Middle-Layer Capture, Work-Culture Collapse, and the Structural Vulnerability of Loyalty-First Staffing
Title Page
Jackboot Poppinjays and the Crab Bucket of NPC Clones: Middle-Layer Capture, Work-Culture Collapse, and Structural Vulnerability
A White Paper on Federal Middle Management, Schedule C Staffing, and the Operational Brittleness of Loyalty-Based Governance
February 2026
Executive Summary
Everyone focuses on the wrong layer.
Political commentary orbits either the flashy bottom (field agents, enforcement spectacle, the "jackboots") or the strategic top (presidential authority, executive orders, cabinet drama). Both miss where actual governance lives: the middle layer. The hive. The conveyor belt. The ~1,550 Schedule C confidential aides, the reclassified career managers, the "special assistants," the "policy advisers," the acting deputies and political staff whose job is to translate a boss's intent into institutional motion.
This paper examines what happens when that middle layer is deliberately built from loyalty-filtered applicants and placed under ambient threat of removal. The result is not a sleek authoritarian machine. It is a sprawling, insecure crab bucket of NPC clones: performative, overconfident, and structurally incapable of the one thing complex systems require—truthful, competent throughput.
The Central Claim:
Intent can be methodical while execution is sloppy. The plan is real; the middle layer is still a mess. That mismatch—between what was designed to happen and what actually happens—is the vulnerability.
This paper argues that a loyalty-first middle layer can generate fear and motion, but it cannot generate durable institutional capacity. The selection criteria prioritizes alignment over craft. The resulting work culture suppresses truth and rewards performance theater. The outcome is predictable: the system produces cascading, discoverable errors while leadership operates on fake information.
Core Findings:
The middle layer is where capture attempts either succeed or break. It is not the visible policy apparatus; it is the translation apparatus. A loyalty-first middle layer can generate motion and fear, but it cannot generate durable institutional capacity.
The intake pipeline selects for alignment signals over craft signals. The feeder populations (Project 2025 alumni, advocacy operatives, loyalist climbers, hardliners) are screened for political commitment, not administrative competence. This is not accidental; it is architectural.
The work culture produced by this intake is functionally Enron-like. Loyalty performance replaces outcomes. Legal imagery replaces legal quality. Speed replaces craft. Metrics become propaganda. Bad news becomes contraband. Leadership becomes information-blind.
This culture produces observable, repeatable failure modes. Contradictory guidance across offices. Constant "acting" roles and reshuffles. Big rollouts followed by quiet walk-backs. Obsession with narrative artifacts over implementation details. CYA behaviors and decision ambiguity.
The master vulnerability is truth-plumbing failure. Once bad news stops flowing upward, leadership operates on false dashboards and makes increasingly confident decisions on increasingly false information. This causally generates the other failures: procedural errors (litigation fuel), principal-agent misalignment (overreach and inconsistency), and ultimately capacity collapse.
This structure is reversible by a competent successor with political will. A successor can remove Schedule C incumbents immediately and comprehensively through personnel action. The reclassification rule can be suspended and litigated as ultra vires. The culture can be dismantled in a hundred days if a successor moves fast, completely, and without nostalgia.
Ruthlessness is operationally necessary, not just emotionally satisfying. A half-measure fails. The entire apparatus—people, structures, incentives—must be removed simultaneously, then rebuilt on merit and truth.
Why This Matters:
The loyalty-first middle layer looks hilarious until you remember that incompetence still harms people, chilling effects still suppress truth, and chaos still destabilizes institutions before it collapses. But the good news is this: what was built on loyalty and fear is structurally brittle. It cannot defend itself. Career staff will not die for their Schedule C overlords. Courts will not defend legally aggressive reclassifications. Congress will not spend capital defending a regime that suppressed truth.
A successor who understands the brittleness and who is willing to move fast can dismantle the entire machine in the first hundred days. That is the strategic opportunity.
Section 1: The Problem — The Middle Layer Nobody Models Correctly
1.1 Why Headlines Mislead
Every major outlet covers the visible drama: the field agents, the enforcement spectacle, the "thug culture," the presidential fury, the courtroom battles. These stories are real. They matter. They also distract from where actual governance lives.
A government has three functional layers:
The top layer: A small number of decision nodes—the president, a few agency heads, key White House staff—who set priorities, sign directives, and shape enforcement.
The bottom layer: The executors. The agents in the field, the call-center workers, the administrative assistants, the frontline staff doing the literal tasks. They are visible, photogenic, and often blamed for systemic problems they did not create.
The middle layer: The translators. The people who take intent and turn it into memos, pressure, org charts, talking points, "deliverables," performance reviews, hiring decisions, budgets, enforcement priorities, guidance documents, and silent threats. They are invisible, unglamorous, and almost never analyzed.
The middle layer is the gearbox.
The top can scream. The bottom can stomp. Neither of those things turns into policy reality on Tuesday afternoon without the gearbox.
And if the gearbox is made of cheap plastic—if it is staffed with loyal but incompetent people, if it is run by a system that punishes truth and rewards performance theater, if it is designed to maximize fear instead of capacity—then the whole machine sounds like it is doing 90 mph while it is actually stripping its own threads.
That is what this paper is about.
1.2 The Three-Layer Frame
A normal presidency's middle layer serves as a coordination and translation apparatus. It is made up of:
- Civil service managers (career staff, merit-selected, with some job protection)
- Political appointees in senior executive service roles (confirmed or high-level excepted)
- Confidential aides and policy staff (Schedule C, at-will, trusted by the political leadership)
The civil service managers provide institutional memory, technical expertise, and continuity. The political appointees provide direction and political sensitivity. The confidential aides provide access, day-to-day implementation, and loyalty to the political leadership.
In a healthy system, these three groups compete and negotiate, but not in a way that breaks the machinery. You get tension between politics and process; that tension is often productive.
In a capture-oriented system, the middle layer is deliberately restructured to maximize loyalty and minimize resistance. That means:
- Expanding the reach of at-will positions (Schedule C, and now attempted expansion via Schedule Policy/Career reclassification)
- Staffing those positions with people selected for alignment, not craft
- Creating ambient threat (removal is now easier, dissent is now risky, compliance is now rewarded)
- Flattening the traditional distinction between "political" and "career" by making career roles function like political roles
The result is a middle layer that is less a gearbox and more a swarm. Lots of movement, lots of noise, lots of jockeying for position. But no coherent throughput.
