Perspectives
January 30, 2025 | By Richard Moore
Policy Issues
Accountable Government

Trump Moves to Squash the Real Deep State: Meet the SES

President Trump has initiated massive changes to the federal bureaucracy, focusing on reducing its size and scope, particularly targeting the Senior Executive Service (SES), the real seat of power in the federal Deep State.

Meet the Senior Executive Service

Gosh, it’s been hard to keep up with Big Not-Green Trump Machine since he took office just 10 days ago. In that short period, he has done more to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and shrink the size of government than all previous presidents combined.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar since no previous presidents, save for Trump 1.0 and Ronald Reagan, ever wanted to actually shrink the size of government. But Trump 2.0 even puts Trump 1.0 to shame.

At the center of the storm is the federal bureaucracy, which has especially drawn Trump’s ire. He started with a federal hiring freeze, got rid of DEI positions and personnel and programs, ordered federal bureaucrats back to their offices, and established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He also issued a temporary freeze on regulatory activity.

What got the most splash from the corporate media was Trump’s insistence on bringing back the dreaded (for bureaucrats) Schedule F, which will transform at least 50,000 federal employees from protected civil grifters into at-will civil servants. When you can be fired at any time, you’re far more likely to try to serve the public by doing your job than when you are protected by unions and the federal bureaucracy itself.

Without at-will employment, grifting is just another job perk. There’s been a lotta, lotta grifting going on.

Of course the progressive left gripes and grumbles that what Trump is doing is politicizing the civil service and undermining all the government’s cubicled experts. Well, when you’re right, you’re right. That is exactly what the president is doing, and that also happens to be exactly what the president should be doing. That’s because democracy is inherently political, and the only way democratically elected officials can truly pursue the policies the people elected them to pursue is if they have the power to hire and fire the personnel of the bureaucratic infrastructure that implements those policies.

Progressives call that hiring “loyalists,” and once again they are right. Elected representatives are hiring people to be loyal to the agenda they were voted in to pursue. If those bureaucrats fail to do so, they can be fired. And if the elected representatives don’t do as the people instructed, they can be fired, too—by the voters.

I’ll be the first to admit that the people can go wrong. That’s why direct democracy isn’t such a good idea. Think California. Think the proposition to ban cable TV or that state’s constitutional amendment to allow property owners to discriminate based on race when selling or renting property, which passed with 65 percent of the vote in 1964 before being declared unconstitutional. The left is still voting for racial discrimination, by the way, just in the different format of DEI.

That said, the people usually have a better handle than the experts do. The experts who run academia and the government have been so spectacularly wrong on so many things, from climate change to Covid vaccine protection to transitory inflation (Yes, Janet Yellen, we’re looking at you), it’s a wonder that the government isn’t dysfunctional.

Oh wait.

And what about Irving Fisher, considered one of the great economists of all time, and his prediction that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” That was 12 days before the 1929 stock market crash.

Here’s one of my favorites. Over in Australia, the experts assured the government that little old invasive cane toads could do no harm to the Australian environment, so they encouraged the government to reintroduce them to biologically control pests endangering sugarcane crops.

Yup, they were wrong. Cane toads gone wild got completely out of hand, threatening natural predators in the Australian habitat, and also threatening people because they were poisonous.

Naturally, the Australian government—at the behest of more experts—spent millions of dollars implementing a national cane toad plan. I’m not kidding. They never did get complete control.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that the experts can be and often are spectacularly wrong, and in a representative democracy, built around elections whereby representatives pursue a due process of deliberation and debate and decision-making, the people more often come out ahead.

That’s because the people know what they need better than experts know what they need. It’s the people who have resisted EV mandates, not the experts. It’s the people who have stopped taking the Covid jabs despite ongoing “expert” government advice that they should keep on getting them, and give them to their six-month old babies to boot.

So targeting the the federal bureaucracy and all the experts in it is a great way to start the new administration, and Schedule F, now renamed the “Schedule Career/Policy," is a great way to begin to transform the bureaucracy into an essence of nonexistence.

It’s like throwing water on the Wicked Witch, and watching with glee while she melts.

