donald-trump governance schedule-f civil-service deep-state loyalty-test administrative-state project-2025 follow-the-money
related: Project 2025 - The Blueprint They Followed · The Billionaire Cabinet - Wealthiest Administration in History · DOGE - The Billionaires Government · _Donald Trump Master Profile donors: Koch Network - Charles Koch · Heritage Foundation
THE EXECUTIVE ORDER THAT WEAPONIZES THE BUREAUCRACY
The promise of Schedule F is brutally simple: reclassify up to 50,000 career civil servants as at-will political appointees. Strip their job protections. Fire them at will. Replace them with loyalists. No votes in Congress. No legislative debate. Executive power operating in the shadows of regulatory agencies that regulate capital.
Trump first signed the order on October 30, 2020, five days before the 2020 election. Biden immediately reversed it on day one of his presidency. On January 22, 2025, Trump signed it again as his first move in his second term. The Office of Personnel Management finalized the regulations on February 26, 2026. Federal workers who enforce environmental regulations, labor standards, wage laws, tax compliance, securities rules, and consumer protections became vulnerable. Some 50,000 positions (about 2% of the federal workforce) fall in the “policy-related” category where career expertise is being replaced with political reliability.
Quote
The regulations described civil service protections as “unconstitutional overcorrections” to be dismantled. The Federal Register finalized the rule after receiving 40,500 public comments, of which 94 percent opposed it.
THE PERSONNEL DATABASE: PROJECT 2025 AND 20,000 PRE-VETTED LOYALISTS
The Heritage Foundation created a personnel database to solve a fundamental problem: staffing a government with people willing to break their own agencies’ rules. By the end of 2024, the foundation said it had 20,000 people in its database. Candidates were vetted on their answers to ideological questions. Not policy questions. Ideological questions: Do you believe life has a right to legal protection from conception? Do you believe the president should advance his agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected officials?
Project 2025 trained candidates in “Deep State 101” seminars. The database contained webcrawl reports and red flag assessments. Every applicant was screened for willingness to serve the president’s will over the agency’s mandate. This is not hiring. This is political purification.
Money
The Heritage Foundation’s decades-long war on regulatory agencies created the ideological and organizational infrastructure to staff Schedule F. The personnel database turned doctrine into payroll.
WHAT SCHEDULE F ACTUALLY DOES: DEREGULATION WITHOUT LEGISLATION
Career civil servants at the EPA, IRS, CFPB, NLRB, and SEC enforce rules that constrain capital. They have civil service protections specifically so they cannot be fired for enforcing laws that wealthy donors dislike. Schedule F dissolves that barrier. It offers deregulation through personnel rather than legislation. It offers the donor class what it wants without needing Congress.
The EPA has 15,000 career employees who write environmental enforcement rules and execute them. The IRS has roughly 75,000 employees who audit wealthy individuals and corporations. The Securities and Exchange Commission has 4,600 employees who investigate securities fraud and market manipulation. The National Labor Relations Board has 1,600 employees who enforce workers’ right to organize. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has 1,600 employees who write and enforce consumer financial rules. All vulnerable now. All replaceable by people whose loyalty to the president overrides their duty to enforce the law.
Contradiction
Schedule F is described as “restoring accountability” to civil servants. The actual mechanism is stripping accountability to law and creating accountability to the president only. It inverts the hierarchy: the law becomes less authoritative than the executive’s will.
THE KOCH NETWORK’S 40 YEAR WAR WINS THROUGH PERSONNEL POLICY
Charles Koch has spent four decades and billions of dollars on a unified project to destroy the regulatory state. He created think tanks (Cato, Mercatus), legal organizations (Institute for Justice), advocacy networks (Americans for Prosperity with 37 state chapters), dark money vehicles (DonorsTrust with $195M distributed in 2024), and training programs to produce ideologically vetted personnel. The goal was always personnel. The Heritage Foundation connection closes the loop.
In 2022, Koch’s network won a Supreme Court victory (overturning Chevron deference). In 2024, Koch-tied groups doubled down on eliminating agency power. Schedule F hands them the key to every agency they could not overcome through courts or legislation. Charles Koch’s 40 year war is not ending with legislation. It is ending with the hiring of true believers into career positions that will simply not enforce environmental regulations, labor laws, tax compliance for the wealthy, or consumer protections.
THE DONOR FUNCTION: EACH AGENCY, THE SPECIFIC CONSTRAINT BEING REMOVED
The IRS enforcement collapse is the clearest example. The Trump administration pulled roughly 25 percent of IRS staff between January and May 2025. The Global High Wealth office tasked with auditing billionaires lost 38 percent of its staff within weeks. Criminal referrals against the ultrawealthy and big corporations dropped 63 percent. By mid 2026, the Large Business and International division was referring zero cases of ultrawealthy tax cheating to criminal investigators. Wealthy tax cheats benefit directly. The constraint being removed is the capacity to audit them. Schedule F provides the personnel mechanism.
