Chapter 3. Central Personnel Agencies: Managing The Bureaucracy

Key Points

• Personnel

  • Support merit-based performance evaluations of federal workers
  • Reward managers and employees who implement conservative policies
  • Make MSBP main arbiter of federal personnel dispute cases, not EEOC
  • Use Schedule F to remove career employees and prior administration holdovers
  • Restore Trump-era Executive Orders to boost management rights vs. union power
  • Give president the power to fast-track personnel appointees, with empowered OMB
  • In Coast Guard, and military posts, “re-vet” promotions and hirings during Biden Administration; rehire personnel let go for refusing Covid vaccination, offer back pay
  • Reduce US Secret Service budget; reassign USSS personnel to ICE, Justice, emphasize protection roles
  • Eliminate the Office of Intelligence and Analysis
  • Hire more Schedule C/political legal appointees to Office of General Counsel to assure consistency of legal viewpoints in response to Congressional requests
  • Only political appointees from Office of Legislative Affairs should speak to Congressional staffers; all requests to pass to OLA

• Civil Rights

  • Reduce size, authority of Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties;
    • put it and Privacy Office under Office of General Counsel, eliminate their access to review, advise on intelligence products

• Immigration

  • Eliminate both Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) and Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman (CISOMB);
    • issue policy to stop assisting illegal aliens and DACA applicants to obtain benefits
  • Move Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and Dept of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Office of Immigration Litigation to DHS control, aggressively help to build US southern border wall Housing:
  • Only US citizens, ‘lawful’ permanent residents can use or live in federally subsidized housing

• Education

  • Deny US loans to non-US citizens, lawful permanent residents, students at schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens

• Labor

  • Eliminate the two (of four) lowest wage levels for foreign workers

• Treasury

  • Equalize taxes between American citizens and working visa holders and quickly provide DHS with all tax information of illegal aliens

STC 2025 Commentary

Project 2025 is focused on strategies to both reduce the size of the federal workforce – a familiar conservative movement goal —and reduce the power and impact on policy of career professionals who may disagree with the conservative agenda.

Here, Schedule F and Trump Executive Orders are to be weaponized to remove and punish career professionals who might otherwise resist the GOPs restructuring agenda. The proposal to give a president the power to decide personnel appointees, advised by a now Cabinet- level OPM – also reflects the goal of removing any obstacles to the GOP’s agenda, beefing up the cadre of loyalists in critical decision-making positions, and limiting Congressional opposition to, and oversight of, conservative nominees.

Overall, Project 2025 makes clear its restructuring personnel plan supports the conservative goal of radically reversing existing government protections for federal workers and favoring private corporate and management rights over union power. If hard-line conservatives could, they would eliminate public sector unions altogether.

Full Summary

This chapter emphasizes the conservative mantra “personnel is policy” that the authors state is the fundamental principle guiding the government’s personnel management. They discuss needed changes at the four key personnel agencies of the government: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM); The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB); The Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA); and The Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The MSPB is the main regulator of cases of some 2.2 federal employees, while another agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), manages federal contracts.
The authors focus on the need to implement merit-based performance evaluations of employees to address what they view as a glut of federal workers who are given high performance and salaries but provide poor performance. They raise the issue of managers being accused of racial or sexual discrimination when they give employees low performance rating, a barrier to firing workers who don’t do their jobs well. They call for reinstating a Trump- administration Executive Order 13839 to crack down on employee performance that the Biden administration overturned.
They also note that, “It is essential that political executives build policy goals directly into employee appraisals both for mission success and for employees to know what is expected” – a tacit threat to fire managers and employees who fail to enact conservative policies. They want to transfer authority to rule in federal employee complaint cases away from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and to the MSPB, which would become the main arbiter.

Schedule F: The authors advocates using ‘Schedule F’ to carry out what is essentially the removal of career professionals who are not conservative loyalists from high-level advisory positions into a new “at will” status that strips them of civil service protections. They back applying a private market system of pay for federal employees and retired workers, arguing that their current benefits are too great. They also seek a freeze on hiring of career professionals with subject expertise, and advocates various strategies to cut the federal workforce.
They want to strengthen management authority over organized labor, and restore three Executive Orders Trump passed that Biden reversed (EO’s 13836, 13837, and 13839) — all designed to limit the power of labor unions representing federal agency workers. They also question “whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.”
They also call for the OPM to work closely with the Presidency and suggest giving the president new “direct supervision of the bureaucracy with the OPM Director available in his Cabinet” to help push through political appointees quickly – an important ideological goal.