A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
For years, President-elect Trump has talked about reining in the federal bureaucracy, dismantling what he calls the deep state. Now, he's taking action. Trump just announced what he calls the department of government efficiency to help with that. Though, only Congress can create a new department, so it's more like an advisory board. It'll be led by the CEO of Tesla and X, Elon Musk, and former Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur, Vivek Ramaswamy. So how quickly could the new Trump administration start getting rid of federal workers? Here's NPR's Andrea Hsu.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: President-elect Trump has a message for the 2 million strong federal workforce - change is on the way. The vast majority of federal workers already work outside Washington, D.C., but Trump wants more of them out.
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DONALD TRUMP: As many as 100,000 government positions could be moved out. And I mean immediately.
HSU: And he wants to bring back something he rolled out late in his last term - a new category of political appointees called Schedule F. It was part of his plan to get rid of career civil servants he considers rogue bureaucrats and replace them with people who will faithfully carry out his agenda. President Biden immediately put that plan on ice, but Don Kettl, former dean at the University of Maryland, says Schedule F will be back.
DON KETTL: It's one thing that's absolutely for sure. Positively, absolutely, for sure.
HSU: After all, Kettl says, those close to Trump see it as...
KETTL: ...A good idea that they waited too late to launch.
HSU: Now, earlier this year, the Federal Office of Personnel Management issued a rule designed to protect against a return of Schedule F. The rule makes it harder to convert career federal employees into political appointees who can be fired at will. But now Trump has tapped Musk and Ramaswamy to dismantle government bureaucracy. And besides, Kettl points out, rules can be rescinded and replaced in pretty short order - just a matter of months. Nicole Cantello at the Environmental Protection Agency knows it too.
NICOLE CANTELLO: It's something like a speed bump.
HSU: Cantello has been with the EPA for more than three decades as a lawyer prosecuting polluters, and more recently as a union president, representing EPA employees in the Great Lakes region. With or without Schedule F, she is bracing for all kinds of setbacks for the agency - budget cuts, a rollback of environmental roles, limits on what government scientists can pursue. She worries about who might be cut by the new administration. EPA workers around the country perform a lot of critical tasks. She points to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio last year.
CANTELLO: In the train car was vinyl chloride. And if you didn't have federal employees on site who understood that that was flammable and understood that immediate action needed to be taken to make sure that train didn't go up in smoke, you'd be in deep trouble, right?
HSU: At the end of the day, Don Kettl doesn't think the incoming administration will get rid of federal employees en masse, because that would undermine their ability to get anything done - which would be disastrous, not to mention a public relations nightmare.
KETTL: Who wants to read - if you're in the inside of the new government - that unsafe drugs have been unleashed on the public, or that it's not safe to buy Cheerios in the grocery store?
HSU: But he guesses that the Trump administration will move swiftly to oust a smaller number of individuals seen as particularly problematic - those standing in the way of Trump's goals.
KETTL: They know that by doing just a little, they can have an enormous effect.
HSU: It's a strategy, he says, that brings to mind Henry VIII, who was known for beheading his enemies and putting their heads on spikes for everyone to see.
KETTL: If you succeed in getting your message across, then you don't need to chop everybody's head off. You just need to tell everybody that you're serious about this.
HSU: Just putting the federal workforce on notice, he says, will go far in getting the administration where it wants to go.
Andrea Hsu, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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