As Vivek Ramaswamy has intoned for several years, and Trump has reiterated over the past 10 days, the goal is to all but kill the federal bureaucracy, not reform it. That’s because—and this is a vital point—bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It is by definition antithetical to the people’s interests.

“Most of those bureaucrats are being fired, they’re gone,” Trump said at a rally last week. “It should be all of them.” He went on the say, as he prepared to sign Schedule F: “We’re getting rid of all of the cancer, the cancer caused by the Biden administration.”

To be fair, the Biden administration didn’t cause the cancer, but they sure did their best to metastasize it over all of society.

And yet, and yet ….

And yet, establishing Schedule F and DOGE, which progressives and their poodle press have obsessed over, wasn’t even the most important step Trump has taken in dismantling bureaucratic control. While those moves zero in on the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy, they don’t really get to the heart and soul of bureaucratic power.

To do that, the president must strike at the Deep State ruling elite, not just the worker bees of the rank-and-file bureaucracy. And that he did by issuing a less ballyhooed order entitled, “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” followed by a presidential memorandum to all agency heads targeting the real seat of deep state power: the Senior Executive Service, or SES.

So just what is the SES?

One way to describe it might be as a large-scale version of the old Soviet Politburo. Large scale because it encompasses about 9,000 bureaucrats wielding enormous and heretofore unaccountable power.

Another way to describe it is as the board of directors of the Deep State. It is a layer of high-level bureaucrats with civil-service protection serving in policy-related positions. More specifically, it is a shadow bureaucracy which, as the government itself puts it: “Members of the SES serve in the key positions just below the top presidential appointees.” Their goal is to “ensure that the executive management of the government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the nation and otherwise is of the highest quality.”

Let me translate: The real goal is to serve as a wall between the top presidential appointees and the rest of the bureaucracy to ensure that the executive management of the government is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the bureaucracy. Its very purpose is to thwart the president’s political appointees right above them, if those appointees don’t agree with the bureaucratic agenda, and they did a great job during Trump’s first term.

Heck, the Federal News Network, a government friendly broadcaster of news and issues pertaining to U.S. government staff and members, all but admits it in a Tom Temin statement that says it all: “A small number, but crucial, they are the main buffers and translators between the political appointees and the rank-and-file who actually do the work of government.”

Ah. Translators. The political appointees tell the SES what needs to be done and then the SES “translates” that for the federal workforce. I’m left wondering why the bureaucrats aren’t speaking the same language as the political appointees, unless they are up to no good.

And the last time I checked a ‘buffer’ is defined as “a person or thing that prevents incompatible or antagonistic people or things from coming into contact with or harming each other.” As such, the SES’s role is to prevent political appointees from interfering with or harming the incompatible bureaucratic class. And, I guess, those political appointees are speaking a foreign language—the language of democracy, which is alien to bureaucratic ears.

The SES led the resistance in Trump’s first term. They routinely withheld information from political appointees, they misrepresented facts when they were asked for reports, they refused work they considered ideologically incompatible with their own agenda.

Some of the great work on bureaucratic resistance to Trump has been done by James Sherk, in “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump,” produced by the America First Policy Institute. Thankfully, Sherk will now serve as assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

For instance, Sherk wrote, career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including Title IX due process regulations, “would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the agency’s official policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.”

It wasn’t just the Department of Education.

“Career employees in the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases with which they ideologically disagreed, even when the facts showed clear legal violations,” the report states. “This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian Americans and cases protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.”

In addition, Sherk cited, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) career staff circumvented Trump’s hiring freeze by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork: “Staff used Sharpie pens to adjust the start dates retroactively to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office,” he wrote.

It was all sabotage, in sum.

“During the first Trump Administration, many career employees refused or defied directives, withheld information, slow-walked projects they opposed, performed unacceptably, and used strategic leaking to undermine the president’s agenda,” Sherk wrote. “Some career employees even refused to enforce laws they did not support.”

Make no mistake, the marching orders for the vast majority of this “resistance” was coming from the SES.

And what were they up to in the friendly Biden administration?

