WASHINGTON, DC (Government Executive) — President-elect Trump’s forthcoming government efficiency commission is hoping to institute large-scale layoffs of federal employees and force civil servants to work in their offices five days per week, according to one of the business executives Trump has tapped to lead it.
The Department of Government Efficiency—a non-government panel that Trump has vowed to stand up—will be able to move swiftly to implement the changes without congressional approval, Vivek Ramaswamy told Fox News on Sunday, saying the president-elect can act through executive action. The entrepreneur and former presidential candidate added that recent Supreme Court precedent and its conservative makeup would provide legal backing to the ideas he and his co-lead, Elon Musk, will put forward.
“We expect mass reductions,” Ramaswamy said. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions-in-force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.”
Reductions-in-force, or RIFs, is how the government refers to layoffs. Ramaswamy, who during his presidential campaign vowed to lay off 75% of the federal workforce, said the Trump administration will take a “different view” than “many scholars” who note that career civil servants are statutorily entitled to protections that prevent their arbitrary firing.
Recent Supreme Court decisions, Ramaswamy said, gives his new commission “the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state.” He did not specify to which decisions he was referring, but said the court has struck down many of the regulations federal agencies have propagated under President Biden. He was perhaps then referring to its overturning of the Chevron deference and the creation of the “major questions doctrine,” which revoked the broad latitude agencies have for decades enjoyed to interpret federal law in areas where Congress was unclear.
Ramaswamy suggested without those authorities to interpret and enforce federal law, the Trump administration would have the grounds to eliminate federal jobs en masse. He also said the administration would be making significant cuts to federal contracting.
“If we don’t downsize the federal government now, it’s never going to happen in the future as well,” he said, referring to the six-three conservative majority on the high court. “So this is a historic opportunity. We’re not actually going to squander this.”
He added that reductions to telework and relocating agencies would help motivate employees to leave government voluntarily. He called it a “dirty little secret” that most federal workers “don’t even show up to work.”
