He’s got to do that, or he won’t get anywhere.
I recall a statement from William Bennet who was Secretary of Education under Bush HW, I think.
He said that he felt like a captain of a large ship turning the ship's wheel hither and yon, but nothing seemed to happen, and it's as if he went down below to look at the rudder mechanism to discover it wasn't attached to the wheel.
He said the entrenched Bureaucracy ran the department despite his best efforts to make it go a different direction.
I've seen estimates that 80% of the Federal government employees are Democrats.
One thing about Trump that will greatly help him in taming the federal leviathon, is that he has decades of experience at the top of a large organization. He’s already got finely honed instincts where it comes to rooting out trouble makers and misfits down the chain of command.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that he’s done it for so long, that it’s just standard operating procedure for him. A successful exec like Trump demands compliance and performance from his immediate juniors, and insists that they ruthlessly root out the non-compliant dead weights directly below them, and so on.
He’s an expert at that sort of thing.
Personally I would direct that the ones not ‘cooperating’ be offered new position somewhere in Kansas at a ‘tent city’. If they refuse to accept the new positions and their old positions have been eliminated then they are out of a job and no longer employed.
I’m not saying they are going to jail, I’m saying that their new ‘jobs’ are at a location where there is no telephone or internet services. If they want to sit on the ground and talk to each other while still collecting a paycheck then that is their choice. Otherwise they can quit and stay in their comfortable homes in the Greater DC area.
It would be expensive to keep them on the payroll but I think it would be a LOT less expensive that them staying at their current jobs and causing bureaucratic mischief as they are doing now. Especially those EPA types.