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Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're joined now by Eric Katz.
He's senior correspondent for government executive.
We're talking about the future of the federal workforce in the next Trump administration.
Eric, welcome.
Thanks for having me.
So just tell us about your publication, Government Executive, and what you cover.
So we cover the management and oversight of federal agencies.
We cover what federal agencies are actually doing and how that affects their employees.
We can cover congressional oversight of federal agencies.
And yeah, we're read all over Washington.
Well, let's hop right in.
Your article has the headline: Trump vows to, quote, dismantle the federal bureaucracy and restructure agencies with a new Musk-led Commission.
First, talk about how President-elect Trump is talking about the federal bureaucracy and what his plans are.
So he's coming in with a promise to shrink the size of the federal government and the employees who work for it.
He did something, he talked similarly in 2016 after being elected.
He actually oversaw a slight growth in the federal workforce, although most agencies saw their employees actually shed employees.
So what he's talking about now is slashing the agency budget, slashing regulations, slashing what agencies actually carry out, and in so doing, eliminating many federal jobs.
So has he talked about actually cutting programs, or is there a plan as to how many federal workers he wants to cut?
It's not really precise.
He hasn't talked about too many programs he wants to eliminate.
He's talked about getting rid of the Department of Education.
That would require an act of Congress, so unclear whether that would actually happen.
And let's talk about that a little bit because Vikwan Ramaswamy did say that entire agencies could get deleted.
That was his word.
But if they wanted to close down an agency and that money's already been allocated by Congress, what would happen to that funding?
Or like talk us through that process.
So if the funding is there from congressional appropriation, that money, the president doesn't have that much discretion in revoking that.
The president-elect has talked about using the Impoundment Act, which is a decades-old law that would give the president more flexibility in withholding funds, and maybe he could use that.
But the legal capacity there is a little bit murky.
So if once Congress provides the money and authorizes these things, it's not really up to the president to say that we're getting rid of this agency.
That requires an act of Congress.
And when he was president last time, he tried this on a smaller scale with these small independent agencies.
And even those, Congress said, no, no, we're keeping them.
And they outlasted.
Well, let's play a very short portion of Vivek Ramaswamy from this Sunday on Fox News Sunday talking about the plans for reducing government.
Are you expecting to close down entire agencies?
Like President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example.
Are you going to be closing down departments?
We expect mass reductions.
We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright.
We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.
We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.
So yes, we expect all of the above.
And I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we're able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.
He said people are going to be surprised at how quickly we can move.
What is he talking about?
Well, so he has this, when he was running for president, he also talked about this.
And his proposal was instead of to, so federal employees are protected by certain legal protections that allow them certain guarantees before they can just be fired.
You know, that's to protect us from having a spoil system where a president comes in and just installs loyalists.
Instead, we have a merit-based civil service made up of experts who can manage the functioning of government.
He can get around that by just having massive widespread layoffs.
That's what the term reductions in force is referring to there.
So he says he can come in quickly, say, all these agencies, you're too bloated and we're laying people off.
Or what I think he's talked about is randomizing it and saying, if your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you're laid off.
Now, whether that would actually, whether that's an effective way to manage our government is very questionable.
You're talking about laying off, if this is evenly distributed, half of the doctors who care for veterans and half of the air traffic controllers and the civilians who support the armed services.
So that's something that I don't think would be very practical or that Congress would allow that to go through.
But they do have some ability to try to implement these layoffs.
It won't be as quick as he talks about because federal employees have the ability to appeal those and bog down the system a little bit, but he could do it.
And there are unions within the federal government.
Talk about how that works and what their role might be in this.
Yeah, so they're obviously going to fight this.
They have, in most cases, collective bargaining agreements in place.
They have contracts that in some ways dictate whether these, the course by which these layoffs must take place.
And they protect things like flexible work schedules.
So Ramaswamy has also talked about eliminating telework.
Most federal employees do not telework at all.
those who do spend most of their time on site, but for those who...
But Ramaswamy was saying that most of them are teleworking and that they're not actually working.
Right.
So according to the most recent data we have, that's not true.
And of course, those who are, when you telework, it doesn't mean you're not working.
It just means you're not working from the office.
But so even that is, in many cases, needs to be negotiated through labor agreements.
They could try to override that and press that through labor authorities or in court.
But it'll be a challenge for them to just sort of unilaterally try to put that in place.
I want to read you this quote by the American Federation of Government Employees Everett Kelly and get your reaction.
Who says, But make no mistake, our union will not stand by and let any political leader, regardless of their political affiliation, run roughshod over the Constitution and our laws.
