CV NEWS FEED // President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday unveiled his incoming second administration’s ten-point plan to rein in the federal bureaucracy and administrative state.
Trump has long championed reducing red tape and corruption in the federal government since his initial 2016 bid for the White House, using the slogan “Drain the Swamp” to express his support for such initiatives.
The president-elect’s newest proposed reforms notably include measures to prevent federal agencies from targeting Christians, as well as support for a proposed constitutional amendment to institute term limits for members of Congress.
“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption, once and for all,” Trump said at the beginning of a three-and-a-half-minute video.
Removing rogue bureaucrats
First, the president-elect announced that he would “immediately reissue” an executive order he signed during his first term “restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.”
The October 2020 executive order “creates a new classification of federal employees titled ‘Schedule F’ for employees serving in ‘confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions’ that typically do not change during a presidential transition,” CNN reported at the time.
Supporters of the order praised it as a necessary check on the power of a group of longtime federal employees often colloquially referred to as the “deep state.” Critics on the other hand claimed that it undermined the jobs of “career civil servants.”
Stopping the weaponization of intelligence
Secondly, Trump promised that his incoming administration “will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
“The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies,” he stated.
During his successful 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to end the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) targeting of American Catholics, which was prevalent under the Biden-Harris administration on many levels.
Anti-corruption measures
Thirdly, Trump said his next administration will “totally reform” the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, commonly known as “FISA courts.”
The president-elect remarked that these courts “are so corrupt that the judges seemingly do not care when they’re lied to in warrant applications.”
According to its government website, the Court’s primary function is “to review executive branch (‘government’) applications for authorization to employ various means of obtaining foreign intelligence, principally when they are conducted in the United States or otherwise directed at Americans.”
Next, Trump promised to “expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart.”
“We will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish all documents on deep-state spying, censorship, and corruption,” he said.
“Fifth, we will launch a major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the fake news to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy,” Trump continued. “When possible we will press criminal charges.”
Making government more independent
“We will make every Inspector General’s office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee,” Trump went on to say, “so they do not become the protectors of the deep state.”
Next, he announced that his incoming administration will “ask Congress to establish an independent auditing system,” which will
continually monitor our intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people, or that they are not spying on someone’s campaign – like they spied on my campaign.
>> 2024 ELECTION: TRUMP DEFEATS HARRIS IN A ROMP <<
Draining the swamp
The president-elect then stated that he will continue the work of his first administration “to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.”
“Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions could be moved out – and I mean immediately – of Washington, to places filled with patriots who love America,” he added.
“Ninth, I will work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate,” Trump said. “Such a public display could not go on and it’s taking place all the time, like with Big Pharma.”
Term limits
The final policy Trump expressed support for in the video was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would institute term limits for members of both houses of Congress.
For such an amendment to pass, it would require either the support of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, or a constitutional convention approved by two-thirds of state legislatures – the latter method having never been employed in American history.
It would then have to be ratified by three-fourths (38) of the 50 states in the union.
Currently, neither the House nor the Senate have any term limits, and members are allowed to serve indefinitely.
Some notable cases of long-tenured federal lawmakers include the late Rep. John Dingell, D-MI, who continuously served in the House from 1955 to 2015, and the late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV, who continuously served in either the House or the Senate from 1953 to 2010.
However, many states, such as California and Florida, do have term limits in place for their state legislators – but not their federal representatives in Congress.
“This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore a government that is controlled by the people and for the people,” Trump concluded.
