The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought has made good on his promise to put federal workers in “trauma.” The second Trump administration’s opening salvo against the federal workforce included the notorious “fork in the road” email, attempted mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency, and hiring freezes that have left a myriad of key posts unfilled. The most recent data from the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Workforce Data dashboard tells a simple but devastating story: a net loss of over 270,000 workers, about 15 percent of the federal workforce, over half of whom took the Deferred Resignation Program offered by Elon Musk’s DOGE.

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The hemorrhaging of federal capacity has been stemmed somewhat by legal challenges. Nonetheless, the reduction in manpower and the ensuing hits to worker morale and funding impose serious damage to American state capacity. But the overt assault on federal staffing isn’t the only way that Vought is waging his war—it’s coupled with smaller, quieter moves aimed at causing death by a thousand cuts.

Case in point are three rule changes proposed in late February and early March by Vought’s OMB and Scott Kupor’s OPM. If implemented in their current form, they would politicize the way federal employees are graded on their work, limit the ability of workers to challenge unfair ratings, and prioritize the new ratings system in determining future layoffs. They would also exempt political appointees from the new ratings process—something that shouldn’t be surprising to those familiar with Project 2025. In that Heritage Foundation document, which has proven to be a blueprint for Trump 2.0, Vought and his co-authors asserted that “empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success.”

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The first two proposals, posted February 24th, deal with the performance review process itself. The component that has garnered the most attention has been an elimination of the ban on “forced distribution” of performance ratings. This would limit the highest performance ratings for the federal workforce, creating a more even distribution of scores from top to bottom.

Currently, federal workers are assessed based on their completion of relevant goals, not by asking if they outperformed the person in the cubicle next to them. At a glance, a forced distribution of performance ratings may sound like OPM is trying to get “tough” on the civil service and replicate the ostensible efficiency of the private sector. But forced distribution is controversial in business as well—with some of the world’s most profitable corporations like Microsoft and GE abandoning it after it failed to produce desired outcomes.

Kupor made a flimsy case for changing the performance review process in some sassy blogs. They’re full of trite conservative talking points that analogize the federal government to a grade-inflated university where everyone gets an A. Forced distribution, claims Kupor, “will reward true above and beyond performance by recognizing that proportion of employees who are in fact delivering on that.” OPM even issued a guidance in September to agency heads recommending they begin gradually adopting the forced distribution model by capping top marks for senior employees at 30 percent in FY2025. The data confirms that there was a marked decrease in the proportion of employees earning an “5 – Outstanding” and a commensurate increase in the number earning a “3 – Fully successful” between FY2024 and FY2025. A formal rule change would accelerate this trend.

In addition to limiting top performers, the proposed changes would make it more difficult for bureaucrats to challenge a bad rating. Currently, if a federal employee believes that their rating doesn’t adequately reflect their performance, they can appeal to an independent adjudicator called the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Vought and Kupor’s plan is to have OPM manage these appeals instead, a decision that would allow presidentially appointed employees to deny appeals en masse.

The final change is to tie future Reduction in Force (RIF) proceedings—that is, layoffs—to the new performance ratings system. The RIF changes were posted to the federal registry on March 5th, and the commenting period remains open until May 4th. These changes are straightforward: Currently, in the event of a RIF, jobs are cut based first on tenure and then on performance. If the rule changes are implemented, this would be flipped, and the new arbitrarily distributed performance reviews would dictate who loses their job.

Considered together, these changes would empower Vought and Kupor in their efforts to trim the federal workforce under the guise of efficient management. This would make it easier for Vought to continue abusing RIF proceedings to eliminate positions. And it would give political employees significant leeway in whom to hire and fire, without accountability.

Kupor and Vought are bad-faith actors who don’t care about identifying top performers to improve efficiency; they just want to be able to drown the government in a bathtub after the “satisfactory” employees are gone. Vought has given speeches at the Center for Renewing America that make this obvious. That being said, it’s worth highlighting the fact that these proposals are still bad on their own terms.

According to reporting from Government Executive, senior federal employees widely “panned” the proposals when they were unveiled. One Defense Department assessment put it bluntly: “Decades of management research, and the subsequent reversal of this policy by many private sector organizations, confirm that forced ranking systems degrade organizational effectiveness.” Kelly Shih and Matilda Mottola at Partnership for Public Service (PPS) concur. They noted that “employees competing for limited top ratings have a built-in incentive to hoard information, avoid risk and undermine peers—leading to increased dysfunction.” They also point out that OPM’s own evidence is cherry-picked, and key research leveraged in favor of forced distribution actually found that in organizations where long-term collaboration is essential, “the risks associated with forced distribution tend to outweigh the benefits.” PPS’s recent analyses of how Vought and Kupor’s proposed changes would harm the federal talent pipeline and worker morale are also worth reading.

But these proposals aren’t just managerial nightmares; they’re an attempt to drive out career civil servants while protecting ideologically aligned hacks. Since the proposals exempt Schedule C and G political appointees from forced distribution, only 30 percent of career civil servants will be able to earn top marks, but an unlimited number of political appointees will be able to do so. This arrangement would gradually filter out career civil servants and make sure that personally loyal staffers make up a greater proportion of the federal workforce. It also leaves the opportunity open for the administration to continue expanding the number of political appointees if they so chose—without exposing those new hires to potential RIFs.

These changes would bolster other measures the Trump administration put in place last year—especially the creation of the Schedule G category and the revival of Schedule F. As public administration expert Don Moynihan put it, the very creation of the new Schedule G category facilitates the staffing of Trump cronies into “the most senior levels of government.” Trump has also revived the Schedule F designation in the form of the new Schedule Policy/Career classification, which applies to roughly 50,000 career bureaucrats. Schedule F, first established during the final weeks of Trump’s first term, sought to reassign thousands of civil servants, remove their union affiliation and job security protections, and prioritize loyalty to the president over merit to justify terminations. In theory, the recently finalized Schedule Policy/Career rule enables the administration to dismiss affected employees with few to no barriers, though this strategy will have to be tested in the courts.

Any future administration that wants to govern effectively will need to reverse the Trump administration’s attacks. Among the most urgent responsibilities of a new administration committed to undoing Voughtism will be to shed unqualified MAGA-affiliated cronies in the senior service. It’s essential that, when mass hiring is undertaken to replenish the decimated federal workforce, top posts are staffed by dedicated civil servants rather than partisan hacks.

The federal government faces a dearth of staffing and funding in areas ranging from disaster preparedness and response to financial regulation—a crisis that has been exacerbated by Trump, Vought, and Kupor’s personnel policy. It’s difficult to predict how many more bureaucrats will be shed during Trump’s administration, but if current trends are any indication, a New Deal–scale investment in state capacity will be necessary to return the federal government to a workable standard.

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Fletcher Calcagno is an intern at the Revolving Door Project.