For one thing, many people have been been wondering just who was running the country during those four years of presidential senility, and Lara Logan, the former CBS journalist and now independent journalist, has a reasonable answer: “Great question….who is really running the country? Look no further than the Senior Executive Service or SES…Part of the answer lies there.”

The Head of the Snake

By inauguration day, and well before, of course, Trump had already taken that further look. He knew all this as he drafted plans for his second term. And so while most of the screaming has been about the new iteration of Schedule F, the heavy lifting will be done by the aforementioned executive order and follow-up memo dealing with the SES.

In the executive order, the president directs his team to develop a federal hiring plan that brings to the federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests, but more than that it mandates that specific agency plans “improve the allocation of Senior Executive Service positions in the Cabinet agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget, the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration, to best facilitate democratic leadership, as required by law, within each agency.”

In other words, Trump is directing those agencies to draw up plans for reassigning the positions, as well as potential relocation. One way to break up a seat of power is to disperse it over as wide a landscape as possible, as if scattering the ashes of a not-so-dearly departed.

Also on January 20, Trump sent a memo entitled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives” to the heads of executive departments and agencies. The memo fires a shot across the bow of the SES, and Trump began by stating the obvious to those in the know, that the SES actually runs the bureaucracy, much more so than his cabinet does. In fact, it functions like a shadow cabinet, positioned just below cabinet level positions.

The only difference is, the SES is loyal to the bureaucracy and is protective of its interests, not to the interests of the nation, and Trump has grasped that significance.

“SES officials have enormous influence over the functioning of the Federal Government, and thus the well-being of hundreds of millions of Americans,” Trump wrote.

But, he reminded agency heads, the constitution vests all executive power in the president, who must rely on subordinate officers—the SES, as it has come to be—for assistance.

And so Trump asserted his right to fire them.

“The President’s power to remove subordinates is a core part of the executive power vested by Article II of the Constitution and is necessary for the president to perform his duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’” he wrote. “Because SES officials wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the president.”

Only that chain of responsibility ensures that SES officials are properly accountable to the President and the American people, Trump wrote.

“If career SES officials fail to faithfully fulfill their duties to advance the needs, policies, and goals of the United States, the president must be able to rectify the situation and ensure that the entire executive branch faithfully executes the law,” the memo stated. “For instance, SES officials who engage in unauthorized disclosure of executive branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently should be held accountable.”

The president must be able to trust that the executive branch will work together in service of the nation, Trump continued: “My administration will restore a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’”

As such, the president ordered the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to issue SES Performance Plans that agencies will be required to adopt. These must contain SES accountability measures, and Trump empowered agency heads to reassign agency SES members to ensure that “their knowledge, skills, abilities, and mission assignments are optimally aligned to implement my agenda.”

In other words, the SES is not just on the hot seat, it’s standing in the incinerator door.

More specifically, Trump directed agency heads to terminate its existing Executive Resources Board (ERB), institute a new or interim ERB, and assign senior non-career officials to chair and serve on the board as a majority alongside career members. This is important because these boards make qualification, hiring, and assignment decisions for senior executives. As stated, the new ERBs must include a chair and a majority of non-career senior officials.

Along with that, he ordered agency heads to terminate existing Performance Review Board membership and re-constitute membership with individuals committed to full enforcement of SES performance evaluations that “promote and assure an SES of the highest caliber,” and he directed agency heads who become aware of an SES official whose performance or continued occupancy of the position was inconsistent with either the principles of the order or of the nation to take action, including firing them.

The devil is in the details, of course, and we’ll see how the directives play out over the coming months. There will undoubtedly be litigation to overturn the orders and memorandum directive. We’ll also begin to see just how adept the federal bureaucratic collective is in resisting and overcoming Trump’s efforts if the orders stand.

The good news is that all MAGA eyes are on the SES for the first time, whether the corporate media pays any attention or not. Trump and his administration have their eyes open, and they know where the head of the snake is. For the first time since World War II, a president is sincerely going after the bureaucracy, or, as he puts it, “the cancer.”

May we all hope, for all our sake, that Trump 2.0 is the cure.

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