3. Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy

Project 2025 link: 3. CENTRAL PERSONNEL AGENCIES: MANAGING THE BUREAUCRACY

WHO WROTE THIS CHAPTER ?

Donald Devine served in the Office of Personnel Management under Reagan, where the Federal Times titled him the “Rasputin of the reduction in force for cutting 100,000 bureaucratic jobs, reduced disability retirements by 40 percent, eliminated abortion coverage from federal health insurance programs, and threatened the automatic merit pay system. He is now a Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies (TFAS), whose goal is to “educate students and young adults about leadership, the principles of limited government, and free-market economics.”
- TFAS is connected to the State Policy Network (SPN), which was founded by Thomas A. Roe, a member of the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation.
- Their policy positions include reductions in state health and welfare programs, state constitutional amendments to limit state government spending, expanded access to charter schools, and school and opposition to public-sector trade unions.
- Former presidents of SPN include former Vice-President Mike Pence, Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Tom Tacredo (R-CO)
- SPN introduced model legislation for state legislators to undermine the Affordable Care Act and to prevent states from expanding Medicaid.
Dennis Dean Kirk, Associate Director of Personnel Policy with the Heritage Fund’s Project 2025, so already completely within the club.
Paul Dans – Watch this the video of him with soon-to-be-jailed Steve Bannon – love how he thinks that the Heritage Foundation’s $22 million dollar project, bankrolled by billionaires, is just a normal part of American politics. This is the same crew who publish incredibly hypocritical articles complaining about “Welfare for the Rich Foundations” and the inadvertently hilarious “American Elections Shouldn’t Be Bankrolled by Billionaires.”

We like this TLDR synopsis of Chapter 3 from Stop the Coup 2025

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 Cabinetlevel 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.

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; o put it and Privacy Office under Office of General Counsel,
- Eliminate their access to review, advise on intelligence products
Intelligence Community:
- Cooperate in the shrinking or elimination of the I&A (Intel, Advisory) role in the intelligence community
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

Abbreviations and terms to know

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM); – Congress has generally charged the OPM Director with executing, administering, and enforcing the laws governing the civil service
The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);
The Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA);
The Office of Special Counsel (OSC)
Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) – 2.2 million career civil servants, who have taken an oath to the Constitution, are active today are the backbone of the Federal workforce.
- established protections for career Federal employees from undue partisan political influence, and extended adverse action rights by statute to a larger cohort of employees,
- so that the business of government can be carried out efficiently and effectively, in compliance with the law,
- encourages individuals to apply to participate in the civil service.
- Congress intended to except noncareer political appointees from civil service protections.
Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 – ended the patronage system.
Competitive Service and Competitive Status – further clarify a competitive service employee’s status in the event the employee and/or their position is moved involuntarily to an excepted service schedule.

Our own page-by-page deep dive

(Pg. 70-76): Yada, yada, yada on why the GOP hates the merit system. Need expert here.
(Pg. 76): Because many corporations are allowed to provide shitty benefits, the benefits of federal employees, especially retirement benefits, should move to match them.
(Pg. 81) Restore Trump’s restrictions against unions and urge Congress to abolish all public sector unions.
(Pg. 82) Full staff the ranks with political appointees. It was noted that holdovers from Obama’s term stifled Trump’s moves.

This is a tragedy if we assume expertise matters and that corruption is bad. The Nation Treasure Employees Union authored this analysis “Schedule F Threat Broader, More Severe Than Previously Known”
- The reach of the order was alarming: “Resurrecting Schedule F in the next Republican administration is designed to get rid of even more federal employees than anyone realized.”
- They were specific: Russell Vought, the OMB Director under Trump, and now president of the Christian nationalist organization – “Center for Renewing America“, (alongside Jeffrey Clark, former DOJ official who is now facing disbarment in DC for helping Trump subvert the 2020 election), shifted 88% of OMB employees on to the new Schedule F, job classification, stripping them of their statutory due process rights and make it easier to fire and replace them. This included high-skill jobs like attorneys, economists, IT specialists, a toxicologists, correspondence specialists, and Freedom of Information Act officers, who had nothing to do with setting policy.
- and counterproductive: Robert Shea, a former associate director at OMB stated “Education, national security, housing and public health, these folks have been helping to oversee the administration of these organizations and development of policy in these important areas, and if they are somehow removed . . . you would certainly lose that institutional expertise,” he said. “I think you’ll see an acceleration in the proposal of policies likely to be ineffective. Policies will be proposed that are likely to be met with not only resistance among stakeholders in Congress, but also in the courts.”
The personnel office serves as a link between conservative organizations and the executive branch. (Groups like the Heritage Foundation, the author of Project 2025)