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Why do you think Trump didn’t execute the schedule F strategy in late 2016?

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Sorry for taking a long time to reply, I wanted to think about your question properly. My view is that in late 2016 Trump and the people around him did not understand enough about how the government and civil service functioned to realize (a) that they were going to have this problem or (b) what they might do about it. At first they tried to circumvent or ignore the bureaucracy (see e.g. the book The Fifth Risk, or Tilleron's tenure at State) and Trump was mostly concerned with palace intrigue in the White House (Bannon vs. the Kushners vs. Cohn vs. whoever else). And they didn't have a good understanding of the legal code governing the civil service.

According to reporting by Axios and The Washington Post, the idea for Schedule F was discovered by James Sherk in 2019. Sherk put forward some vague proposals in 2017 but it was only in 2019 that he gave it this concrete form. The plan was to implement it in early 2020 but then the covid pandemic got in the way. I think that in this winding story you see Trump's weak leadership at play again - he never really made trying to MAGA-ify the civil service a priority, but just latched onto Sherk's idea when it was presented to him. I'm worried that the next president would make it much more of a priority and focus on it from the beginning.

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This is very interesting. I really appreciate your response which I largely concur with. Here’s something I wrote this week on the topic https://medium.com/3streams/schedule-f-is-destined-for-failure-2b01f1745d16

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Thanks, that's a great read!

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'The final problem was that Trump, not understanding how the government worked, but virtually no effort into planning the staffing of his administration.' reads a bit weird?

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