1.3 What "Middle-Layer Capture" Means Operationally
Middle-layer capture is not a conspiracy. It is a staffing and incentive structure that produces a predictable outcome: governance by loyalty performance instead of competence.
It works like this:
You expand the positions that are removable at will (Schedule C already is; Schedule Policy/Career attempts to expand this).
You screen for loyalty rather than craft when filling those positions.
You create ambient threat (reclassification looms, removability increases, dissent is noted).
You reward those who interpret the boss's intent and push it downward without asking questions.
You punish those who report problems, suggest constraints, or resist pressure.
You stop getting truthful information about what is actually happening in the organization.
You make increasingly confident decisions on the basis of fake dashboards.
You generate cascading errors that you then try to paper over with more messaging.
The machine sounds louder and louder while becoming less capable of actual execution.
That is what middle-layer capture looks like in practice. It is not a master plan that is executed with precision. It is a system that produces consistent dysfunction.
And that dysfunction is where the vulnerability lies.
Section 2: The Mechanisms in Scope — Schedule C and Schedule Policy/Career
2.1 Schedule C: The Embedded Political Layer
Schedule C is a Civil Service Reform Act category for "confidential" or "policy-determining" positions. In plain English: these are jobs that exist to be political. They are aide positions, special assistant roles, policy shop staff, comms helpers, schedulers with political authority—roughly 1,550 positions across the federal government.
The law is explicit: Schedule C positions are noncareer. Incumbents serve at the pleasure of the appointing authority. There is no "vacant" Schedule C position; when the person leaves, the authorization revokes. There are no adverse action protections, no appeals, no union representation, no claim to tenure.
This is by design. Schedule C was created to allow political appointees to have staff they trust. The system works: a new political leadership comes in, brings in their own people, and those people help implement the new direction.
The problem arises when Schedule C is used not as a thin layer of trusted aides, but as a thick layer of political operators embedded throughout the bureaucracy, operating with minimal oversight, screened primarily for loyalty, and positioned to pressure career staff into compliance.
Schedule C power is positional, not based on headcount. The significance lies not in the total number (1,550) but in where those positions sit: access to decision-making, control of information flow, interpretation authority, and proximity to career staff who can be pressured. One Schedule C aide in the right seat—between an agency head and the career SES—can function as a control point for an entire division.
In the current moment, Schedule C has been deployed exactly this way. Reporting and analysis describes:
- Expansion of Schedule C allocations in key agencies and choke-point positions
- Screening for loyalty signals (election denial, willingness to implement mass deportations, hostility to "the deep state")
- Placement of Schedule C staff in positions where they sit between agency heads and career staff, creating a control point
- Use of Schedule C staff as "enforcers" of political direction, with authority to recommend removal of career staff who resist
- High churn (people move between agencies, between roles, or out of government entirely)
The result is a portable political layer that can be dropped into any agency and can function as a pressure mechanism without needing to understand the agency's actual mission or law.
2.2 Schedule Policy/Career: The Reclassification Pressure
Schedule Policy/Career (the current name for what was previously called "Schedule F") is different from Schedule C. It is not a creation of new positions; it is a reclassification of existing career roles.
The mechanism: OPM issues a rule stating that certain career positions are "policy-influencing" and therefore should be classified as excepted service (not competitive service), exempt from adverse action procedures and appeals, and more easily removable.
The reach: estimates suggest up to 50,000 career roles could be affected, depending on how broadly "policy-influencing" is defined.
The effect: career staff in those roles are no longer protected by civil service law in the way they historically have been. They become functionally at-will. They become vulnerable to removal for reasons that have nothing to do with job performance.
This is not Schedule C (which is at-will by design). This is reclassifying existing career positions to make them function like Schedule C.
The legal status is contested. The rule has been challenged in court; litigation is ongoing. But the mere fact of the rule being issued—and the White House signaling it will be implemented—creates ambient threat.
Career staff in "policy-influencing" roles are living with a sword over their head. They know they could be reclassified. They know that reclassification would remove their protections. They know that resistance to political direction could be the reason for reclassification.
So they pre-comply. They interpret the boss's intent and push it downward. They stop reporting problems. They start producing what they think the boss wants to hear.
That is the second mechanism of middle-layer capture.
2.3 How These Two Levers Interact
Schedule C is removal by staffing: you flood the zone with political operators who can pressure from inside.
Schedule Policy/Career is removal by reclassification: you change the legal status of career roles to make them removable.
These are two different mechanisms, but they reinforce each other. Together, they create a middle layer where:
- A thick layer of political staff (Schedule C) can operate with minimal oversight
- Career staff in "policy-influencing" roles (Schedule Policy/Career target) live under threat of reclassification
- Both groups are incentivized to anticipate what the political leadership wants and to deliver it without asking questions
- Truth-telling becomes dangerous; compliance becomes safe
- The machinery becomes faster but less capable
This is the structural foundation of the capture project.
Section 3: The Intake Pipeline — Who Applies and Why That Matters
3.1 Applicant Buckets
The intake pipeline for Schedule C and policy-staff roles is not random. It has several distinct feeder populations:
Alumni and Orbiters
Former Trump administration staffers and appointees from 2017–2021, plus their extended networks. People who already did time in government, already understand the machinery, and already have proven loyalty. Project 2025 brought many of these people together, creating a database of known quantities. They are the first call when positions open.
Advantage: they know how government works. Disadvantage: they already know the shortcuts, already have internalized the "how to work around this" logic, and come with a track record of either going along with loyalty-first systems or leaving in disgust.
Advocacy Operatives
Policy people from conservative think tanks, advocacy organizations, and issue-specific groups who want to move from analysis into implementation. Project 2025 was explicitly designed to funnel these people into government. It provided training (how to wield administrative power, how to avoid watchdogs, how to interpret directives). It provided a database (here are the people who are ready to govern). It provided placement logic (we know which roles these people should go into).
Advantage: they understand policy direction and are ideologically aligned. Disadvantage: they often have no experience running an organization, managing staff, or implementing at scale. They know the talking points; they don't know the machinery.
