[Art in Idaho]

What you need is someone who will appoint cabinet officers who will decide what needs to be done for their departments to serve the interests of the American people and then make the people in their departments do those things and take them out if they do something else instead. It is hard to fire a federal employee, but you can side-line them if they are in the way.

Your plan sounds like a great idea and sounds like something Trump would insist on doing. I know it's currently hard to fire deadwood, but can't that even be changed. What about public sector unions? I would hope everything is on the table to at least take a look at.

Let's face, who besides Trump would even investigate various departments, entrenched bureaucracies, do some downsizing and cut the deadwood. We need to run the federal government as a business not a bottomless money pit. It's Our Tax Money and if you define taxes as 'theft of income' then it makes sense for all of us to be interested in a complete top to bottom overhaul of the Federal Government. It will never be efficient if it's 'do whatever you want' in every department.

A Fed employee once told me your promotion up the system depended on how many new people you hired and how many departments you were able to create. You were labeled a doer then. Now that's just the opposite of the way a private business would look at it.

[AndyJackson]

While there is a lot of dead wood, the top guys in each office are often pretty good. But for each assistant secretary there are a couple of Schedule C employees (unconfirmed non-career positions controlled by the white house) who serve as white house handlers to keep tabs on what is going on - the American version of Political Commissars. In the Ozero administration no one can do anything useful. Bush II was actually not a whole lot better. Really! A good bit of the expansion of DC beltway banditry was funded through DHS which was created by .... Bush/Cheney.