How to Rebuild a Civil Service

We want to put them in trauma.

This was the blueprint for Project 2025’s assault on the civil service, stated plainly by Russell Vought, the man who drew it up. And trauma was, unlike most things the second Trump administration promised, delivered. Schedule F returned, opening the civil service to direct politicization. USAID—an agency created by Congress, with funding appropriated by Congress, performing explicit functions delegated by Congress—was dissolved by executive fiat: its workforce placed on mass administrative leave, its contracts terminated for convenience, its appropriated dollars left unspent, all without any statutory authority. But why was it so easy to do something so blatantly against the spirit, and arguably letter of the law? Because while there was no statutory authority to dissolve USAID like this, there was no statute to prevent such a dissolution.

In light of this, how must liberals respond? Thus far, there have been two responses. There has been the institutional one, which has focused largely on preventing more harm and reversing as much of the damage as possible. Undo Schedule F. Rehire the fired. Restore collective bargaining. Essentially, restore the status quo as it existed on the last day of the Biden administration. But the administrative state that existed in January 2025 was not a healthy state that authoritarians wrecked. It was already hollowed out, already stretched thin, gutted by repeated body blows from the conservative right—from tax cuts to cultural demonization to the infamous “sequester.” It was easy to wreck because it was hollow. And to merely restore that structure would also restore that structure’s vulnerabilities, ready for another—more intelligent, more competent, more ruthless—authoritarian to deliver the coup de grâce. So what is needed is not merely a program to restore Washington. What is needed is a program to reconstruct Washington—to rebuild the civil service into a robust driver of liberal goals and ambitions, because none of what we wish to build in the world is possible without a robust administrative state.

The federal civilian workforce has been roughly flat at about two million since the 1960s. But the population it serves grew by more than 130 million, and the budget it administers grew by an order of magnitude. Vital government functions still had to be performed; services still had to be provided. Where did the work go? Into a shadow contractor workforce that is arguably several times the size of the government. Into endless administrative backlogs that the civil service does not, and will never, have the resources to clear, ranging from the GAO High-Risk List to the disability determination process that leaves applicants waiting upward of a year while their savings drain away.

The federal government’s months-long hiring timeline loses every competitive candidate to a private offer cycle measured in weeks, then pays contractors substantially more than equivalent federal employees to rent back that lost state capacity. Every backlog, every dead phone line, every thirty-minute wait is an argument against the idea that the civil service can deliver in a timely and efficient manner. We know what fascism argues for, and what the anti-fascist coalition must argue against—but for too long, we have quietly conceded the point. If we want to be the party of big government, we must become the party of good government.

Reconstructing the workforce

We must restore federal civilian employment outside defense and security toward pre-sequestration benchmarks. Make no mistake, this is a massive first effort—250,000 positions in a first wave, roughly $31B per year in salary and benefits. The costs of underfunding the government, and of starving American state capacity, as well as the benefits of restoring that capacity, are immense. For example, with the IRS alone, CBO has consistently found that investing in IRS enforcement capacity returns several dollars for every dollar spent. It is existential for liberal goals, as well as for the proper relationship between citizens and the services the state provides, that we restore our tax-collecting capacity. Buttressing FDA review capacity shortens approval delays that cost far more than the reviewers needed to prevent them. This goes beyond raw dollars and cents: the understaffing of the SSA and its review process has been a source of real pain and hardship for disabled Americans. Thus, I propose the following:

• Raise the IRS budget from roughly $13B to $40B—25,000 additional revenue agents, auditors, and criminal investigators aimed at high-income individuals, large corporations, and pass-through entities, as well as additional workforce to make the process of paying taxes less onerous for the average citizen. This measure alone—estimated to recover around $135B—more than covers the cost of the IRS expansion itself and offsets much of the broader rebuild of government.
• Modernize the federal hiring process: a 10-business-day hiring process target, centralized digital onboarding, and a realistic probationary structure.
• Provide fast-track apprenticeship and retraining programs that encourage people without direct experience to apply. Specific technologies and processes are learnable; critical thinking and a focus on the public good are foundational.

Reconstructing civil service integration

Anyone familiar with billing-rate comparisons knows just how much public funding is lost to outsourcing government functions into the contract realm. From massive placement premiums to staffing levels held hostage by profit-making entities, the post-1980s expansion of the contractor-industrial complex has been a drain on the public coffers. But that is only half the story. The DOGE era has shown that this outsourcing also represents a real loss of state capacity: a contracted-out state is one whose institutional knowledge is privately owned, and whose loyalty lasts only as long as the next option year. Large organizations require institutional memory. Insourcing makes the work of government, once again, the property of the public that pays for it. Thus, I propose:

• Insource the bulk of the civilian generalized-services contract pool—on the order of $100B a year, or 400,000 to 600,000 positions—phased in over five years. Even at a conservative billing premium (roughly 1.25x over federal) this recovers roughly $20B a year, and according to the Project on Government Oversight, potentially considerably more. And that is civilian contracting alone: defense, the single largest source of federal contract spending, is deferred to a separate essay, so these figures are a floor, not a ceiling.
• Audit all existing contracts against a single question: does this provide generalized services, or highly specialized, irreplaceable technical know-how?

Reconstructing employment standards

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer; its defaults are standards, and with the measures above it would grow larger still. As such, it should set the standard for how work is done and how workers are treated in America. The federal government is known for strong benefits and job stability at the cost of lower salaries than those available in the private sector. But there is room both to raise the general pay scale enough to attract more workers to public service, and to address some of the exaggerated—but real—downsides of civil service stability.

Time-based promotion was an artifact of an earlier era, when the expectation was steady employment at one organization for decades. That meant paying one’s dues over time, and the federal government was no exception. The flip side is that performance truly does need to count for more—both positively and negatively.