During President Trump's first term, his administration attempted to gut many of our negotiated union contracts, downsize and relocate federal agencies at great disruption and cost to taxpayers, and replace tens of thousands of nonpartisan civil servants with political appointees who would blindly do his bidding.
Yeah, a couple points there.
The Trump administration really butted heads with federal employee unions in his first term.
They tried to kick them out of their office space that they have and reduce the amount of time that employees could spend doing union activity.
And they thought that I expect those executive orders to come back into place very quickly upon Trump taking office.
And in terms of the last point, that's a reference to something, an executive order President Trump signed right before he left office called Schedule F, which made employees, federal employees at will to take away what we were just talking about with the merit-based civil service.
Instead, employees could be fired because they weren't loyal enough to the president.
And that was met with a lot of backlash.
It never ended up going through, but Trump has promised to bring it back.
And so we'll see where that winds up.
We'll take your calls up until the end of the program at 10 a.m. when the House comes and gavels in.
The numbers are Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8,001.
And Independents 202748-8002.
We have a line set aside for federal employees.
You can call 202748-8003 if you work for the federal government.
In that clip that I showed you, Ramaswamy did mention contractors who were overbilling the government.
Of course, contractors are a big part of the federal budget.
How would that work?
Has he said anything more about going after contracts?
And of course, interestingly, Elon Musk, of course, who's working with him on this same efficiency department, is a big recipient of government contracts.
Yeah, I think that's estimated to be his contracts are estimated to be worth billions of dollars per year.
And there's some concerns about a conflict of interest there.
In terms of going after the contracts, I mean, these things are constantly being re-bid and renegotiated.
So any administration has the ability to try to work out better deals for the government.
Trump talked a little bit about that in his first term.
And the federal government has enormous buying power, obviously, because the scale at which they're operating.
So you could definitely see some of these contracts be reworked, reshaped.
I think every administration tries to do that.
So it depends what they're willing to go after, what services they're willing to shed, if that's up for debate.
But they will have opportunities to press federal contractors on what they're billing the government.
And past administrations have attempted to reduce the size of government before.
Can you talk about those previous attempts and what came of them?
Yeah, I mean, it's honestly one of the oldest tricks in the Washington playbook is to come in and say, we have this blue ribbon committee that's going to reduce the size of government and get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Almost every president comes in with some sort of task force to do that.
There were, well, first of all, President Trump in his first term had this big reorganization plan that was aimed at making government more efficient.
They came up with, that was internal to government, whereas the Musk Ramaswamy thing will be outside of government.
That came up with some ideas that never really went anywhere.
Some big initiatives happened under President Clinton and President Reagan that were sort of similarly like bringing outsiders from government to come up with these proposals and were really going to make government more efficient.
They had some success.
President Clinton really did actually reduce the size of the federal workforce.
But some of these proposals never really went anywhere.
They required congressional action.
And they weren't just like, oh, here's some waste.
It was real policy proposals that they were coming up with.
And there wasn't always an appetite to implement those.
Richard sent us on X who wanting to know about the numbers.
So what is the percentage of America's workforce that's employed by the federal government?
So it depends what you count.
There's about 2 million, 2.1 million federal career civil servants.
There's another 600,000 or so that work for the Postal Service, and then there's active duty military.
So it's a pretty, it's a fairly small percentage of the overall workforce in America, but it's not nothing.
I mean, if you're talking about widespread layoffs of these people, and Ramaswamy has talked about 75%, you know, that's a major economic impact.
You're talking about laying off over a million people.
And let's go to the phones now to Sean in Blacksburg, New York.
Democrat, good morning.
Yes, hello.
I just wanted some clarification.
Actually, I'm not really Democrat or Republican.
I think I might have said Republican, just more independent.
But clarification, you mentioned that President, the law that he passed before he left the last time, basically made it sound as though he would fire people that weren't loyal to him.
As I understand it, it would give the ability to fire a federal employee basically that weren't doing their job.
So the law, or it's not a law, it was an executive order, and he would apply this new firing capacity to any federal employee who worked in a policy position.
It was very loosely defined, and there was concern that this could be applied on an extremely widespread basis.
And what I was referring to is what the administration actually talked about there, which was we have federal employees that are entrenched in these agencies and they're standing in the way of the president accomplishing his goals.
So when I talk about loyalty, what I mean is they view much of the federal workforce as adversarial to what they're trying to accomplish.
And anyone who stands in their way, this will make it easy to get rid That.
Jika on X said Project 2025 said to privatize as much as possible.
Can you explain the key risks and benefits of hiring employees versus contracting services?
Sure.
So first of all, there's many things that are defined in federal law as inherently governmental.