The EPA has been running on skeleton crews with career people instructed to step back from environmental enforcement. The reclassification accelerates this. CFPB enforcement has been dismantled (the agency transferred all active litigation to the Department of Justice by December 2025). The NLRB had its budget slashed after Trump took office. The SEC had enforcement actions drop by 50 percent in the first months of the administration.
Each agency has a specific donor interest. Schedule F weaponizes agency hiring to protect those interests permanently.
Money
The revolving door accelerates under Schedule F. Political appointees from industry replace career regulators who enforced against that same industry. The constraint dissolves through staff replacement rather than law repeal.
SCHEDULE F AND DOGE: TWO MECHANISMS, SAME FUNCTION
Elon Musk’s DOGE cut government spending and eliminated 280,000 to 320,000 federal positions. Schedule F reclassifies survivors as vulnerable political appointees. They are not the same mechanism. They achieve the same result. DOGE demolished the capacity. Schedule F ensures the survivors will not use remaining capacity to enforce against the donor class. One is a bulldozer. The other is a loyalty test. Together, they decapitate the administrative state and replace competence with obedience.
PROJECT 2025: THE BLUEPRINT FOR EACH AGENCY
The Heritage Foundation did not just build a personnel database. It built agency-specific battle plans. Every department got a document describing which positions to reclassify, which regulations to rescind, which enforcement actions to halt, and which industry interests to protect. The “Mandate for Leadership” handbook ran to 1,000+ pages of specific targets: EPA regulations, CFPB rules, NLRB precedents, SEC enforcement patterns.
Schedule F provides the mechanism to place the people who will execute the plan. Project 2025 provides the plan. The personnel database provides the people. It is a fully integrated operation.
THE CLASS ANALYSIS: THE “DEEP STATE” AS CODE FOR REGULATIONS ON CAPITAL
The political narrative calls career civil servants the “deep state” or the “administrative state.” This is the villain frame. It disguises what the servant class actually does: they enforce regulations that constrain capital. Environmental rules constrain resource extraction. Labor rules constrain wage suppression. Tax enforcement constrains wealth accumulation. Consumer financial rules constrain predatory lending. Securities rules constrain fraud.
These are not shadowy bureaucrats protecting themselves. They are people hired to enforce laws that the donor class has long opposed. The solution in a normal democracy is to change the laws through legislation. The solution under Schedule F is to staff the agencies with people who will ignore the laws. The constraint dissolves. The law remains. Enforcement stops.
Contradiction
The “deep state purge” narrative claims to be anti-elitist. It is actually the clearest possible expression of elite control: placing the donor class’s preferred personnel directly inside the agencies that would otherwise constrain them.
THE MECHANISM THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE CONGRESSIONAL VOTES
Schedule F is the donor class’s answer to the problem of democracy. They cannot repeal environmental law because voters support environmental protection. They cannot repeal wage laws because workers oppose them. They cannot cut IRS enforcement through the Senate because the taxation state is structured at 50 years deep. But they can reclassify the people enforcing the laws as political appointees and fire them if they actually enforce. The law stays on the books. Compliance with the law ends.
No legislation required. No public debate. No voted-on compromise. Just executive order, personnel database, loyalty test, and the slow disappearance of regulatory capacity through firing and replacement. This is the mechanism that circumvents the democratic process. This is deregulation by decree.
content-readiness:: ready
SOURCES
- OPM Finalizes Schedule Policy/Career Regulation: OPM Rule Describes Civil Service Protections as Unconstitutional (Tier 2)
- NPR: Trump Removes Civil Service Protections with Schedule F Plan (Tier 2)
- Protect Democracy: Trump’s Schedule F Plan Explained (Tier 2)
- White House Fact Sheet: Schedule F Initiative (Tier 1)
- Project 2025 Wikipedia (Tier 3)
- ProPublica: Project 2025 Detailed Breakdown (Tier 2)
- Center for American Progress: Project 2025 Would Destroy Checks and Balances (Tier 2)
- Washington Post: How Charles Koch’s Network Won 40 Year War to Curb Regulation (Tier 2)
- The Intercept: How Charles Koch Purchased the Supreme Court’s EPA Decision (Tier 2)
- Senator Whitehouse: Collapse in IRS Investigations of Wealthy Tax Cheats Under Trump (Tier 2)
- ICIJ: IRS Criminal Referrals Against Corporations and Ultrawealthy Plummeted (Tier 2)
- Oxfam America: Trump’s IRS Cuts Allow Ultra Rich Tax Cheats to Steal $30 Million Per Day (Tier 2)