President-elect Donald Trump’s government-crushing team has outlined plans for mass firings of federal employees. Its playbook is causing workers to panic and would almost certainly lead to protracted court fights.
The Trump team’s attitude: Bring it on.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy business-world allies Trump picked to lead the incoming administration’s government-downsizing bid, are drafting a playbook for using broad presidential authority to slash regulations and the size of the workforce.
Trump has dubbed the effort the Department of Government Efficiency, although it’s shaping up to be an advisory operation rather than a federal department. Its influence will likely depend on how much Trump decides to heed its advice.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s approach is unconventional — some of their critics would argue it’s preposterous. But they appear eager to test legal boundaries and are optimistic about their chances in court following the legal challenges that experts say are certain to stem from their plans.
“It is going to cause chaos,” William Resh, an associate professor of public policy and management at the University of Southern California, said of the plans laid out by Musk and Ramaswamy.
“On its face, there’s so much here that they cannot do,” Resh said. “The administrative state is a function of the law. It is legislated, and so they cannot just willy nilly come in and make these cuts that they’re proposing by exploiting some archaic loopholes that have yet to be tested through the courts.”
Musk and Ramaswamy want to broadly eliminate regulations they view as exceeding agencies’ authority. Then they envision “mass head-count reductions” across the federal bureaucracy, they wrote. One option Ramaswamy floated recently as a “thought experiment” was to randomly fire workers based on their Social Security numbers.
The Trump advisers suggested that civil service protections aren’t as strong as conventional wisdom would indicate, and they think the president has broad power to conduct large-scale firings and to relocate federal agencies.
Testing the limits of civil service protections through mass firings would spur legal fights that could take awhile to resolve, according to government experts. Large-scale firings of federal workers could also disrupt government services, which could also prompt a political backlash.
Musk and Ramaswamy appear to like their chances in court — particularly given the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority.
“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government,” they wrote in an op-ed last week outlining their plans. “We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail,” they said.
The full scope of the incoming Musk-Ramaswamy operation still isn’t clear. They wrote last week that 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.” The new team will work “in the new administration” closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget, the authors wrote.
“The Government Efficiency effort led by Vivek and Elon will target waste and fraud, which exists throughout our massive federal bureaucracy,” Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said in a statement. “They will work together, slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring Federal Agencies.”
Legal, political pushback?
Musk and Ramaswamy could achieve some of their objectives of pushing workers out of the government even if they lose in court.
“It’s a win for them either way, even if they lose,” said David Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
Saying they want to end remote work and move agencies out of Washington are ways of “getting people out of government,” Lewis said.
“If you’re a federal employee and right after the inauguration, the president tries to stop enforcing all these regulations that you’ve been working on for decades, and then begins the process of putting in place reductions in force — even if those are held up in court, you begin thinking maybe I don’t want to work here anymore,” Lewis said. “And in some ways, that also helps them accomplish their goals, just by different means — a sort of shock and awe approach to taking over.”
Any legal challenges that stem from the Trump team’s efforts to fire workers will take awhile to play out, said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University.
“Feds are going to fight, and it’s going to take up a lot of time,” Light said.
“It may be to Trump’s liking that the federal government just goes into a slog, but there are a lot of Americans who really want government to do its job,” Light said.
The Trump team could see political pushback if government services are impacted, such as Social Security checks or veterans’ hospitals.
“If Trump decides to go that direction, he’ll get a big backlash, and we’ll see whether it’s strong enough to pull him away,” Light said.
Lewis, too, said the Trump team’s government-downsizing plans will likely face both judicial and political constraints.
“You have to see what the courts will do,” Lewis said. “The main constraint, though, is really, I think, a political constraint. That is, if this begins to affect the performance of agency actions that members of Congress care about — particularly in the president’s own party — then you might get some slowdown, and probably from him.”
If, for example, patent applications start taking longer, mountaintop mining pollutes the property of important constituents or Social Security checks are delayed, “eventually those things trickle up into Congress in a way that makes them uncomfortable,” Lewis said.
“It’s a massive, massive change,” Lewis added. And as much as they might try to be careful about which regulations they want to stop enforcing, “it’s hard to do this surgically.”
