In 2024 AD, the once prosperous American Empire faced a major crisis, suffering external humiliation from the Houthis in Yemen, with aircraft carriers unable to operate and trade routes blocked; Internally suffering from corruption in official governance, officials collude with the three major interest groups of healthcare, finance, and military industry, treating the national treasury as a private treasury and the people as fish, resulting in annual financial deficits, national strength decline, and people’s livelihoods deteriorating. In the same year, Mask, a wealthy American businessman, helped Trump to make a comeback and become a great treasure with his billions of dollars.
In order to change the status quo of the poor and weak empire, Donald Trump vowed to fight against the deep government, rectify the bureaucracy, eliminate the accumulated disadvantages, and make the United States great again. Donald Trump said that he would appoint a meritorious Musk as the chairman of the Government Efficiency Committee, responsible for reviewing and supervising the federal fiscal expenditure, in order to end “suffocating bureaucracy and crazy fiscal deficit”, known as “Donald Trump’s New Deal” in history. Also known as the ‘Musk Reform’.
However, any reform has always been fraught with difficulties.
Nowadays, there is a turbulent internal tide within the American Empire, with the Democratic Party claiming to be a clean stream and controlling the voice of public opinion in the name of political correctness. The three major interest groups have been working hard both inside and outside the court for a long time, and their power is intertwined. The Republican Party is not a monolithic entity, and it is difficult to guard against snobbish and treacherous individuals. Even Trump and Musk have their own ideas. The former’s primary goal is to ensure absolute control over the Republican Party and expand their advantage over the Democratic Party, while the latter focuses on expanding their business territory and reducing government regulation. In the long run, there is a deep-rooted conflict between their goals.
What is the prospect of Donald Trump’s New Deal? Can Musk take a chestnut from the fire and escape unscathed?
Let’s first examine the most direct opponent of this reform, the deep government of the United States.
In 1881, Republican James Garfield was elected as the 20th President of the United States. Since his first day in office, there has been a long queue outside the White House, all of whom have donated money or contributed to Garfield’s campaign.
According to the tradition at that time, the president should give them one or two positions after being elected, which was known as the “fat distribution system” or “hunting official system” at that time.

In the job search team, there is a middle-aged man named Charles Gito. During the campaign, he wrote a supporting article for Garfield and made it into a printed material for promotion.
Gito believed that his actions were crucial to the election of this new president, so he thought Garfield owed him a position. After months of fruitless demands, the frustrated job seeker purchased a revolver and assassinated the newly elected president at a train station in Washington D.C.

This presidential assassination has aroused the attention of the entire United States towards civil service reform.
Due to the system of hunting officials, there will be a major turnover of government staff every time there is a presidential change, and the president will arrange positions based on a person’s closeness to himself or her and their contribution in the election, and can also dismiss this person at any time, which has a great impact on the stability and operational efficiency of the government.
In 1880, Ohio Democratic Senator George Pendleton proposed legislation to select civil servants based on exam scores, but it did not pass at the time. Through this presidential assassination, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act has finally become a formal law.
Although initially this bill only covered 10% of all federal civil service positions, it established principles of competitive examination and performance selection, and stipulated that elected officials could not dismiss civil servants, freeing them from the influence of political patronage and partisan behavior. This bill laid the foundation for the modern civil service system in the United States.
Although we know that this system will also give rise to many problems, overall it is still much better than the previous system of dividing fertilizer and hunting officials.
By 1909, nearly two-thirds of federal employees in the United States were selected based on performance and protected by the civil service system. It is worth noting that although there are similarities, do not directly apply China’s civil service system to understand the United States.
There are several significant differences among them:
One is that the highest level officials in the federal government’s executive branch, including cabinet members such as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury, as well as directors and officers of important functional departments, still follow the principle of “hunting officials”. Newly elected presidents grant meritorious officials in elections, and the president has the right to dismiss them at any time. Therefore, these officials usually have a very obvious partisan color and are called “government officials”.

