President-elect Donald Trumpreturning to power with a promise to eradicate the “deep state” of the unelected. bureaucrats who thwarted his first-term agenda, has a better chance of exerting greater control over the civil service than reducing its size.

On the campaign trail, he frequently criticized the federal bureaucracy as beyond the president’s control.

As a result, at the top of his agenda is a plan to expand the president’s control over career bureaucrats and impose new standards on civil servants.

Along the same lines, he called for reducing the government’s footprint and downsizing agencies – even eliminating the Department of Education. Education. Trump said he would create a government efficiency program to curb spending and bloat, which would be led by the world’s richest man, entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk suggested that, with his advice, Trump could cut spending by about $2 trillion. This would represent approximately 30% of total FY 2024 spending.

Musk has successfully downsized in the private sector. He said he cut about 80% of X’s staff after buying the platform.

Yet reducing the number of federal employees is an entirely different proposition.

Team Trump will face a fundamental fact: The size of the federal workforce has been stagnant for decades. As of this year, there are approximately 2.3 million civilian executive branch employees, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Add to that the Post Office and the number is around 2.9 million. There were also 2.9 million federal employees in 1967, almost 60 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump, during his first term, called for the privatization of the Postal Service.

That aside, it is worth noting that the federal workforce has declined significantly, in relative terms. That represented about 4 percent of the total U.S. labor force in the 1960s and less than 2 percent today.

“The general trend among federal employees is that it has been stagnant for a few generations at this point,” said Donald Kettl, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Of the entire federal civilian workforce, more than half work for the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump campaigned on strengthening the military and better caring for veterans rather than calling for cuts to those departments.

Of course, not all the others are essential. But it will be difficult to find efficiency gains.

In terms of specific cuts, completely dismantling the Department of Education would result in a reduction in staff numbers of roughly 4,200 – barely a drop in the ocean.

Another cut favored by Republicans is the reversal of the IRS funding increase provided by Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. That bill authorized $80 billion in additional funding for the tax collection agency, although some of that was later clawed back by Republicans.

In recent years, the agency has added employees. Its membership fell from 84,133 in 2014 to 73,519 in 2018, in part because Republicans fought hard against defunding the IRS following the Lois Lerner aimed at scandal.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, however, was more willing to give the agency more money, and it began hiring staff again in Trump’s final years. Thanks to new funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, its workforce has surpassed 90,000 and the agency now the plans have 102,500 employees by 2029.

With Republicans now poised to hold the purse strings in 2025, it is possible that these staffing increases could be slowed or reversed.

But these reductions number in the thousands, even tens of thousands. And Trump and the Republicans are also aiming to recruit staff elsewhere.

Trump has called for hiring 10,000 Border Patrol agents to address the crisis at the southern border and end the personnel problems that plagued the agency during the Biden years. He also plans to dramatically ramp up the use of tariffs to prosecute a trade war, which could require more staff at the Commerce Department and elsewhere.

Ultimately, it will prove difficult to get rid of civil servants.

Trump learned this lesson during his first term, when he presided over the growth of the federal workforce.

The ranks of bureaucrats have swelled even as the early Trump administration imposed a freeze on federal hiring.

The problem with such crude tools for restricting federal employment is that it is too difficult to avoid making exceptions. Whether it’s Border Patrol agents or other high-priority hires, like air traffic controllers, senior officials will inevitably struggle to pass up the opportunity to hire.

“The reality is that this takes all judgment out of the management of our government and it is a change that is more symbolic than meaningful,” said Max Stier, CEO of the Public Service Partnership, noting that the Trump administration has added employees despite an attempted freeze. .

But there is an even bigger obstacle to reducing the size of government, one that has emerged over the decades. This is because the restriction on federal hiring has resulted, in the past, in an increase in the number of federal contractors, a sort of shadow government workforce.

This shadow government is less directly accountable to the public, as there is no up-to-date and accurate official measure of its size. An external researcher estimated the number of entrepreneurs was 5 million in 2020. It is unclear how big they are to date. But total spending on entrepreneurs increased from $665 billion during the 2020 financial year for $759 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, suggesting it has only grown.

A simplistic explanation, then, is that efforts over decades to downsize the federal workforce have succeeded not in reducing the workforce, but rather only in diverting work to outside contractors who are less accountable to the president and the public .

Trump’s plans to change its composition might be more realistic than changing the size of the workforce.

The centerpiece of his reform agenda is the reimposition of a rule change called “Appendix F.” In 2020, Trump issued an executive order calling for the creation of a new category of federal jobs where policymakers would be exempt from certain hiring rules — and from which they could more easily be fired. The Office of Personnel Management implemented the rule briefly before President Joe Biden took office and reversed it.

Trump pledged to restore the regime, and his allies suggested that it could apply to up to 50,000 workers. The effect would be to replace many of these workers, presumed liberal or otherwise opposed to Trump’s agenda, with people who would advance his goals.

He also called for moving parts of the bureaucracy out of Washington, D.C., suggesting that up to 100,000 positions could be moved.

Chris Edwards, a tax policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute which runs the website Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org, said the best way to improve government performance would be to eliminate programs to make bureaucracies more manageable. . But he also advocated the adoption of Annex F.

“Making it easier to lay off federal employees would be a step forward, because the layoff rate in government is only about one-sixth that of the private sector,” he said.

Reimposing Schedule F could be procedurally difficult or time-consuming for the incoming Trump administration, thanks to Biden’s efforts to block it through regulation.

If Trump were to enforce this rule, it could backfire in some ways.

Stier said officials should be chosen based on their expertise, not political loyalty. He noted that the United States already has many more political appointees than comparable democracies, in which the number of political appointees is typically in the dozens rather than the thousands.

Career staffers should be held accountable to the president and meet high performance standards, he said, but a partial reversal of late 19th century bureaucratic reforms, which required positions to be assigned on the basis of of merit, would risk provoking a return. to the government’s “remains system.” At that time, positions with major influence over decisions regarding contracts, rules, and personnel were given to the president’s allies as rewards, leading to corruption. “We shouldn’t make that mistake again,” Stier said.

Paradoxically, an increase in the number of politically appointed positions could create pressure for an increase in the federal workforce, he noted. To the extent that such roles are seen as a reward for political support, the president might find it useful to create positions to distribute to allies.

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Rather than carrying out a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy, Kettl suggested, Trump could lead a more targeted effort to replace key officials at agencies that obstructed his agenda last time, like the Environmental Protection Agency and , in particular, the Ministry of Justice. and the Department of Homeland Security. Replacing several hundred bureaucrats in key positions could significantly soften resistance to Trump’s efforts to reorient his policies on borders, foreign policy and crime.

Setting an example for recalcitrant bureaucrats could send a message to others, he said. “Certain agencies, in particular, would try to put their heads on edge and try to make other federal authorities understand that it is dangerous to go against what the administration has in mind by political terms.”

Joseph Lawler is the political editor of Washington Examiner.