Loyalist Climbers
Ambitious people for whom alignment with the current leadership is a ladder. They are good at: messaging discipline, grievance performance, internal politics, loyalty signaling. They are often less good at: administration, deep expertise, long-term planning.
These are people who would work for any power center, as long as it offered advancement. They are selected because they are useful; they stay because the power is real.
Advantage: they are ruthless and efficient at small-scale political games. Disadvantage: they have no investment in the organization's actual mission or capacity. They optimize for the moment they are in.
Ideological Hardliners
People attracted by what they see as permission to act on convictions that were previously constrained. This includes people from the far end of the policy spectrum who see the moment as an opening. Leaked Project 2025 applicant materials hint that some applicants signaled extreme ideological influences; not all applicants are in this category, but the pipeline does pull from that edge.
Advantage: they are motivated and unambiguous about what they want to accomplish. Disadvantage: they often lack constraints and are quick to escalate. They can create operational chaos while feeling morally certain about it.
Enforcement Types and Security Specialists
For DHS, CBP, ICE, and related agencies: some are career law enforcement moving into policy roles; some are political appointees with enforcement backgrounds. This cohort has a different culture than policy shops—more hierarchical, more "command and control," more comfortable with coercion.
Advantage: they understand how to execute enforcement. Disadvantage: they are often unfamiliar with civilian agency norms, civil service law, and due process constraints. They can treat the bureaucracy like an enforcement apparatus instead of an institution.
3.2 The Selection Filter: Alignment Over Craft
The intake pipeline for these positions is designed to select for specific traits, and craft is not primary among them.
Reported selection mechanisms include:
Loyalty questions in interviews. Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen? Would you be willing to be the public face of mass deportations? Do you see the civil service as an obstacle to overcome? These are not competence questions; they are alignment questions.
Ideological vetting. Project 2025 materials and reporting describe training sessions focused on how to wield administrative power in ways that might be legally or procedurally challenging. This is not neutral instruction in how government works; it is coaching on how to navigate constraints.
Speed of adoption. People willing to move fast, not ask questions, and push direction downward without hesitation are preferred over people who want to understand the law, consult with career staff, or think through second-order effects.
Enthusiasm for the mission. For immigration enforcement, for example: applicants who show genuine conviction about the mission are selected over those who see it as a job. Conviction is correlated with willingness to escalate and with lower tolerance for constraints.
The result is predictable: the intake pipeline selects for people who are good at signaling, performing loyalty, and escalating. It selects against people who are good at administration, process design, or managing complexity.
This is not a flaw in the pipeline. It is the design.
3.3 Self-Selection and "Pre-Compliance Personalities"
But the pipeline is also shaped by who opts in and who opts out.
When a staffing process is known to screen for loyalty and when the organization is known to punish dissent, strong applicants self-select out. People with deep expertise, people with institutional knowledge, people with strong reputations to protect—these people often decline to apply or withdraw when they encounter the loyalty-first screening.
What remains is a self-selected cohort of people who:
- Are early in their careers and willing to take risks
- Have less to lose by being associated with a controversial administration
- Are attracted by the chaos and the permission to escalate
- Are confident that they can navigate loyalty-based systems
- Are optimizing for the next job, not for this one
This is not a conscious selection by the intake process; it is a byproduct of the intake process. But it is real.
The result is a middle layer that is younger, more aggressive, less experienced, and more comfortable with boundary-pushing than it would be if the selection criteria prioritized craft.
And that shapes the culture.
Section 4: The Work Culture — Enron Without the Accounting
When you populate a middle layer with people selected for loyalty, screened for alignment, placed under ambient threat, and rewarded for speed over quality, a specific work culture emerges.
It is not a conspiracy. It is not coordinated. It is an emergent property of the incentive structure.
And it looks a lot like Enron: the behavior patterns that let an organization do reckless things while still looking "professional" on the outside.
The work culture is diagnostic. Each trait produces observable artifacts and predictable failure modes. Understanding the pattern lets you recognize it in practice.
4.1 Signal Compliance Over Actual Outcomes
Incentive: Loyalty performance is the metric that matters most
Behavior: People produce artifacts that prove alignment with the direction and demonstrate effort, regardless of whether the actual policy works
Artifact: Messaging-heavy memos, internal "win" dashboards, talking points prepared before implementation is ready, progress metrics based on activity not outcomes
Failure mode: Contradictory guidance across offices, constant reversals, policies announced as successes then quietly rewritten
Why this matters: The internal output is not "policy that works." It is "evidence that you are aligned with the direction." A memo gets written not because it will improve policy but because it signals that you are paying attention. A "win" is announced not because the outcome is durable but because announcing it shows momentum. Leadership celebrates actions that have not yet been implemented. Metrics become propaganda because the real metric is "are you performing loyalty convincingly?"
4.2 Speed Over Craft
Incentive: Moving fast is rewarded because it generates motion, momentum, and the appearance of control. Slow is punished because it implies caution, doubt, and possible disloyalty.
Behavior: Decision-making accelerates; consultation decreases; legal review becomes perfunctory; corners are cut routinely
Artifact: Policies announced before implementation is ready, guidance that contradicts earlier guidance, constantly revised directives, memos that assert rather than justify
Failure mode: Procedural errors accumulate, courts strike down actions on technical grounds, need for constant walk-backs and rewrites
Why this matters: The incentive is to get the announcement out, get the action started, get something in the media. Whether it is legally sound or operationally sustainable is secondary. But speed forces shortcuts: weaker legal footing, sloppier recordkeeping, more contradictions, more procedural errors. More opportunities for courts, inspectors, and state AGs to jam the gears.
4.3 Escalation and Boundary-Pushing
Incentive: People who escalate, who push boundaries, who move faster than the law clearly permits, who are willing to take risks, are rewarded
Behavior: Aggressive interpretation of authority, willingness to overreach, lack of institutional caution
Artifact: Legal theories that are novel and contestable, authority claims presented as settled fact, actions framed as ironclad but procedurally vulnerable
Failure mode: Litigation surge, court losses on basic procedure, need for emergency legal repair
Why this matters: This rewards a specific personality type: the person confident they can figure it out, willing to ignore constraints, able to convince others that hesitation is weakness. It punishes the person who says "we should check with the lawyers" or "that will blow up in court." Over time, the escalators stay; the careful ones leave or stop offering advice.