So it's actually quite difficult to contract those out unless Congress were to rewrite those laws.
Federal contractors generally bill at a higher rate than federal employees, but there's a little bit more flexibility there, which is why agencies often turn to them because they don't have to go through the same hiring processes and they don't have to be responsible for their lifelong pension or health care benefits as career employees who serve a certain amount of time.
They are responsible for that.
So there's a little bit more flexibility with contractors, but it sort of depends what you're working on and what you need, what you're looking for.
Clarence in North Carolina, Independent.
Good morning, Clarence.
Good morning.
How you doing?
I was a federal worker for 43 years.
And my problem with union, and I was a shop steward, you have too much authority in the union because you have a program like the union I was in.
You can self-work two days without getting a doctor's excuse and come back the third day.
Nothing can be saved to you.
You can't fire nobody.
What Trump did with the VA, I'm a veteran.
He made it for if you're not doing your job, you can get fired.
We at the VA, we had to wait months to get an appointment.
You go there and stand in line, employees on the phone.
They ignore you.
We had people come in in wheelchairs, wait, and employees on the phone.
So it was good.
Make them responsible.
And I was a shop steward for 40-some years.
If you don't make them responsible by promise, you will run the federal government.
And that's one of the main problems.
It'll never be solved until you get these union in line.
And I was there and I saw it.
That's what made the federal government run so bad.
And it'll never get right until they get the unions in line with what they want to do.
Thank you.
What do you think, Eric Hatz?
Well, there's been complaints for many years, decades, that it's too difficult to fire malfeasant or poorly performing federal employees.
That's because of what we talked about with the protections that they have.
So, you know, there needs to be justification for firing federal workers besides that they're not politically engaged in one side or the other.
It's not impossible to fire them.
You just need to be able to support your case.
It can take a little while, but thousands and thousands of federal employees get fired every year for cause.
So, you know, it's certainly not impossible.
I'll quickly mention that the caller worked at VA and talked about what Trump did there.
He passed a law that made it easier to fire employees at the Veterans Affairs Department.
That didn't go well because it got challenged in court and several different courts and panels found that it was actually unconstitutional the way they wrote the law.
We may try to see, we may see them try to bring that back, but VA is not currently using that law because of all the trouble they had enforcing it.
Let's talk to Jay in Burbank, California.
Democrat, good morning.
Hi.
My question would be, you know, historically, given how dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Hussein, Gaddafi, Chavez, and Orebon, the first things that they do when they come in is they purge elected civil service officials.
They purge them.
They replace them.
They use patronage to ensure loyalty, which it looks like what's going on here.
They maintain control through intimidation, surveillance.
My question is: how do you think that President Trump's actions with his own administration compare?
And do you see any direct parallels in his treatment of the civil service and government loyalty, especially in terms of loyalty tests, firing officials, basically using the government for personal political gain?
That's my question.
Thank you.
So there's it's there's, it's.
That's interesting because certainly what they're what these over a century now of civil service law is trying to prevent is that sort of system and what you know.
So there's really two different things going on here.
What the efficiency commission that Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are leading are talking about is just getting rid of employees altogether, not necessarily replacing them with loyalists, but just shrinking the size of federal government.
You know that would give more influence to the political appointees that are at those agencies, but it also would mean that they're just doing less, because you can't just replace that with nothing.
And then there's the Schedule F thing, which you know could lead to the president installing more loyal people to him.
I mean, they're certainly, they've certainly talked about getting those who aren't, loyal to him out of the way because they're they're, you know, resisting his efforts.
So it depends what scale that they deploy this in, whether the courts let this go through or not.
Vivek Ramaswamy has talked about how there's a friendly Supreme Court now, so that he plans to use that to his advantage to sort of just do things and then, once it gets up to the court, the the highest court, then they'll just sort of rubber stamp what he's trying to do.
So, but that is a possibility.
This is Jerry in Somerset, Kentucky Independent LINE.
Good morning, yes.
If Trump succeeds in getting rid of say, 12 million illegals and well, three of them, like Republicans like to say, just lay around, don't work, and three million are children at least six million jobs of workers that are going to be leaving their job and they're going to be open.
So if them federal workers gonna go, do them jobs picking peppers and picking peaches and cucumbers and whatever because I picked cucumbers and it ain't no fun okay, have a good day, everybody.
All right Jerry, and the Washington POST has this about where federal workers live in the U.S.
And it says only 15% of the 2.1 million civilian full-time federal employees in the U.S. work in the Washington metro area.
That includes Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland and even a bit of West Virginia.
The other 85% work elsewhere around the country.
And you can see a map here.