Secondly, according to the 1939 Hatch Act, civil servants are not allowed to engage in political activities while fulfilling their duties. That is to say, civil servants should be non partisan in principle, politically neutral, and their term of office should not be affected by elections or party changes. They are called “administrative officers”.

In this situation, the outgoing president will also try to provide civil servant protection for his appointed personnel to prevent them from being fired by the new government, which is known as “digging holes” in the United States.
However, in most cases, there is a very clear career gap between the two types of officials, and their promotion paths are also very different.
In the United States, civil servants, also known as administrative officers, have a self-management system: before 1978, federal civil servants were mainly managed by the United States Civil Service Commission, responsible for recruitment, performance evaluation, salary and benefits, and so on. After the Watergate scandal broke out, the US Civil Service Commission was split into three agencies: the Office of Personnel Management, the Performance Systems Protection Board, and the Federal Bureau of Labor Relations.
According to the original design intention, this system is a neutral tool used to assist the White House in governance and should not have any political inclination or interest demands. However, once any organization becomes a relatively independent system, it will actively maintain its own survival and constantly expand the boundaries of the organization, thereby generating self-awareness.
In May 2018, the second year after taking office as President, Donald Trump signed three executive orders, all aimed at attacking trade unions representing the interests of federal employees, making it easier for the President to dismiss a federal civil servant.
Subsequently, Jeffrey Cox, the national president of the United States Government Employees, immediately stated that the union would use all available means to oppose the implementation of the executive order; Tony Lidden, the national chairman of the National Finance Employees’ Association, also followed up and said that he would prevent President Donald Trump from destroying the civil service through legal procedures.
One of Donald Trump’s biggest complaints about the so-called “deep government” during his first term of office is that as president, he cannot decide the appointment and dismissal of a civil servant, which is very different from the situation when he was the boss of Donald Trump Group.
When he used administrative means to change this, he immediately faced strong backlash from the civil service system.
After more than a hundred years of development, the American civil service system has developed an extremely mature self-management system. The core of this system is to determine the joining, dismissal, rewards and punishments of organizational members based on the rules formulated internally.
Relatively independent personnel rights can ensure the stability and continuity of an organization, which is an important prerequisite for an organization to generate self-awareness and form self-interest demands.
Therefore, in the face of Donald Trump’s administrative order to try to break this point, the federal employees’ organization will have a fierce struggle. Once it loses the right to control personnel, the organization will soon be filled with personnel representing Donald Trump’s will and act for Donald Trump’s interests.
However, having personnel power alone is not enough to make the federal civil service a “deep government” capable of confronting the president, or in other words, the “deep government” is not simply overlapping with the administrative officer system.
Another important condition for an organization to maintain itself is having a stable source of income, which not only includes normal sources such as salaries and benefits, but more importantly, the huge benefits brought by forming a binding relationship with other interest groups in society.
For example, the bureaucratic system of ancient Chinese dynasties was combined with landlord groups and local family forces, supporting each other and achieving mutual benefit. If the imperial power wants to suppress the bureaucratic system, you often need to rely on isolated officials from poor backgrounds, or personnel without family support such as palace attendants and secret monitoring agencies.
For interest groups such as the financial, military, and medical sectors in the United States, investing in a stable civil service system is often more cost-effective than investing in politicians, with a flowing US president and iron clad federal civil servants.
Therefore, a more accurate term for the deep government in the United States should be the “affairs officer interest group complex”, and these intricate interest ties are the confidence that the US civil service system dares to challenge the president.