4.4 "Legal Imagery" Over Legal Quality
Incentive: Things need to look legitimate long enough to create compliance and buy time. Actual legal soundness is secondary.
Behavior: Procedural theater, memos that assert rather than justify, authority claims that are aggressive but framed as established
Artifact: Strong nouns ("accountability," "security," "integrity"), stern tone, paper shields that make actions look legitimate while the actions themselves may be legally dubious
Failure mode: Actions survive initial announcement but fail in litigation; need for rewrites; judges see the pattern and become skeptical of future actions
Why this matters: You get memos with stern tone and invocation of authority ("pursuant to my delegated authority") but the reasoning is thin. Guidance is left vague so people can interpret it as they wish, then later you claim plausible deniability when challenged. The effect is to create a paper shield that makes actions look legitimate while the underlying legal thinking may be shallow. Courts eventually recognize this pattern.
4.5 Metrics as Propaganda
Incentive: The story about momentum and success matters more than actual outcomes
Behavior: Selective measurement, cherry-picked data, manipulation of numbers between categories
Artifact: "Number of actions taken" instead of "did the policy achieve its goal"; "speed of implementation" instead of "is the policy sustainable"; "media mentions" instead of "is the implementation legally sound"
Failure mode: Leadership operates on fake information, makes increasingly confident decisions based on increasingly false data, produces exponential failures when disconnected from reality
Why this matters: Dashboard reality diverges from operational reality. The internal dashboard shows momentum and success. The operational reality is that implementation is chaotic, staff are confused, legal challenges are mounting. But the dashboard is what gets presented to leadership. When bad information finally reaches the top (usually via a lawsuit or crisis), the response is shock and blame rather than "we should have been listening."
4.6 Bad News as Contraband
Incentive: Reporting problems is punished; silence is rewarded
Behavior: People bottle bad news, delay reporting, reframe problems as smaller than they are
Artifact: Information hoarding, careful language that obscures rather than clarifies, problems discussed only in informal channels where they don't create records
Failure mode: Truth-plumbing failure; leadership becomes information-blind; organization fights the world it imagines instead of the world that exists
Why this matters: This is the core Enron dynamic. In a loyalty-first environment, telling the truth is how you get singled out. So bad news stops traveling upward. Leadership operates on flattering distortions. The org looks confident while it is actually blind. This is what makes failures exponential: decisions get more confident as reality gets worse.
4.7 Expertise as Constraint
Incentive: Expertise brings constraints; constraints feel like betrayal. Expert advice sounds like "but we can't" and "but the law says."
Behavior: Career expertise is treated as enemy terrain to navigate, not a system to partner with
Artifact: "How do we route around the person who will say no?"; use of contractors to bypass expertise; decisions made verbally to avoid expert documentation; questions like "how do we spin this?" instead of "is this legally sound?"
Failure mode: Predictable legal errors, inconsistent implementation, loss of the people who actually know how things work
Why this matters: Career staff learn to stop offering expert advice. They stop recommending caution. They start pre-complying with what they think is wanted. Over time, the organization loses the people who understand the law and the systems. Remaining staff prioritize survival, not accuracy.
4.8 Factionalism and Constant Churn
Incentive: Ambitious drones compete for proximity to power
Behavior: Leaking, undermining, factional sniping, blame wars
Artifact: Internal warfare framed as motivation; reshuffles presented as optimization; constant turnover
Failure mode: Institutional memory collapses; no one owns long-term outcomes; organizational chaos deepens with each reshuffle
Why this matters: There is no unified organizational culture. There are competing courts, each trying to get closer to power, each trying to prove loyalty, each ready to undermine the others. When something fails, factions blame each other. The incentive is to make sure someone else takes the fall. Short-term optimization dominates; long-term capacity gets sacrificed. You get a machine that looks busy but is actually engaged in internal warfare.
4.9 The "Portable Staffer" Effect
Incentive: Political staff move between agencies and don't stay long enough to own consequences
Behavior: Shallow domain competence; high confidence despite low expertise; movement from one agency to another before mistakes are fully exposed
Artifact: Constant reinvention of systems; confident assertions about things the person doesn't understand; "bounce-and-bluff" approach to implementation
Failure mode: High error rates, shallow legal analysis, knowledge loss with each person who leaves, impossible to fix ongoing problems because the people responsible are gone
Why this matters: A portable staffer does not need to understand the mission, the law, the history, or the stakeholders in depth. They need to understand the boss's intent and how to push it downward. They can move on before consequences are apparent. This creates: mismatch between right skills (moving fast in a political direction) and required skills (running a complex institution). Procedures are not followed because they are not understood. Rules are broken because they are not known.
Section 5: Observable Signatures — How to Recognize This Culture From the Outside
A work culture rooted in loyalty, speed, and legal imagery over legal quality produces specific observable signatures. These tend to signal that middle-layer capture is occurring, even if the underlying motives are unclear.
Note: These are patterns, not absolutes. Single instances may have innocent explanations. But repeated patterns across agencies typically indicate structural capture.
5.1 Contradictory Guidance Across Offices
When the middle layer is a swarm of agents interpreting signals inconsistently, guidance does not align across offices and regions.
One regional office gets told to prioritize X. Another gets told to prioritize Y. Both believe they are following the direction from the top, but they are interpreting it differently.
Observable signs:
- A policy announced at the top gets implemented differently in different places
- States, local governments, and agencies on the receiving end report confusion about requirements
- The administration has to issue corrections and clarifications constantly
- Litigation becomes easy because there is inconsistent policy
- Career staff report different directives from different Schedule C staff
This typically shows up as external confusion and as plaintiffs' complaints about uneven enforcement, rather than as internal chaos that is immediately visible.
5.2 Acting Titles, Reshuffles, and Churn Cascades
The use of "acting" titles instead of permanent appointees tends to signal:
- Uncertainty about who should be in the role
- Intent to keep people temporary so they will comply with pressure
- Lack of clarity in the chain of command (if you have four "acting" deputies, which one actually has authority?)
Constant reshuffles tend to signal:
- Instability in the middle layer
- High failure rates
- Loss of institutional memory
- Organizational chaos
Churn cascades occur when removal or departure of one person triggers a cascade of departures or reassignments, indicating the organization is losing people faster than it can replace them.
