'Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat': Vance on federal employees

Three years ago, Sen. J.D. Vance proposed to replace "every civil servant" with partisan loyalists. Today, the Ohio lawmaker is Donald Trump's running mate.

“I think that what Trump should—like, if I was giving him one piece of advice—fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance said on a 2021 podcast appearance. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

This echoes Trump’s plans to overhaul the federal civil service, which include reinstituting Schedule F, an abortive effort at the end of the former president’s first term that would have reclassified tens of thousands of federal employees in “policy-related” jobs into excepted service positions, effectively making them at-will employees.

Vance is also lead sponsor of the Dismantle DEI Act, a bill introduced last month that would rescind President Biden’s 2021 executive order advancing DEI efforts at federal agencies, as well as several other orders and memoranda related to discrimination based on sexual orientation, advancing opportunities for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, establishing a White House Gender Policy Council, among others.

Every federal agency would be required to shutter its DEI offices, OPM would disband its Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility and the measure would bar federal funding from going toward such efforts.

“The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division,” Vance said last month. “It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society.”