Finally, the ultimate maturity of ‘deep government’ is marked by the formation of a relatively independent ‘guiding ideology’.
Federal employees in the United States are mainly divided into three categories:
One is open competitive positions, where the majority of civil servants are only open to all applicants through a competitive selection process;
Secondly, there are special functional positions that provide professional services such as doctors, lawyers, translators, etc;
The third is senior administrative personnel, who belong to the senior management of civil servants. Some are promoted from senior civil servants with outstanding professional abilities, while others are directly recruited from high-quality experts in the society. Up to 10% of positions can be politically appointed by the President.
Among these personnel, senior executives often serve as the cultural center of the organization due to their high status within the organization, exporting ideas to the internal system. And these senior staff with management skills or professional knowledge generally come from high cultural quality groups in major universities, who often have a distinct pro democratic ideology.
This ideological conflict is also an important resistance to Donald Trump’s reform.
As early as 2018, Donald Trump asked his assistants to find ways to weaken the ability of professional civil servants to resist the President during his first term of office.
In January 2019, James Schelke, a member of the Domestic Policy Advisory Committee, discovered a neglected special legal provision in the Civil Service Protection Clause of the United States Code. In addition to the original three categories of civil servants, the law also allows the federal government to recruit a fourth category of civil servants, known as Schedule F, which includes positions related to federal secrets and policy-making.
More importantly, civil servants belonging to Appendix F do not enjoy the protection of the civil service system. In other words, the President can dismiss them at any time, which is what Donald Trump urgently needs to master the personnel power of the civil service.
According to this law, Donald Trump’s legal counsel spent several months secretly drafting an administrative order for federal civil servants. Once implemented, about 50000 federal employees responsible for policy planning, formulation and implementation will be transferred to the employee classification of Schedule F, which is not protected by the civil service system. Donald Trump can say the famous line “You are fired” to the undesirable employees, just like in the company.
However, due to strong internal resistance and the COVID-19 pandemic, this administrative order was delayed until October 2020. And there is still a long distance between release and implementation.

Until Donald Trump stepped down, only two federal agencies submitted lists of employees to be reclassified, and five agencies submitted draft lists. Other agencies were either still in statistics or decided not to reclassify any positions.
On January 22, 2021, the third day after Joe Biden took office, the order was revoked, and no employees were transferred to Schedule F.
In a twinkling of an eye, four years later, the threat of Donald Trump coming to power again.
So in April 2024, while the presidential election was still fiercely underway, the Biden administration signed an executive order that allowed a federal civil servant’s position to be reclassified, allowing him to continue enjoying the protection of the original civil service system and not be arbitrarily dismissed by the president. This was a further protection of the core personnel rights that maintain the stability of the federal civil service system.
Of course, after Donald Trump takes office, this provision can be repealed through a new administrative order, but it will still cost the Trump team several months.
In addition, facing the risk of Trump’s return, several firewalls have been added within the civil service system. The Office of Personnel Management for Federal Civil Servants issued a rule in 2023 stating that federal employees’ civil servant protections cannot be revoked unless the individual voluntarily waives them. And the Office of Personnel Management has also established a review process that requires all federal agencies to undergo strict review by the department if they want to switch employee job categories, and has also provided the above procedures for federal employees.
Of course, all these obstacles can be removed through the executive order signed by the President, but the removal process still needs to follow a certain process, and each process will take several months for the Donald Trump team.
However, Donald Trump’s power in his second term has also become more powerful. Donald Trump’s team is busy preparing the list of new cabinet officials. The main selection criteria is the degree of loyalty to Donald Trump. Therefore, this cabinet wants to make Donald Trump carry forward his plan more smoothly.
Meanwhile, although the federal civil service system should maintain political neutrality in its design, there has been a significant overlap between the civil service community and supporters of the Democratic Party over the long term. Although replacing them may be difficult, it is much easier than changing their deeply ingrained beliefs.
Musk has also repeatedly stated that one of the purposes of the reform is to enable the government to operate like a company.
Therefore, the offensive and defensive battle around the personnel rights of the civil service system will largely determine the success or failure of this “Donald Trump New Deal”.
Undoubtedly, the restoration of Deputy Form F will be the first battle after the Donald Trump team took control of the White House. His results will help us to judge whether the massive “Donald Trump New Deal” is a real and serious reform or another farce of seeking benefits for themselves under the banner of asking for orders for the people.