Observable signs:
- Multiple "acting" titles in same office
- Rapid succession of people in key positions
- People leaving after short tenure
- Org chart changes every few months
- Repeated "leadership transitions" announced as corrections
5.3 Big Rollouts Followed by Quiet Walk-Backs
The pattern of announcing something big, implementing it badly, then quietly fixing it tends to signal:
- Insufficient planning before rollout
- Legal vulnerability discovered during implementation
- Operational infeasibility not caught beforehand
- Pressure to announce before the work was actually done
Observable signs:
- A major rule announced as final, then quietly revised before or after litigation
- A directive issued, then weeks later a clarification substantially changes what the original meant
- A policy rolled out to fanfare, then aspects suspended pending legal review
- Media announces the action, then internal corrections are issued without fanfare
- Courts strike down actions that leadership confidently announced
These patterns typically indicate a middle layer optimizing for announcement rather than implementation, discovering problems too late.
5.4 Hyper-Focus on Narrative Artifacts
When internal communications focus heavily on talking points, "wins," press strategy, framing, and internal PR—rather than on implementation details, outcomes, and actual performance—that typically indicates the culture is optimized around narrative.
Observable signs:
- Internal memos that are 80% messaging and 20% actual instruction
- Meetings mostly about how to describe the action to reporters
- Extensive talking point preparation before implementation is ready
- Celebration of actions that have not yet been implemented
- More staff devoted to communications than to execution
- "Success metrics" based on media mentions or action counts rather than outcomes
5.5 CYA Behaviors: Ambiguity, Weird Documentation, Decision Evasion
When people are trying to protect themselves from retaliation, they tend to:
- Write emails that are carefully ambiguous ("I understand the intent to be...")
- Avoid documenting decisions in writing
- Hold meetings where nothing is written down
- Use informal channels to avoid FOIA discoverability
- Create multiple versions of documents with different instructions
- Delay decision-making in writing by making decisions verbally
Observable signs:
- Inconsistent records and hard-to-follow decision trails
- Missing emails or documents in sensitive areas
- Heavy reliance on verbal direction
- Ambiguous memos that can be read multiple ways
- Off-the-books meetings noted informally if at all
- Different written versions of the same policy in different places
The irony is that CYA behavior often creates more documentation problems, not fewer. You get inconsistent records, ambiguity that creates more litigation risk, not less.
Section 6: The Master Vulnerability — Why Truth-Plumbing Failure Cascades
The master vulnerability in a loyalty-first middle layer is not any single failure. It is the cascade that begins with truth-plumbing failure.
Once bad news stops flowing upward, everything else follows predictably:
Truth failure → Fake dashboards
Leadership operates on false information about what is actually happening in the organization. The dashboard reality diverges from operational reality. Decisions become increasingly confident as information becomes increasingly false.
Fake dashboards → Bad decisions
Based on fake information, leadership makes increasingly confident decisions in the wrong direction. They commit resources to things that are not working. They double down on approaches that are failing. They become emotionally invested in outcomes that operational reality contradicts.
Bad decisions → Procedural errors
When you move fast on false information, you skip steps. You don't consult people who would catch problems. You don't do full legal review. You cut procedural corners. Accumulated procedural errors become discoverable in litigation and oversight.
Procedural errors → Litigation fuel
Courts, inspectors, state AGs, and other opponents seize on procedural mistakes. The messier the execution, the easier it is for choke points to bind. Each procedural error gives opponents another handle to grab.
Litigation + Churn → Capacity collapse
The organization responds to litigation pressure by reshuffling people, creating more instability. Experienced people leave in disgust. New people are hired for loyalty, not competence. Turnover increases faster than the organization can absorb. Institutional memory declines. Remaining staff focus on survival, not on building capacity.
Capacity collapse → Louder noise covering deeper dysfunction
As actual execution capacity declines, the organization compensates by increasing noise. More announcements, more directives, more reorganizations. The machine sounds busier while becoming less capable. This creates the paradox: the loudest, most aggressive organization is often the one that cannot execute cleanly.
This is not an accidental cascade. It is the predictable outcome of a system where:
- Truth-telling is punished
- Loyalty is selected for over competence
- Speed is rewarded over craft
- Metrics measure activity, not outcomes
- Fear replaces coordination
Why Other Vulnerabilities Flow From This
The other failure modes (principal-agent failure, inconsistent implementation, factionalism, capacity loss) are all downstream of truth failure. They result from leadership making decisions on false information and the middle layer trying to implement those decisions while also interpreting signals in competing ways.
If truth flowed upward, the system would self-correct. Bad ideas would be challenged before they became policy. Mistakes would be caught early. Leadership would adjust course based on what is actually happening. The organization would retain its competent people.
But in a truth-suppressing system, self-correction does not happen. The organization doubles down, reorients around defending the false narrative, and eventually hits hard limits that litigation and court orders impose.
Section 7: Ruthless Dismantle — How a Competent Successor Rips This Out
This section is an aggressive scenario: a "maximum-speed reset" option, presented to clarify operational possibility and expose the brittleness of the loyalty layer. It is not a prediction or recommendation, but rather a test of how quickly a competent successor could move if they chose to prioritize institutional recovery over caution.
[Section 7 continues as previously written — no changes]
Section 7: Ruthless Dismantle — How a Competent Successor Rips This Out
There is no reason to be precious about this.
A Democratic successor with actual spine—a Newsom, a Jackson, someone who understands that institutions don't self-repair and that mercy toward a capture machine is just slow-motion surrender—can and should treat the middle layer as systematically removable infrastructure. Not over four years. Over four months.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Day One Through Week Two: The Staffing Blitz
On Schedule C: fire the whole cohort and do it visibly.
Schedule C exists precisely to be disposable. There are roughly 1,550 Schedule C positions across the federal government. A successor administration can revoke them all via executive order on Day 1. OPM's own structural rules make this clean: when the authorization revokes, the job ceases to exist. There is no "vacant position" sitting around. The person is gone.
Do not rehire any of them. Do not offer "transition" roles. Do not negotiate. The speed and finality matter operationally and psychologically.
This does three things:
First, it removes the embedded political layer that has been translating loyalty signals into pressure on career staff. Once they're gone, the direct chain of command to agency heads shortens. Career staff no longer have a Schedule C person sitting next to them, interpreting the boss's mood and weaponizing it.
