of SpaceX’s Washington, D.C., office, said Eric Edelman, Miller Center practitioner senior fellow and former undersecretary of defense for policy.

Trump wants all detailees from federal agencies to leave the White House and return to their agencies' offices on day one, and that will be a problem, speakers said. Florida Rep. Mike Waltz (R), Trump’s pick for national security adviser, told Breitbart News last week that “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on Jan. 20.” Waltz said he wants National Security Council staffers who are “100% aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Tenpas said, “All these detailees have to leave and there goes all the institutional memory.” Other countries don’t do things this way and in most nations 98% of government employees are civil servants, she said. “This is highly dysfunctional,” Tenpas added. “We are putting ourselves at an immediate disadvantage when we have something like 4,000 political employees.”

In any government, “it’s so incredibly hard to make change,” said Mara Rudman, professor at the Miller Center and a former White House aide under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Ramaswamy and Musk “don’t begin to understand what they’re getting into.” In addition, the odds are also good that they will quickly become bored and frustrated, she said. “I have zero expectation that they’ll come to appreciate any of the complexities.”

Rudman added, “We’re going to lose a lot of very senior, very talented career folks” and that's already starting to happen at various agencies. “That’s unfortunate, but … there are ways through that.”

Rudman said she’s not as worried about Schedule F, which Trump tried employing late in his first administration. “I’ve seen the legal arguments against it and I will be shocked if they can implement that.” The Trump administration has “a very, very weak legal case” for implementing Schedule F “no matter how much they think they have prettied up the executive orders.”

Edelman expects many knowledgeable federal officials will leave government service. For example, he mentioned Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, who served in the first Trump administration but has already turned in her paperwork to leave government service. “You’re going to see a lot of that in DOD, and not just the policy realm,” he said.

People in “the heartland” want Trump to cut the size of the federal government and make it more responsive to their needs, said Dan Meyer, who served as chief of staff to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “This is the initiative that they’ll probably cheer for the hardest and the more disruption the better,” he said. But Meyer agreed that making cuts to the government will be difficult because of legal and other restrictions.

In Congress, Meyer expects lots of early focus on reconciliation, across possibly two bills. If there’s one bill, securing the border and tax cuts must be the focus, he said. The larger the bill, the more likely that some members will raise concerns, and in the House Republicans have only a few votes to spare, he noted. “They just have no margin for error.” Meyer added, “In a good year, with a 30-vote margin, reconciliation takes a lot longer than anybody expects.”