Beware the boring and bureaucratic

How an autocrat could wield administrative tools against democracy

Most of us understand that, in the 21st century, democracies tend to die not at the barrel of a gun but at the stroke of a pen. Modern dictators gain power through elections, not coups. 

But when it comes to what autocrats do to dismantle democracy once in power, most coverage is still drawn to flashy, combative, and even violent tactics. Which makes sense! The most alarming autocratic strategies are often the most dangerous ones. Our Authoritarian Playbook for 2025 details why risks like politicized investigations, domestic deployment of the military, and refusal to leave office are a) quite plausible and b) quite scary. 

That said, an authoritarian project can also be advanced through quieter bureaucratic and administrative tactics. Today, I want to talk about two of those ostensibly boring and bureaucratic risks that are — once you dig in — anything but mundane. Something called “impoundment” and a proposal known as “Schedule F.” 

Because I think these technical-sounding names often serve as smokescreens for nefarious plans, I’m going to talk about these ideas as what they really are: “unlawful withholding of federal funds” and “civil service purges.” 

Let’s go one by one. 

“Impoundment” is just another way to say “unlawful withholding of federal funds” 

Last week, the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage reported on how “Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending.” As they write:

The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. 

This is no idle threat. Suggesting the executive branch has the power to unilaterally withhold funds appropriated by Congress and to defund federal programs and agencies would dramatically reshape the balance of power between our branches of government. Congress would cease to control spending and would instead play a mere advisory role to the president. They could place effective limits on spending, but that’s it. 

Even more importantly, a unilateral presidential power to withhold funds would create enormous risks of abuse and retaliation. Just a few scenarios: 

1. States and jurisdictions would be at risk of having federal funding cut for political reasons. Your city dared vote against the president’s party in the midterms? Whoops, there goes your federal education funding.

2. Universities and companies that receive federal funding — even indirectly — could be easily extorted by the president. Better not let your students or employees criticize or protest against the administration lest federal support just stops arriving. 

3. Allied foreign countries would face pressure to serve the U.S. president’s personal interests, or else. Want to make sure the foreign aid package comes through? Better find a way to assist the president’s reelection campaign. 

These are not hypothetical.

In order: 1. Trump and allies have openly threatened to withhold federal funds from Democratic states and cities for nakedly political reasons. 2. Trump tried to defund the Postal Service to force it to raise shipping rates on Amazon in retaliation for the Washington Post’s coverage of his administration (Jeff Bezos owns both companies). 3. As president, Trump unlawfully withheld aid to Ukraine to try to force the country to dig up dirt on Joe Biden (reach back into your memory — this was the entire scandal of the first impeachment). 

A lot of that is beside the point, because Trump’s entire argument for impoundment is wrong. As three of Protect Democracy’s spending abuses experts, Michael Angeloni, William Ford, and Conor Gaffney, write in “The impoundment threat, explained”:

Since 1974, a federal statute called the Impoundment Control Act has barred the president from unilaterally canceling funds. But Trump and his advisers think the president can do so anyway, in spite of the laws Congress has passed. They believe the president has an overriding and inherent constitutional power to refuse to spend — or “impound” — appropriated funds. 

But Trump’s position is wrong. There is no inherent power to impound. The Constitution’s text and structure and the history of presidential impoundments make this clear. 

They explain lots of reasons why Trump’s claims are incorrect and ahistorical. And they note that presidential attempts to withhold funds have lost in federal courts over and over again. 

My favorite example from their piece: Trump and his allies often cite a supposed impoundment of funds for gun boats by Thomas Jefferson. But the underlying appropriations law authorized Jefferson to spend “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars” for the purchase of “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats.” In other words, when Jefferson didn’t spend the money, it was permissible because Congress said he didn’t have to spend it. 

All that said — as plainly wrong as Trump’s arguments are — if I were a lawyer for a state, city, county, company, university, government contractor, or any other institution receiving federal funds, I would be preparing for these attacks and planning to push back. You know, just in case… 

Read their whole piece here.

What is Schedule F, anyway?

The federal government doesn’t just spend money. It also does things. To do those things, it employs over 2 million people who go to work each day keeping our country safe, our water clean, our food supply reliable, and our air travel disaster-free. They get the Social Security, unemployment, disability, and Medicare reimbursement checks out on time. And they collect the taxes that pay for all this. 

The vast majority of those federal employees — all except for the roughly 4,000 political appointees at the top of the system — aren’t political. They’re hired based on merit, not loyalty. They stay in place for Republican and Democratic administrations because they don’t work for the politicians. They work for the American people. Yes, the politicians get to tell them what to do through policy and legislation, but the whole system is designed so that individual civil servants can exercise independent, expert judgment without fear of political reprisals. 