Second, it sends an immediate signal down the entire organization: the old incentive structure is dead. You are no longer being evaluated for loyalty performance. You are no longer being threatened with removal for dissent. The rules have changed.
Third, it clears the field for rebuilding. You cannot rehabilitate a middle layer when the Schedule C cohort is still there reinterpreting signals and pre-complying. They have to go first.
The optics matter here. Make it public. Make it fast. Make it so complete that there is no ambiguity about whether the old crowd is coming back. A successor should hold a press event and say plainly: "These positions existed to politicize the federal service. They are gone. Full stop."
On career staff who have been reclassified under Schedule Policy/Career: immediate executive action and then litigation.
This is more complex, but it's doable and it's necessary.
The current OPM rule attempting to reclassify career roles into "Schedule Policy/Career" status is sitting in the Federal Register. A successor can issue a countermanding executive order immediately revoking it—or suspending implementation pending review—on Day 1 or Day 2. That stops further reclassifications in real time.
Then, file for emergency administrative relief in federal court arguing the rule is ultra vires (exceeds authority), violates the Administrative Procedure Act, and should be vacated immediately. Don't wait for the full case. The Federal Register record is weak; the legal theory is aggressive. A friendly circuit can move fast.
While that case proceeds, issue interim agency guidance: reclassifications are suspended; affected employees are returned to prior classification status pending legal resolution; no adverse actions based on Schedule Policy/Career status will be sustained; and any manager attempting to use the classification as a basis for removal faces investigation for potential civil service law violation.
This is not wimpy. This is: "we are betting our political capital that this rule is illegal, and we are prepared to litigate to prove it."
The point is not to wait four years for litigation. The point is to immediately reverse the presumption and put the burden back on anyone trying to use the rule. Career staff who have been living in fear of reclassification get an immediate reprieve, and the signal is: the retaliation apparatus is being dismantled.
Week Two Through Week Six: The Culture Dismantle
Issue a presidential memorandum on civil service restoration. Make it binding.
Not aspirational. Binding. Something like:
"Effective immediately:
No federal employee may be removed, demoted, reassigned, or subjected to adverse action based on (a) protected disclosure of wrongdoing, (b) exercise of union rights, (c) refusal to violate law, or (d) providing candid advice to agency leadership that differs from political direction.
All allegations of retaliation or adverse action based on the above shall be referred immediately to the Office of Inspector General for investigation and potential criminal referral. Managers found to have engaged in such conduct will be removed.
The Office of Special Counsel is restored to full independent authority over whistleblower retaliation cases. No agency may override or interfere with OSC determinations.
All 'acting' titles are eliminated, effective immediately. Every acting role must be filled by a Senate-confirmed appointee or a permanent interim director with explicit written authority. No more ambiguous temporary power.
All civil service employees are restored to full adverse action protections, including appeals, discovery, and union representation, regardless of reclassification status."
This is a memo, not legislation. It is fully within executive authority. It reverses the incentive structure immediately. Career staff know they are protected. Retaliation becomes illegal, not just discouraged.
Clean house on OPM leadership and issue binding new guidance on merit-based hiring.
The personnel office is the execution layer for staffing capture. Fire the current Director. Fire the current Deputy Director. Replace them with people who understand civil service law and are explicitly tasked with undoing the politicization.
Issue new OPM guidance:
"Merit-based hiring means: demonstrated competence, relevant experience, and professional judgment. It does not mean alignment with presidential policy preferences. Hiring officials may not use job interviews to assess candidate loyalty, ideology, or willingness to suppress dissent. Any hiring decision based on political alignment is grounds for removal of the hiring official and potential litigation."
Make it explicit. Make it inspectable. Tell OPM to audit hiring records for the past two years and flag anything that looks like loyalty screening. Publicize the findings.
Restore the bad-news pipeline.
Issue explicit direction to all agency heads:
"Career staff must feel safe delivering bad news. If a report comes back that a policy is legally vulnerable, operationally infeasible, or likely to fail, that information will be taken seriously and will not trigger retaliation. Conversely, if we discover that bad news has been suppressed or that staff have been intimidated into silence, the responsible manager will be removed.
Create an internal 'candor channel' where career staff can report directly to agency leadership without going through political staff. Protect the source. Act on the information."
This sounds soft, but it is not. It is directly attacking the Enron dynamic. Once truth starts flowing upward again, the organization begins to see reality. And once it sees reality, it can stop making unforced errors.
Purge the performative metrics apparatus.
Every agency has been running "success metrics" that are actually narrative theater: "number of actions taken," "speed of implementation," "media mentions," "internal talking points generated."
Issue guidance:
"Metrics must measure outcomes, not activity. Outcome = did the policy achieve its stated goal, is it legally defensible, is it sustainable? Activity = we moved fast and got attention. Activity is no longer a metric. Any agency caught using activity metrics as a basis for performance evaluation or promotion will have that practice investigated and reversed."
This is administrative, but it matters. It stops the dashboard-reality divergence. Once people are being evaluated on real outcomes instead of narrative artifacts, behavior changes.
Week Six Through Month Four: The Structural Rebuild
Rewrite the Schedule C framework entirely or eliminate it.
Schedule C can be useful. It doesn't have to be a loyalty hire dumping ground. But under the current system, it is. So either:
Option A: Eliminate Schedule C as a category in affected agencies and replace political staffing with a smaller, more carefully vetted group of genuinely noncareer policy advisers (who still don't have retaliation authority).
Option B: Keep Schedule C but rewrite the selection criteria: demonstrated policy competence, relevant experience, and an explicit prohibition on hiring primarily for loyalty. Make them answer for their selections.
The point is: don't just fire them and rehire the same type. Change the machinery.
Stabilize the middle layer: hire back people who quit, promote based on competence, protect tenure.
The middle layer is now empty (Schedule C is gone, the retaliation regime is reversed). Now fill it.
Go back through hiring records for the past four years. Identify career professionals who quit rather than comply with the loyalty regime. Reach out. Offer them positions back. Many will come back; the cloud has lifted. You've just recovered institutional memory and competence.
