President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with the House GOP conference.Allison Robbert/Pool AFP/AP

In a campaign video since March 2023, Donald Trump has set his goal to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from the corruption in Washington.” Such rhetoric was also common in 2016. But this time, his new administration has an actionable plan on how to do it.

The idea has been around for years, and as Donald Trump prepares to take office, it will start from day one: Make thousands of career federal civil servants “at-will” employees and, in turn, derogable for not doing what the new administration is asking for. This will be the first step in a radical reshaping of the federal government.

The newly elected president has repeatedly made it clear that his second term will begin with a purge. Once the pre-vetted paper pushes are in place, the policies will be implemented – with less internal resistance from long-time government employees.

To understand the next Trump administration, you need to know about Program F.

Signed in the run-up to the 2020 election and promptly rescinded by the Biden administration, Annex F would potentially reassign tens of thousands of policy-related jobs to a new category, effectively removing career civil servants from labor protections and making it easier for policies. appointed to fire them.

As I did reported before, one of the main champions of Program F during Trump’s first was Russ Voughtformer director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has tried to turn the influential agency into a tool for pursuing the president’s agenda without regard for institutional knowledge and expertise, and sometimes in defiance of the law.

Vought and the remainder of the Project 2025 (Heritage Foundation) pending management plan for resuscitate Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potential, 50,000 Federal workers could be affected, with their expert roles open to MAGA partisan loyalists, ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought said Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

The Biden administration has since taken over action to strengthen merit-based protections for career civil servants, but for some experts and observers they have RECORDED the change might end up not summing to little more than a “bump” to delay the implementation of Program F and prevent the politicization of labor. Just last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who may end up overseeing government health agencies under Trump, said no fewer than 600 National Institutes of Health workers should be fired and replaced.

Plus, Elon Musk seems to be involved.

This week, President-elect Donald Trump began the process of announcing his staff picks for the next administration, selecting a new “border tsar“, criticizes national security rolesand Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) as Attorney General. These were sometimes bizarre choices, but still part of a conventional transition process: a president would say who would be appointed to fill key positions.

In less usual fashion, Trump said “first friend” Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would CAUSE “Department of Government Efficiency”—a non-governmental advisory entity whose acronym, DOGE, suggests billionaire Tesla’s favorite memecoin. The commission, proposed by Musk himself, will work alongside the OMB to restructure federal agencies and reduce spending and regulation by the summer of 2026.

“It will potentially become the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said he wrote in a statement. According to Musk, who previously advocated for a devastating 2 trillion dollars budget cuts, the group “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!”

From the announcement, he stood up question about possible sources of funding and the extent of power DOGE can actually exercise because federal spending requires Congressional approval. But his stated goal of reshaping the executive branch in the image of the MAGA movement signals what is likely to happen once Trump takes office: an all-out war against the federal bureaucracy and career civil servants in Washington.