Trump: Federal Employees Must Pass Civil Service Test

Former President Donald Trump campaigned ahead of the 2016 election on a promise to “drain the swamp,” and he followed through by slashing the cost to taxpayers of federal regulations imposed by unelected bureaucrats.

In the more than two years of President Joe Biden’s big-government administration, however, the regulatory state has grown by leaps and bounds to exceed even that of the Obama administration.

As Trump gears up for another White House bid, he is once again taking aim at such “wasteful and job-cutting” regulations. One strategy he revealed in a recent campaign video involves ensuring that those working within the federal government understand “our constitutional limited government.”

Trump said he would “require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test” and those who could not demonstrate sufficient aptitude would face termination.

In addition to paring down the amount of regulation imposed on businesses and the American people, the former president indicated that his plan would address a number of other issues. He used his own experience of having his personal residence raided by FBI agents last year as an example.

“This will include command of due process rights, equal protection, free speech, religious liberty, federalism, and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure — I know all about that at Mar-a-Lago, don’t I? — and all other constitutional limits on federal power,” Trump declared.

The end result of his plan, he concluded, would be more freedom and a healthier economy.

“We will put unelected bureaucrats back in their place, liberate the U.S. economy, and attract millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to our shores,” Trump said.

As for his focus on narrowing the scope of the federal bureaucracy, he promised to re-implement his prior executive action requiring that two regulations be eliminated for every new regulation introduced.

“We will again implement a regulatory budget putting a hard cap on the cost of regulations to the U.S. economy,” he said. “Instead of growing the size and scope of the federal government — every single year we’ve been doing that — we will shrink it every year with aggressive cost-reduction targets for each federal department. In addition, we will require that all agencies’ regulatory guidance must be posted publicly in a central database or else be rendered null and void.”