Donald Trump at the AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Flickr/gageskidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Donald Trump has appointed a cabinet full of billionaires and given Elon Musk full power to reshape the government. This is a billionaire’s coup aimed at smashing our rights and eliminating any program that serves the common good. But they are taking advantage of the complex, confusing structure of the federal government to disguise their plan and pretend like they are just “simplifying” public agencies in the name of “efficiency”. Below are key terms to know to understand how the billionaires’ coup attempt is unfolding.
Office of Personnel Management: A government agency that plays a similar role to a human resources department in a company, setting rules and managing benefits for public sector workers. It is being used as a central tool to carry out Trump and Musk’s plan to impose mass layoffs. For instance, the infamous “fork in the road” email attempting to bully federal workers into resigning was sent by the Office of Personnel Management.
Independent agency: A government institution that is considered to be part of the executive branch, but is not part of a department led by a cabinet secretary (like the Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, etc). For instance, NASA is an independent agency. Many independent agencies are responsible for regulating big business. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission is responsible for regulating the stock market, and the Federal Communications Commission makes decisions that are highly important to telecommunications corporations (like Comcast or Verizon).
Independent agencies are typically designed to have some degree of political independence, and oftentimes their leadership can only be fired for good cause and not simply because they disagree with the policy positions of the administration in power. But Trump wants to change that, and may be hoping that a lawsuit over his decision to unjustly fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board will be his opportunity to have that power recognized by the courts.
Civil service: The system of career public servants carrying out core functions of the government. In 1882, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act which aimed to create a “merit-based” system based on professional qualifications. This replaced what was referred to as the “spoils system”, where the winning candidate appointed loyalists to top posts as a reward for their support regardless of their ability to do the job. Nowadays, people who work in the government are divided between “political appointees” and a much larger group of career civil servants who remain in place from administration to administration. Civil servants have added job protections that make it harder for them to be fired, in order to protect them from being pressured to do something improper for political reasons.
But Trump wants to fundamentally alter the civil service by creating a new category of government worker called “Schedule F”. Public sector workers who are given the new Schedule F status would lose their protections from being unjustly fired. This would allow Trump and Musk to move forward more quickly with their mass layoff agenda, and fill the jobs that remain with ideologically-committed supporters of the far right.
Office of Management and Budget: This agency is responsible for helping prepare the annual federal budget that must be passed by Congress, and overseeing the implementation of the budget. While it cannot unilaterally add or cut money from a program’s budget, decisions and recommendations made by the OMB radiate out through the rest of the government as budget proposals are passed into law and then implemented by various institutions. The current head of the OMB is Russel Vought, a far-right political figure who believes the government should be based on Christian religious doctrine and is the architect of the infamous “Project 2025” policy platform.
Impoundment: When the president refuses to spend money on programs that are part of the federal budget passed by Congress. In the constitution, Congress has the authority to determine how the government spends money, but the executive branch under the President is responsible for implementing the measures that are funded by Congress. Impoundment effectively gives the president the right to eliminate any government service at any time, because he can simply refuse to spend the money on programs he does not support. Richard Nixon abused this so often that Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act in 1974 to ban the practice, but now Trump and Musk want to go to the courts to overturn it and revive the practice of impoundment to more quickly destroy social services.
District court: A court responsible for holding trials involving federal law. There are 94 district courts responsible for different geographic areas of the country. When a policy by the federal government is challenged, the case typically goes first to the Washington, D.C. District Court. Before a judge holds a hearing and makes a ruling, they have the authority to issue preliminary orders that freeze or modify the implementation of a government policy. But the ruling of a district court judge is not necessarily final.
Appeals and Supreme Court: Either side of a case can appeal a district-level ruling they disagree with. The 94 district courts are grouped into 13 “circuits” for purposes of hearing appeals. For the cases most relevant to the billionaires’ coup, that will usually mean the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit – considered to be the second most important court in the country. Appeals court judges review decisions made at a lower level and can overturn, confirm or modify their rulings.
But even these “circuit”-level rulings can be challenged by appealing to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court only accepts a small fraction of the appeals it receives, but the most high-profile and politically charged cases have a strong likelihood of being taken up. Six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are right wingers – three of whom were appointed by Trump.
Trump administration officials have openly considered simply ignoring judges who try to get in the way of the billionaires’ coup. Judges at any level can hold officials in contempt of court for refusing to obey rulings, and impose fines or even seek the arrest of people who are in contempt. But the police agency that would be responsible for carrying out arrests of officials who illegally ignore court orders – the U.S. Marshals Service – is controlled by the White House through Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Project 2025: A nearly 1000-page document published by right wing strategists in 2023 proposing what policies a Republican president could implement if they won the next election. Project 2025 was the latest installment in the “Mandate for Leadership” series published since 1981 by the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is widely considered the most important Republican think tank in the country, and the vision it lays out in Project 2025 involves the destruction of vital social services and an overhaul of the structure of the federal government to lock-in right wing policies. Russel Vought, who was appointed by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is considered the key architect of Project 2025.
Budget reconciliation: A legislative process involved in passing the annual budget for the federal government. It is nominally a way for the Senate and the House of Representatives to resolve differences between their respective budget proposals, but the real significance of this procedure is that it allows the Senate to pass a bill with a 51-vote majority instead of a 60-vote majority. The 60-vote requirement is referred to as the filibuster. While it is not a law or in the constitution, the filibuster is a long-standing rule in the Senate that is mostly used as a way to block progressive legislation even if it has majority support. But a bill passed using the budget reconciliation process is exempt from the filibuster rule.
That means that measures that would otherwise not be able to pass the Senate can go forward if they are attached to the federal budget. Trump is demanding that all of his main priorities be packaged together in “one big, beautiful bill” that would be passed as part of the budget, and Republican leaders in Congress are working with him to make that happen. Congress has until March 14 to approve a budget, or else there will be a government shutdown.
Inspector General: An official assigned to a department of the federal government to ensure that proper ethical and legal procedures are being followed, and to audit the work of the agency to reduce waste and abuse of resources. This role was established by the Inspector General Act of 1978, passed as part of a string of reforms implemented after the Watergate scandal and other abuses during the Nixon administration.
In his first week in office, Trump fired 17 inspectors general assigned to various parts of the government. An Inspector General is supposed to function more as an independent watchdog than a partisan official of an administration, so this move eliminates potentially “disloyal” figures who could hamper Elon Musk’s DOGE takeover of the federal government.