And the federal government must lead the way on equity. It already has generous disability protections and, prior to the degradation of the Office of Personnel and Management under Project 2025 architect Russ Vought—which targeted these standards precisely because of how powerfully they advance equity goals—ample telework opportunities. But it is not enough to simply restore the status quo; it must go further. Thus, I propose:

• Adjust federal pay scales—up to and including the President, Vice President, and Members of Congress—so that they correspond to at least 80% of the prevailing Fortune 500 wage at each level of seniority. A member of the Senior Executive Service, the highest level of government service, often leading divisions or subdivisions of the government equal to or greater than a private sector executive, currently tops out around $228,000 annually; a private-sector vice president can pull $400,000 in base pay alone, before profit-sharing and options—which discourages the most talented and ambitious applicants from joining the civil service.
• Implement quarterly performance reviews of all civil service employees, based on clear, legible, and accountable metrics that account for the unique challenges of each agency. It must be made easier to rise on merit, and easier to sanction the minority of employees who seek to abuse civil service protections. For example, certain agencies, especially customer facing ones, could implement measures analogous to service level agreements, that bind agencies to specific action and delivery timelines.
• Make all telework-eligible federal positions—roughly half of all federal positions—default to remote, under an “if it can be done remotely (uncleared, knowledge-based work), it must be done remotely” standard, and establish telework as a presumed reasonable accommodation for such work. This is not only an attractive option for employees and a way to place the federal government at the forefront of workplace equity; it also allows large-scale downscaling of the federal office portfolio. Accommodations can be made for early-career onboarding on the basis of geographic accessibility, medical eligibility, and a documented, time-bound mentorship program.

Reconstructing the guardrails

Everything above can be done—and undone—which is why the second half of the program matters more. The lesson of 2025 is that the guardrails were largely norms, and norms are not laws.

Thus, we must encode the norms as laws. Every one of the following falls within Congress’s ordinary Article I powers over appropriations and the offices it creates, pointing toward the key question we must answer in response to Trump and Project 2025: what statute prevents this? I propose the following statutory changes:

1. An anti-dissolution rule. No agency, office, or program established by statute may be abolished, merged, transferred, or functionally suspended except by statute. The statute must define functional suspension to foreclose the USAID loophole where an agency’s operations and functions are shuttered without the agency being formally abolished or suspended. This is not an exhaustive list, but it would include placing more than a small fraction of an agency’s workforce on administrative leave, or terminating contracts and grants above a threshold share of its program budget. Such measures would constitute constructive reorganization and would trigger the ban. Presidents have not held statutory reorganization authority for decades—that power lapsed in the 1980s—yet there has been no enforcement mechanism to stop a president who reorganizes by fiat anyway.

2. Bolstering the Impoundment Control Act. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 already makes it unlawful to withhold appropriated funds. But once again, there was no real enforcement mechanism; it was simply assumed the President would follow the law. Thus, we must bolster the law, and build an explicit enforcement mechanism for violations of impoundment—automatic apportionment of appropriated funds on a statutory schedule absent an approved deferral; independent GAO standing to sue, plus a private right of action for intended beneficiaries and for state attorneys general; expedited three-judge review with direct Supreme Court appeal; and personal accountability for willful violations on the Antideficiency Act model—the officer who impounds should face the same statutory jeopardy as the officer who overspends. The core principle is simple: money appropriated by Congress must move, and the executive cannot stop it from moving.

3. Mandatory staffing. One of the most important vulnerabilities the Project 2025 era exposed is that you can technically comply with an appropriation for an agency and still kill the agency—keep the money, fire the staff. As such, mandatory appropriations must be paired with mandatory staffing. The statute must require agencies to maintain no less than a fixed share of authorized FTE absent congressional notification and a waiting period, with mass reductions-in-force above a threshold requiring advance notice to Congress, a published workforce-impact analysis, and IG review for pretext—backed by a private right of action for both civil service employees and citizens with documented harms from such capricious RIFs. A force reduction undertaken to circumvent a statutory function is not workforce management; it is illegal impoundment, and the statute should treat it as such.

4. Merit protection by statute—closing the Schedule F loophole. We must codify what Schedule F exploited: positions in the competitive service may not be reclassified into the excepted service in bulk, and no reclassification may strip incumbent adverse-action rights, absent express congressional authorization. The 2024 Office of Personnel Management rule that tried to secure exactly this by regulation—the “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles” rule—was targeted for rescission by the incoming administration within days of taking office. Regulation, as we have seen, was not enough. It must be done by law. 

To summarize: we must replace executive discretion and executive fiat with statutory clarity, and where statutory provisions already exist, we must add real, automatic, non-discretionary enforcement mechanisms.

Reconstructing state capacity to build the future we fight for

Liberalism in its modern form is fundamentally dependent on the capacity of the state to execute on its directives. Every loss in state capacity discredits our program, lowers social trust, and weakens the coalition that would defend and expand it. State capacity makes liberalism feasible. From healthcare expansion to housing construction to climate mitigation—to even just collecting taxes—the federal government must be able to hire, retain, and direct people at scale. We must make the funding, staffing, and organization of the machinery of governance the highest priority. Because if we don’t, the fascists will.

Vought said the goal was trauma for the civil service. To counter that goal, we must not just heal the trauma but build resilience against it—resilience in the form of stronger institutional design, robust statutory guardrails, and a workforce that is highly competent, highly protected, and highly compensated. Restoration looks back at January 2025 and sets that as the ceiling. Reconstruction looks at what the demolition revealed, and rebuilds with that in mind.

Featured image is "US Civil Service Commission seal," 1968.