Trump nominees offer praise to career feds, but promise efficiencies

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Several of President-elect Trump’s picks to lead key agencies told lawmakers this week they will value and support the career federal workforce, even as they mostly declined to commit to preserving current staffing levels. 

While many of his top advisors and Trump himself have taken an antagonistic approach to the federal workforce—and the president-elect has promised to downsize the federal workforce and remove some of their key job protections—at least some of his designated appointees are promising to respect federal employees and lean on their expertise. Asked whether they would seek to downsize the workforces of the agencies they intend to lead, the would-be cabinet members largely demurred at their confirmation hearings and said they will seek to boost productivity. 

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator-designate Lee Zeldin, for example, acknowledged to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday that he will have to rely on career staff as he is not himself a scientist. 

“Fortunately, at EPA, we do have many talented scientists who provide that research,” Zeldin said. “They have that talent to be able to tell us exactly what the metrics are of their research.”

Asked if he would help push employees out at EPA, Zeldin said he was not aware of any such effort in Trump’s first term. The Trump administration did offer early retirements and buyouts to EPA employees early in its tenure and the agency shed about 8% of its workforce in Trump’s four years. Zeldin did not rule out a similar effort under his leadership, but said his focus was to make the agency more efficient. 

“I want to make sure that my job as EPA administrator is to increase productivity, is to make sure that we are efficient and accountable and transparent, that we are to you, not just myself as administrator, but our entire team, for us to be in the office, collaborative and productive,” Zeldin told the senators, suggesting he would reduce telework at the agency. 

He said he has been “hugely impressed” by EPA staff and pledged to work with those employees to follow the law and not prejudge any outcomes. 

“I will foster a collaborative culture within the agency, supporting career staff who have dedicated themselves to this mission,” Zeldin said. “I strongly believe we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of our environment for generations to come. It’s been so motivating to see the tremendous talent stepping up to serve in the EPA.”

Throughout Trump’s first term, career EPA employees derided the political pressure and sidelining they experienced from political appointees. Last year, EPA workers received protections against political interference in their latest union contract. Zeldin’s tone throughout the hearing, from his embrace of the workforce to his acknowledgement of the impacts of climate change, struck a far different note than that of Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt. 

Zeldin said he has not been a part of any conversation to move EPA headquarters outside of Washington. The administrator-designate stressed that he wanted agency decisions to be durable, noting he would comply with recent Supreme Court decisions limiting agencies’ administrative powers. 

Still, he said, Congress has enacted laws giving EPA enforcement authority and the agency would use those powers under his watch when necessary. 

Like EPA, Trump has approached the intelligence community with significant skepticism. He has vowed to gut the “deep state” that makes it up, though CIA Director-designate John Ratcliffe on Wednesday vowed to defend his employees. Asked by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.,  if he would fire or force out career CIA employees for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump, Ratcliffe, who previously served as head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said he would not employ any political litmus or loyalty tests. 

“If you look at my record and my record as DNI, that never took place,” Ratcliffe said. “That is never something anyone alleged.” He added: “It’s something that I would never do.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who Trump has tapped to lead the State Department, said he and the political appointees at the agency would lean on the “array of experts within the Department of State.”

“The point is that we want to have people that are highly capable, both those who we bring from what they call political appointees, but also those that are promoted from within the Foreign Service,” Rubio told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

Under President Biden, State has grown its rolls more than any federal department and new Foreign Service classes have reached record highs in size. The department faced an extended hiring freeze during Trump’s first term, however, and shed staff at a high rate. Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if he would commit to resisting efforts to downsize State’s workforce, Rubio suggested he would do so. 

“When we talk about efficiency, the efficiency isn’t simply just saving money,” he said. “The efficiency is improving performance.” 

He noted State has a significant customer service role and “if somehow, through the leveraging technology appropriately, we can get people at the State Department to achieve three times the amount of work than they do now, because it takes less time to do these tasks or frees them up to do other tasks, that would be an enormous win.” 

Already, though, Trump’s State transition team has asked three top career officials to step down from their roles on Jan. 20, Reuters reported this week.  

The Internal Revenue Service has also undergone an enormous hiring surge thanks to funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, though Republicans have pledged to revoke the remaining money. While current Treasury Department leadership has cautioned that would lead to an unwinding of modernization efforts and the ramped up enforcement on wealthy tax cheats, Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary-designate, declined to spell out his vision. Bessent said he would continue investing in technological upgrades that would make tax collection more efficient, but fell short of any promise to maintain current staffing levels. 

“If confirmed, I will come back to you with a plan for helping collections,” Bessent told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, on Thursday. Alluding to Wyden’s request that the plan focus on wealthy tax evaders, Bessent added: “If there is some large motherlode there then to figure out how to crack that, whether it is through AI [or] here are some other means, I will commit to coming back to you.” 

At the governmentwide level, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Russ Vought on Wednesday defended a plan he helped create to strip merit-based civil-service protections from large swaths of the federal workforce. Even Vought, however, when explaining his belief that there are “weaponized bureaucracies across the federal government,” said his view “doesn’t mean there’s not amazing career civil servants.”

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