Trump Did Not Abolish the Merit System. He Changed Who Civil Servants Answer To

SUMMARY

• Trump's Schedule F – one of the most consequential changes of his second presidency – increased his control over the job security and rewards of civil servants.
• This ‘selective re-coupling’ leaves an institution's formal structure intact, while shifting accountability toward the political leader.
• Schedule F offers political control while retaining administrative expertise. By leaving the formal structure of merit appointment in place, it also leaves legislative and judicial checks with little to act on.
• In Britain, appointment by merit remains intact, while continued service is increasingly open to political discretion.
• So who decides what counts as good performance and to whom are officials accountable?

When political leaders want to bring civil servants under their control, the options seem familiar: cut departments, dismiss officials or replace them with loyal appointees. Donald Trump has tried all three. Yet Schedule F, one of the most consequential changes of his second presidency, takes a different route. It leaves merit recruitment in place while giving the president greater influence over whether career officials stay—and how their work is rewarded.

For a populist leader, that distinction has particular value. A professional civil service derives its standing from law and professional standards, sitting uneasily with the populist claim that political authority flows from a single popular will embodied by the leader. Yet a populist government still needs professional expertise to govern. Schedule F offers a way through that dilemma.

What is 'selective re-coupling’?

A civil service can remain formally merit-based while accountability within it changes direction. I call this strategy ‘selective re-coupling’: preserving an institution’s formal structure while redirecting accountability toward the political leader. Schedule F does this through two levers. First, it withdraws protection against dismissal without cause from career officials whose work is deemed policy-related. The category can reach tens of thousands without changing the merit-based process by which those officials entered government. They keep their professional status and expertise; the terms on which they continue to serve change.

Reward provides a second, less conspicuous lever. The administration has created a separate bonus pool for officials covered by Schedule F and directed its personnel office to establish a presidential award for the same group. Under the existing Presidential Rank Award, career professionals nominate and assess candidates before the president confers the honour. Under this new arrangement, officials already know that the president will confer the award even though its criteria have yet to be written. They can see who will judge their performance before they can see what will count as good performance.

Ordinary patronage changes who gets into government. Schedule F instead changes incentives facing professionals already inside. An official need not become a presidential loyalist to notice who now has greater influence over continued service and recognition.

Such subtlety also makes selective re-coupling difficult to check. Congress can legislate and courts can review executive action, but Schedule F formally abolishes neither merit recruitment nor a professional civil service. More than a year into implementation, litigation continues without a decision on the merits of a challenge. Institutional change does not always announce itself by tearing up the rules; sometimes it works by changing what existing rules mean in practice.

How do the British and American civil service systems compare?

Across the Atlantic, a more useful question is not whether Schedule F will be copied, but whether the same political logic can work through different institutions. British and American merit systems were built within a generation of each other, both to replace appointment through political connections. Britain has not followed the American path. Senior officials continue to be appointed on merit, but permanent secretaries serve five-year terms with no presumption of renewal, and renewal rests with the prime minister. Merit governs entry while political judgement can enter later.

These changes did not begin with populism. Governments of different complexions have sought to tie senior pay and continued service more closely to assessments of delivery. But Reform UK’s rise gives the question a different urgency. Nigel Farage’s party has proposed a £500 million bonus pool for high performers, suggested linking bonuses to national economic growth, and said that procedures for appointing and removing senior officials are under consideration.

Farage has not proposed a British Schedule F, nor has Britain gone nearly as far as the United States. What Schedule F provides is not a prediction but a question: if a populist government seeks greater control over a professional civil service, where in the existing system would that control enter?

To whom are civil servants accountable?

Performance language can obscure this problem. Improving performance sounds politically neutral, but someone must decide what good performance means, judge whether an official has met that standard, and determine what follows. Once political leaders acquire greater influence over those decisions, the issue is no longer only how well civil servants perform, but the direction in which they are being asked to answer.

Schedule F therefore points beyond civil service reform to a wider question about how populists govern. Research on populism has become very good at explaining how populist leaders win elections, mobilise voters and attack institutions. We know less about the quieter problem that begins after they take office: how a leader who claims to embody the popular will governs through institutions that cannot simply be abolished and whose expertise remains indispensable. Selective re-coupling is one answer. Instead of destroying an institution, a populist government can preserve its professional capacity while changing relationships of accountability inside it.

That possibility deserves attention well beyond Washington. Populist governance is not only a story of institutional attack or democratic erosion. Governing also requires populist leaders to live with institutions they inherited, depend on expertise they did not create and work through officials whose authority comes from somewhere other than the leader himself. What matters, then, is not only whether those institutions survive, but what happens inside them when they do. The next frontier in the study of populism may lie not only in asking which institutions populists attack, but how they learn to govern through the institutions they keep.