## Notes from 01 April 2026 [[2026-03-31|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-04-02|Next note →]] # Schedule F, DOGE, and the Limits of Personnel-Based Reform Read a piece by [[Thomas A. Firey]] in _Regulation_ ([[Cato Institute]]) called "[Schedule F: The Phantom Menace](https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2024/schedule-f-phantom-menace)". I've been going through some of [[Santi Ruiz]]'s [older Statecraft posts](https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge) on DOGE and revisiting [[Gabe Menchaca]]'s writing on the [Clinton-era reinventing government experience](https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/from-gore-to-doge), and a view is consolidating for me. This article helped sharpen it. The argument I keep running into, from different angles, is that you cannot shrink the state by cutting personnel if you don't first reduce the obligations the state is legally required to fulfill. Firey makes this point through a Public Choice lens. The federal bureaucracy exists, persists, and expands because of congressional legislation. Civil servants are, for the most part, following rules (often contradictory ones!) handed down by Congress, the president, and the courts. They are people navigating a difficult institutional environment, trying to keep their jobs. The "deep state" is really just the accumulated weight of decades of statutory mandates and procedural requirements. There are four things clicking into place for me. __First__, Musk's [[Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)|DOGE]] optimized for spectacle: headcount reductions, contract cancellations, dollar figures. These are legible metrics that justify the operation's existence to the public and to Trump's base, but legibility is not the same as effectiveness. __Second__, this connects to a lesson that should have been learned from Clinton's Reinventing Government. Mechaca wrote well about this, and the leaders of the Clinton-era effort said as much [in their interview with Santi](https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-build-the-90s-doge): if you cut the number of civil servants but not the number of tasks mandated by statute, you create a strong incentive for outsourcing. The shadow workforce grows. The state doesn't shrink; it becomes less visible and harder to hold accountable. __Third__, the original DOGE plan may have been different. [[Vivek Ramaswamy]], who briefly co-led DOGE with Musk, apparently had a more regulation-focused approach. A DOGE without Musk might not have attracted the same spotlight or generated the same political noise, but it might have done quieter, more structural work. Counterfactuals are cheap, but the contrast between the two approaches says something about what "government reform" means to different people. __Fourth__, and this is the center of Firey's article: the real lever is regulatory revision, not personnel replacement. He criticizes [[Civil Service Tenure and Employment Stability|Schedule F]] not only because it would install unqualified loyalists (though it would) but because it misunderstands where the bureaucracy's mass comes from. It comes from statute. Congress delegates vague mandates to agencies, agencies produce regulations to fill the gaps, and the bureaucracy expands to administer them. Without Congress reclaiming its policymaking responsibility, and without scaling back doctrines like [[Chevron Doctrine|Chevron]] that let agencies interpret their own authority broadly, personnel reshuffling changes little. Firey flags the potential end of Chevron as a real opening: if courts stop deferring to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes, Congress would be forced to legislate with more precision, which could constrain the regulatory apparatus at its source. But it also requires Congress to do the work of actual policymaking — the thing it has spent decades avoiding by delegating to the executive branch. The Brazilian context is different in many ways, but the structural logic is analogous. If you want a leaner, more effective state, you have to start with the legal architecture that generates obligations and mandates, not with headcount targets. Civil service reform matters (flexibility in hiring, career structures, performance management) but it is downstream of the regulatory and legislative framework. Getting the sequencing wrong is how you end up with a hollow state that outsources its core functions while the legal obligations remain intact.