For promotions in the middle layer, use a clear rubric: professional expertise, demonstrated management capability, ability to implement law as written, and willingness to tell the truth about constraints. Not ideology. Not "how loud can you be." Actual skill.
Tenure protection matters here. Make it clear that middle-layer career staff have security, not as a reward, but as a precondition of truthful advice.
Conduct an audit of the prior regime's work products and reverse/repair what's defensible.
Spend 60–90 days having career staff and career attorneys go through major policy directives, guidance memos, enforcement priorities, and regulatory actions from the prior administration. Ask: is this legally sound? Is it operationally sustainable? Is it advancing the actual mission or just creating theater?
For actions that are legally weak, indefensible, or operationally counterproductive, issue corrections or reversals before litigation forces them. Do this internally first; make it clear you're quality-controlling the government, not just doing political reversal.
This is not "undo everything." It's "keep what's real, reverse what's theater."
Restore institutional memory: revive the personnel database, rebuild org charts, restore documentation.
The prior regime was FOIA-paranoid. That produced documentation chaos: missing records, weird workarounds, off-the-books decision-making, destroyed emails. Start recovering what's there.
Create a proper filing system. Restore org charts. Rebuild the personnel database. Make it clear that documentation is how government stays accountable and that suppressing records is over.
This sounds administrative. It is. It's also strategic. Proper documentation is how you prevent the next person from lying with the same ease.
Month Four Through Month Twelve: Inoculation
Pass legislation or issue binding guidance on civil service protection.
The rulemaking and executive orders work, but they're reversible by the next president who wants to reverse them. At month four, you should be ready to propose legislation (if Congress cooperates) or binding guidance that makes it harder for a future president to rebuild the loyalty machine.
Specifically:
— Require Senate confirmation for any position that has authority over removals of career staff. — Expand whistleblower protections to cover "protected disclosures" more broadly. — Require documented performance-based justification for any adverse action against career staff (not just "loyalty concerns"). — Restore the Office of Special Counsel to stronger independence and investigation authority.
This is not "lock it all in forever." It's "make the next coup attempt harder."
Restore inspector general independence.
IGs were politicized. Rebuild them. Hire new IGs who understand their job is to audit the government, not protect the administration. Make the position secure and independent. Fund them.
Institute regular "health checks" on the middle layer.
Establish quarterly reviews: Are career staff feeling safe reporting problems? Are metrics measuring real outcomes? Are hiring decisions being made on merit? Are people getting promoted for competence or for politics?
Make these public. Publish the results. Institutional change is fragile; you have to keep testing whether it's sticking.
What "Ruthless" Means in Practice
Ruthless does not mean cruel. It means: no nostalgia, no accommodation, no "transition period" where the old guard learns to play nice.
The middle layer that was built on loyalty, retaliation, and legal imagery is gone. All of it. At once.
That creates short-term chaos. Some agencies will have empty seats. Some workflows will stall while competent people are brought in. Some policies will have to be rewritten or delayed because the legal footing is weak.
That is acceptable. That is preferable to a slow decay where the old incentives creep back in because someone decided to "work with" a few of the old staff or "keep some institutional continuity."
Institutional continuity with a capture machine is a mistake. You rip it out.
The political case for ruthlessness:
A successor who moves this fast and this completely accomplishes something crucial: they make it impossible for the narrative to be "it's just politics, we're just replacing their people with ours." They're not. They're replacing a loyalty machine with a merit machine. They're replacing a retaliation regime with a protection regime. They're replacing legal imagery with legal quality.
That distinction matters for legitimacy. And legitimacy matters for whether career staff actually cooperate, whether courts defer to executive interpretation, and whether the public sees this as recovery or just revenge.
The operational case for ruthlessness:
A half-measure middle-layer purge fails. If you fire the Schedule C people but keep the reclassified career staff under threat, the threat persists. If you restore whistleblower protections but don't purge the managers who were running the retaliation machinery, they learn to be quieter about it. If you issue guidance about "merit-based hiring" but leave the people in charge of hiring in place, they interpret the guidance to mean "merit as we define it."
Ruthlessness means: remove the people, remove the structures, remove the incentives, all at once. Then rebuild.
The Vulnerability This Exploits
The middle layer you've inherited is brittle specifically because it was built on loyalty and fear, not competence and trust.
That brittleness is an opening.
A competent successor can walk through that opening and dismantle the entire apparatus in the first hundred days. Not because it's easy. Because it's exposed.
The middle layer cannot defend itself. It has no institutional legitimacy. Career staff will not die in a ditch to protect their Schedule C overlords. Courts will not defend reclassifications that are legally aggressive and administratively dubious. Congress will not spend political capital defending a regime that suppressed truth and encouraged retaliation.
What they built was loud and scary and effective at creating fear.
What they built was not durable.
A successor who understands that—and who is willing to move fast and completely—can rip the entire machine out before it knows what's happening.
That is the strategic opportunity.
That is why ruthlessness is not just emotionally satisfying; it is operationally necessary.
Section 8: What a Successor Needs to Do (Non-Section-7, Strictly Structural)
Beyond the active dismantle, there is the question of what needs to happen for recovery to actually take hold.
8.1 Minimum Conditions for Recovery
A successor cannot simply remove the old middle layer and call it done. Recovery requires:
Restoring truth flow. Career staff have to believe that telling the truth will not get them punished. That takes time. You need to demonstrate—repeatedly, across multiple situations—that dissent is safe. That takes weeks and months, not hours.
Stabilizing roles. The organization needs to know who is in charge. For months, everything was "acting." Now you have to fill roles permanently. That takes time; you have to find people, vet them, make the moves.
Reasserting craft norms. For a long time, the organization has been operating on "speed + loyalty." Now it has to learn "quality + legality." That is a cultural shift that takes time to embed.
These three things cannot be rushed. But they also cannot be indefinitely delayed. The window for recovery is roughly the first hundred days; if you have not made significant progress by then, the old incentives start creeping back in.
8.2 Execution Reality: Why Rebuilding Is an Administrative Project, Not a Speech
It is tempting to imagine that the recovery is primarily a communications challenge: give speeches about how the bureaucracy is going to be different, restore a few key people, and the organization will snap back into shape.
That is not how it works.
Recovery is an administrative project. It requires:
Specific policy guidance. Not general principles, but specific direction on how hiring is going to work, how decisions are going to be made, how disputes are going to be resolved.
