Civil service protections can’t stop large-scale firings of federal workers, the leaders of President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the government wrote Wednesday in an op-ed.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of Trump’s planned effort to cut federal rules and workers, authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed offering the most comprehensive plan sketched out so far for the new Trump endeavor.
They plan to serve as “outside volunteers” and will work with the Trump transition team to “identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders,” they wrote. The new team will work “in the new administration” closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget, the authors wrote.
Musk and Ramaswamy said they’ll advise the effort, which they’ve dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency,” to pursue three major types of reforms: regulatory cuts, administrative reductions and cost-savings.
The team will work with legal experts inside government agencies and “aided by advanced technology” to identify rules that exceed the authority Congress granted agencies. Their team will then present their list of rules to Trump, “who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission,” they wrote.
‘Mass head-count reductions’
A big reduction in regulations “provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. Their operation intends to identify “the minimum number of employees required at an agency” for it to perform its legal and constitutional duties.
“The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited,” they wrote.
Employees whose jobs are cut “deserve to be treated with respect,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote, and their goal would be to help support their “transition into the private sector.”
Trump can use existing laws “to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit,” they said.
The Trump advisers said that despite conventional wisdom, civil service protections can’t stop Trump or his appointees from firing federal workers, as long as the firings are “reductions in force” that don’t target specific workers.
Ramaswamy suggested recently that it would be possible to randomly fire workers based on their Social Security numbers. On Trump’s first day in office, he could fire workers whose numbers end in an even digit, Ramaswamy said, adding that the idea was a “thought experiment,” but would avoid lawsuits alleging discrimination.
As president, Trump would have the authority to implement rules “that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
They said they would welcome “a wave of voluntary terminations” of federal employees who don’t want to work from the office five days a week. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote.
Critics are assailing Trump’s plan to shred the federal government and target federal workers. But Musk and Ramaswamy say they welcome the fight.
“We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail,” they wrote.