This is called the “civil service,” and it’s one of the great achievements of modern democracy. It was intentionally designed to protect against the corruption and incompetence of the cronyism, patronage, and spoils systems that preceded it. 

For more on the history of why this system exists, read: The Civil Service, Explained.

Which is where the second bureaucratic risk comes in. What if large numbers of those people just got… purged. Fired. Canned. And replaced by legions of political cronies. 

This is a real proposal. It’s called “Schedule F.” 

Again, that’s just the technical term for what would be the largest civil service purge in American history. As Alex Tausanovitch, Michael Angeloni, Erica Newland, and William Ford all write:

In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created.  

The administration claimed the authority to create Schedule F based on statutory language that exempted certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees. 

Because Trump did not remain in office, it is unknown how many federal employees his administration would have swept into Schedule F, or how many would have been fired and replaced. Experts have put the possible numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The Trump official credited with the idea to create Schedule F estimated that it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies told Axios it would not be necessary to fire that many workers because firing fewer would produce the desired “behavior change.” 

Trump has made it clear that, if elected, reinstating Schedule F — restarting the civil service purges — is one of his first priorities. 

Read more on Schedule F. 

When the government works for the president, not the people

What scares me most about these two proposals by Donald Trump is how symbiotic they are. They’re different parts of the same project to weaponize the government against anyone who disagrees with the president. 

As Alex, Michael, Erica, and William write: 

Schedule F is an effort to redirect regulatory, administrative, and investigatory functions of the government away from the public interest and toward the president’s interests. This makes it easier for an aspiring authoritarian American president to abuse his power to punish, intimidate, and silence opponents by making government aid, contracts, licenses, merger approvals, tax benefits, permits, civil penalties, relief aid, grants, and regulatory waivers contingent on showing personal fidelity. 

A cronyistic civil service makes it easier to go after enemies, and the power to withhold funds makes those cronies much more powerful. 

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Liberalism for the 21st Century

A nuance I often remind myself — we don’t just need to protect democracy, we need to defend liberal democracy. In the classical sense of the L-word. Openness, pluralism, human rights, checks and balances, executive restraint, and protections for minorities, they’re all just as important as majority rule (and, also in the classical sense, core to “conservatism”). 

An important conference in DC next month (July 11-12) explores the state of liberalism in the 21st century and how it can go back on offense. Really superb lineup of speakers. Check it out. 

(The panel I’m most excited for: “Electoral Systems for a Diverse Liberal Democracy.” Nerd alert.)

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ABA Task Force for American Democracy

Highly recommend following the American Bar Association’s new democracy task force, led by an all-star group of notables. They have a wide variety of background resources, all of which are highly readable and accessible. Two papers I recommend in particular:

• Reviving the American Tradition of Fusion Voting, by Lee Drutman, Tabatha Abu El-Haj, and Beau Tremitiere

• Proportional Representation, by Ruth Greenwood, Drew Penrose, and Deborah Apau

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What else we’re tracking: 

• The “self-pardon” question is coming. You know why, you know the stakes. But, as Grant Tudor and Justin Florence argue in Lawfare, federal courts have already largely answered it. 

• The president’s son was convicted on federal gun charges. Biden again vowed that he would respect the verdict and not pardon Hunter. (Jonathan V. Last: “It is worth reminding people exactly how correctly Joe Biden handled the entire ordeal surrounding his son.”)

• Yesterday, Donald Trump met with the Business Roundtable, one of the most powerful organizations of private sector leaders. (Reminder: markets appear to be dangerously underpricing the current US political and stability risks.)

• “We have the rule of law so as not to have a culture of revenge.” Tim Snyder on revenge culture and the Supreme Court. 

• “Wither the Senate?” — Lee Drutman ponders the thorniest reform question in American democracy. 

• Amanda Carpenter took over Tim Miller’s podcast at The Bulwark yesterday and was kind enough to have me on. Give it a listen. 

• France called snap legislative elections scheduled for just weeks from now after the far-right surged in EU elections. (A reminder from Anne Applebaum: “No, Trump is not the American Le Pen. He's worse.”)

• I spend lots of time (probably too much) thinking about democracy, water, the American West, housing, homelessness, climate change, and, where we all go, *waves hand* you know, from here. So I found this fittingly sprawling George Packer story in The Atlantic on the nation’s fastest-growing city worth every word.