The question is, you know, one of the ideas was, you know, there's too many agencies and departments in D.C., we can just move them out and then people will quit on their own.
What are you hearing about that?
Yeah, that's something that they tried to do in the first term on a much smaller scale.
They moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from Washington out to Colorado and they moved a couple agencies within USDA out to Kansas City.
And if their goal, and at the time, Office Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney talked about this, if their goal was to get people to quit, it worked.
Large scale, on a large scale, those employees did not relocate.
And that led to a lot of problems because these are experienced people who have a lot of institutional knowledge within these agencies of how things work, how budget functions, and they walked, and then the agencies didn't have that anymore.
But it's a very good point that people often get lost in this conversation.
85% of the federal workforce is not in the DC area.
And so most employees are already not here, but most headquarters are.
So that's sort of what these folks are talking about when they want to relocate.
They want to put headquarters out closer to where they are carrying out their functions.
And Patrick in Fairfax, Virginia, Democrat.
Hi, Patrick.
Hello.
Thanks for taking my call.
Question is if Mr. Elon Musk and our Swami, if they, will they be government employees, and if so, what type?
And if so, are they subject to the same conflict of interest rules that all government employees are subject to, especially those employees that are involved with contracting?
They could be sued, I believe, if they violate some of the regulations regarding contracting.
So in announcing this initiative, the president said this would operate outside of government, allow them to sort of operate a little bit more nimbly, but they would work very closely with the White House and its budget office to implement the things that they want to affect.
Typically, when these sort of special advisor positions outside of government, they do have certain ethical constraints and disclosures they have to make.
We'll have to see the exact structure that they set up for this to see if that would apply here.
But I imagine Musk and Ramaswamy would resist that.
The Hill has this article that says, federal workers brace for Trump overhaul of civil service.
What are you hearing from federal workers themselves?
Are they concerned about this?
Are they starting to look for other jobs?
What's the mood?
Yeah, we're definitely starting to have these conversations.
And there's kind of two tracks, I would say, in my conversations.
Employees who are kind of freaked out and they're really worried about what's going to happen.
And some of them are less so, they're just quitting, but more so if they're retirement eligible, they might retire earlier than I had anticipated.
Some maybe just are looking for other jobs.
I have heard that.
And then there's those who said, you know, I've been around for a Trump administration in the past.
It's difficult.
You know, we have smaller budgets and a little bit more pressure on us from political appointees.
And we have sort of reverse course on the type of things we were doing.
But ultimately, we survived.
We got through it.
And it's important for me to be here and carry out my functions and help deliver on the mission of the agency.
I think that's probably the more common thing that you hear.
So there's definitely nerves and there's definitely anxiety.
And in terms of specifically this like Schedule F proposal, I think people are really, really nervous about what that will entail.
But most are willing to sort of wait out and see how it plays out.
What are you going to be watching for as throughout the transition and in the beginning of the Trump administration?
So a couple things.
One, President-elect has not sort of formally cooperated with the Biden administration on the transition because it hasn't signed these agreements that statutorily they must sign in order to deploy their teams into agencies.
So every transition, you send a bunch of people into each agency, kind of get briefed on what they're working on and try to set some expectations for what you want to work on when you get there.
That's not happening yet.
From what we understand, it's expected to happen, but we don't know when.
So definitely keeping an eye on that.
And then, you know, if they start to signal what their day one priorities are going to be, then we'll obviously want to look at that.
Right after he took office in 2017, Trump issued a government-wide hiring free, so there was no hiring anywhere at any agency.
He hasn't said whether he's going to do that again, but that had years-long impact because they were just trying to catch up and backfill all those roles for all that time.
So, we'll definitely keep an eye on that.
And then, you know, these executive orders, you know, we're talking about federal employee union relations or this, you know, making it easier to fire proposal.
These are all things that would have pretty significant impacts, and we'll definitely be watching that.
All right.
Eric Katz is senior correspondent for government executive.
You can find his work at govexec.com.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
Thanks a lot for having me.
And that's it for us today.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
We'll see you again tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country.
Coming up this morning, Republican Congresswoman Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, a member of the Judiciary and Natural Resources Committees, discusses the incoming Trump administration agenda and House Republican priorities.
Then Maryland Democratic Congressman Glenn Ivey talks about the Ethics Committee investigation into former Congressman Matt Gates and the incoming administration's plans.
And later Wall Street Journal National Security reporter Laura Seligman gives us insight on what President-elect Trump's second term could mean for U.S. defense and national security policy.
Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now or online at c-span.org.
Today on C-SPAN, the House returns at 10 a.m. Eastern for general speeches before turning to legislative business at noon.