Let Federal Workers Cut Red Tape!

The Problem

The federal civil service was built, more than a century ago, on the same principles Frederick Winslow Taylor laid out in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management: break every job into standardized, repeatable steps, document each step for traceability, and remove individual judgment from the process entirely.  That architecture succeeded at what it was designed to do, consistency and auditability, but it was designed to achieve those things to the total exclusion of everything else, including the judgment of the very people carrying it out.

Picture a caseworker at a federal benefits office.  A veteran in front of them is clearly in crisis and clearly eligible for help, but one piece of paperwork is missing.  The caseworker can see exactly what the right call is, and they really want to make it.  But the system in front of them gives them no formal authority to use that judgment, and no protection if they do and something later goes wrong, so they follow the process instead, not because they don’t care, but because the system was never built to let them do otherwise.  That isn’t a story about a bad employee.  It’s a story about a good one, working inside an architecture that was never designed to trust them.

Fixing this the wrong way is easy, and we’ve just been shown exactly what the wrong way looks like.  In January 2025, the President signed Executive Order 14171, reclassifying policy-influencing federal positions so they could be removed at will. [1]  In June 2026, the Supreme Court went further still, ruling in Trump v. Slaughter that independent-agency officials who exercise executive power can be removed by the President without cause at all, overturning ninety years of precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. [2][3]  Whichever side of that ruling you’re on, it should worry all of us that the basic operating rules for millions of federal employees can now swing this hard, based on a single administration’s decree or a single Supreme Court term.  A civil service whose fundamental rules change every four to eight years isn’t reformed.  It’s just unstable in a new direction.

What I Propose

There’s a better model, and it didn’t come from a management consultant; it came from two centuries of hard lessons on actual battlefields.  The idea traces back to the Prussian military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst in the early 1800s, and was carried forward by his students, including Carl von Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke, into what the Germans called Auftragstaktik: give a subordinate the goal and the reasoning behind it, and trust them to reach it. [4]  General George S. Patton put that same principle into brilliant practice for the United States in 1944, driving his Third Army across France faster than almost anyone thought possible, precisely because he trusted his subordinate commanders with the objective and let them find their own way to it rather than dictating every step from behind the lines.  It remains one of the most impressive displays of decentralized command in American military history.

And then the American military largely forgot it.  It took the hard experience of Vietnam to force a reckoning, and it was Generals William DePuy and Donn Starry, the first two commanders of the Army’s new Training and Doctrine Command, who did the work of relearning and formalizing what Patton had already shown could work, publishing it as the Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine in 1982, under the name Mission Command. [5]

I want to be clear about something important here: this is not a proposal to put the civil service under military control, and the fact that these same conclusions were reached completely independently, in a totally civilian context, is exactly why I’m confident in them.  W. Edwards Deming reached strikingly similar conclusions studying American and Japanese industry, not armies.  Deming’s first of his famous Fourteen Points for Management calls on organizations to establish a clear, shared “constancy of purpose” that every employee understands, the civilian equivalent of commander’s intent. [6]  His seventh point calls on leadership to coach and support the people doing the work rather than simply supervise them.  His eighth insists on driving fear out of an organization, because people who are afraid to exercise judgment will hide problems instead of fixing them.  And his tenth flatly states that most failures belong to the system an employee works within, not the employee, and that treating people as the problem only damages morale without fixing anything.  These are not military ideas borrowed for civilian use, or civilian ideas borrowed for the military.  They are the same conclusions, reached twice, independently, by people solving completely different problems, which is exactly what a genuinely provable principle of human organizational dynamics should look like.

The core idea is simple: a commander gives subordinates a clear statement of the goal and the reasoning behind it, commander’s intent.  Subordinates are then trusted, and held accountable, to use their own judgment in achieving that goal, within clearly established limits, even when it means deviating from the standard method.  The goal is what’s fixed.  The method is not.  I propose rebuilding the federal civil service around that same idea.

Decoupling rank from position.  Civil servants would keep ironclad statutory protection for their job, their pay, and their GS-level rank; nothing here opens the door to political purges of career employees.  But assignment to the high-discretion, high-responsibility “Mission Command” operational seats, the roles that actually carry the authority to exercise the judgment described above, would be a privilege, awarded through competitive selection boards and tied strictly to demonstrated performance, not tenure.

The lateral reassignment protocol.  When an official in one of those seats demonstrates systemic failure, negligence, or plain hubris, I propose giving the executive branch immediate, codified authority to reassign them, not fire them.  They keep their job, their pay, and their rank, but they move to a centralized Federal Advisory and Operational Reserve, away from operational authority, so the damage stops without a person’s entire livelihood being put on the line to get there.  This creates something we don’t have today: a real, functioning middle option between “protected no matter what” and “fired outright,” which is exactly the gap that fuels both the abuses we’re trying to fix and the fear that any reform will turn into a political purge.

The five-tier “train-the-trainer” cascade.  I propose scaling this culture the same way the military scaled Mission Command after Vietnam.  The U.S. Military’s own training institutions, Training and Doctrine Command and the war colleges, would train the top one percent of career civilian leadership, the Senior Executive Service.  Those leaders would then be responsible for cascading that culture downward through their own agencies’ regular operations and training cycles, the same way it worked in the Army, rather than trying to retrain the entire federal workforce from the top down all at once.

The civilian designee framework.  The train-the-trainer cascade above still takes time to reach every level of a large agency.  To speed that up, I propose expanding a model that already works: the FAA’s Designated Engineering Representative program, which trains and certifies vetted, personally liable private-sector experts to carry out specific technical judgment calls alongside federal staff. [7]  Used this way, the purpose isn’t simply to outsource work; it’s to give the federal workforce working examples of this kind of judgment being exercised well, in real time, so agencies can adopt the Mission Command approach faster and with less institutional risk than training everyone from scratch, in-house, alone.

The democratic constitutional path.  Most importantly: I propose doing all of this through Congress, not around it.  Executive orders can be reversed by the next executive order.  Court rulings can be narrowed, or overturned, by the next case.  We’ve now watched both of those things happen to federal personnel policy within about eighteen months of each other. [1][2]  A reform this significant needs to survive the next election, not just this one.  That means taking this platform directly to the American people, winning a mandate for it, and using that mandate to force a genuine bipartisan agreement in Congress to rewrite Title 5 of the U.S. Code, the actual civil service law, permanently. [8]  Anything less durable isn’t reform.  It’s just the next swing of the same pendulum.

References

How We’ll Know It’s Working