...nice try, but no cigar! Throughout our history political appointees have resigned at the change of an administration and been replaced with a few exceptions, of course. While the law says that civil service employees cannot be fired without cause, political operatives can and have been reassigned to less harmful positions. An office director of 200 employees can be reassigned to, for example, be in charge of the 55 mph speed limit for the entire United States, with a staff of one! Important and essential sounding job, ehhh?
The operatives also can be encouraged to find other jobs. Counterproductive policies (that lack common sense) where the mission of the organization is less important than EEO, Diversity, etc. can be reversed or corrected. IMO leftist, socialist revolutionaries (democrats) operatives are legion throughout the government, especially the military.
One of my parishioners, devout, active, all that, had me over for dinner one night. As we conversed he talked about how he was less than a year from retirement of his federal gov't job and consequently he was taking it easy at work, secure in the knowledge that he could not be fired -- as he said.
2 hour lunches, careful persual of the entire newspaper, things of that kind occcupied his workaday world.
I was stunned then that he didn't see that this was a kind of theft. And I submit now that, as Garry Wills (!) said in Nixon Agonistes, written in the late 60's or early 70's, there is a a vast force of gov't employees not at all invested in doing the job well, but jealous of their twice-the-average salaries and benefits.
Such an attitude is essentially Democratic, and holders of that attitude will have no problem in seeing Republicans fail and in throwing a hundred hindrances and snares in the way of Republican programs.
Yes, both Bushes are a tad trammelled in the "kinder,gentler" approach and fail to see how forthright words AND ACTIONS can frequently accomplish far more than the "come, let us reason together" (Isaish, through LBJ) approach.
But I think it would take a generation of Republican leadership before the vast sea of federal civil service workers was cleansed of pollutants.
FDR et seq. have left us with a huge and bulky government with intrinsic and organic tendencies to bear to port. Trimming this ship of state will take more than shuffling employees, I think.
So while I think you are both right in particulars, the corrections you envision are not to be accomplished in one or two terms.
Here endeth the pompous pontification.