New systems and processes. The old processes were designed to support loyalty-first governance. New processes have to be designed to support merit-first governance.
Staffing up. You need to hire competent people into the middle layer. That takes time: recruiting, vetting, onboarding.
Monitoring and correction. You have to check whether the change is actually sticking. That requires data collection, regular reviews, and willingness to correct course.
Funding. Rebuilding capacity costs money. It is not infinite, but it is real.
A successor who tries to do this on the cheap—assuming that removing the old guard will automatically restore function—will discover that they have created a vacuum, and the vacuum will be filled by default behaviors or by actors who can move fast without guidance.
8.3 Inoculation: How to Prevent Recurrence
The most important question is: how do you prevent the next president from rebuilding the loyalty machine in a slightly different form?
The answer is not to "lock everything in." You cannot protect an institution by constitutional amendments for every possible abuse. The answer is to make the next abuse more difficult by raising the cost and the transparency of capture.
Specifically:
Protect the positions that oversee removals. Make it harder to remove the people who are supposed to protect other people from removal (the Office of Special Counsel, the IGs, the merit protection boards). Do this through legislation or through norm-setting that will be hard for the next president to violate without political cost.
Require documentation and justification. Make removal of career staff something that has to be justified in writing, with specificity, and subject to review. That does not prevent removal; it just means you cannot do it secretly or arbitrarily.
Create external accountability. Congress can hold hearings about what is happening. IGs can investigate. Civil service advocacy groups can litigate. Make sure the architecture enables these actors to see what is happening.
Empower internal truth-tellers. Strengthen whistleblower protections. Make retaliation against whistleblowers a serious legal violation. Create internal channels for people to report problems. This does not prevent abuse; it means abuses cannot be completely hidden.
Invest in institutional culture. The strongest protection against capture is a professional culture where people take pride in their work and where loyalty is to mission, not to person. That is not something you can decree; it is something you have to build over years.
Section 9: Case Studies — Three Examples of Middle-Layer Capture
Case Study A: DHS and Immigration Enforcement — The Pressure Chain
The Department of Homeland Security is a natural site for middle-layer capture because immigration enforcement is inherently political and inherently involves pressure on career staff.
The structure:
At the top: a director with clear political direction. "We want more immigration enforcement. We want it faster. We want bigger numbers."
In the middle: a layer of Schedule C staff and political appointees who translate that direction into enforcement priorities. These are people who understand the immigration system (or believe they do) and who can sit between the political appointees and the career enforcement staff.
At the bottom: ICE and CBP agents who are implementing the direction.
The capture mechanics:
The middle layer staff are selected for alignment: do they believe in enforcement? Are they willing to push the boundaries? Are they willing to translate political direction into enforcement actions?
They are placed under pressure: hit the numbers. Move fast. Show results.
They are given authority that is technically within law but that is pushed to the edge: reclassify who counts as a priority. Lower the threshold for enforcement action. Change what counts as success.
The observable signatures:
- Guidance changes repeatedly as the middle layer reinterprets what is wanted
- Regional offices enforce different priorities because they are interpreting guidance differently
- Career enforcement staff are under pressure to take actions they believe are legally vulnerable
- People quit because they are uncomfortable with the direction
- Legal challenges mount because the actions are inconsistent and sometimes overreach
- The media reports success and momentum, but internal reports show chaos
The vulnerability:
The middle layer in DHS is thick but fragile. It is populated with people who understand enforcement but who are also under pressure to escalate. They are making judgments about what is legal and what is not; those judgments are being challenged in court.
The moment you remove the pressure and restore the precedent that career staff have to follow law (not just direction), the machine stops escalating.
And the moment you restore merit-based hiring and stop screening for alignment, you start hiring people back who are actually good at the job.
Case Study B: DOJ and Political Interference — The Legal Imagery Layer
The Department of Justice has a specific vulnerability because the rule of law is its nominal mission, but its day-to-day work is deeply political.
The structure:
At the top: political appointees who want to use the justice system as a political weapon. This could be targeting opponents, protecting allies, or advancing a political agenda.
In the middle: career prosecutors, career attorneys, and political appointees in charge of major offices. These are people who can decide which cases to prosecute, how to prosecute them, and what facts to emphasize.
At the bottom: line prosecutors doing the actual work.
The capture mechanics:
The middle layer is staffed with people selected for willingness: will you prosecute this case? Will you make this argument? Will you move this fast?
They are under pressure to show political results: bring cases against the administration's enemies. Protect the administration's allies. Use the justice system to advance the political agenda.
They use legal imagery to justify it: this is not political, it is following the law. We are just being more aggressive. We are interpreting the statute in a novel way, but it is a defensible interpretation.
The observable signatures:
- Prosecutions are brought that seem selective (targeting one side more than the other)
- Legal theories are aggressive (novel interpretations of statute, aggressive sentencing recommendations)
- Dissent within DOJ is noted and sometimes punished
- Career prosecutors quit or request reassignment
- Courts reject some of the legal theories
- Watchdog groups and inspectors general raise concerns
The vulnerability:
The middle layer in DOJ is staffed with lawyers, and lawyers are trained to think about law. Even a lawyer who is willing to be aggressive about legal interpretation has to answer to courts, to the ethics rules, and to history.
You cannot completely politicize the justice system without creating a trail of questionable decisions that can be challenged in court and that will be seen as abuse.
And the moment you restore merit-based hiring and remove the political pressure, you start promoting people who take professional responsibility seriously.
Case Study C: HHS and Regulatory Churn — The Speed-Over-Quality Layer
Health and Human Services is a natural site for middle-layer capture because it has a huge regulatory footprint and the regulatory process is slow.
The structure:
At the top: political appointees who want to reverse regulations that they view as overreach. They want to do it fast.
In the middle: career staff and political appointees who are supposed to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. They are under pressure to move fast. They are also under pressure to produce legal justifications.
At the bottom: the implementation level—state governments, health care providers, people affected by the regulations.
The capture mechanics:
The middle layer tries to move fast through a process designed to be slow. They try to follow the APA, but they cut corners: rushing notice periods, ignoring comments, issuing guidance that contradicts the regulation, changing course repeatedly.
They use legal imagery to justify it: we are following procedure. We have issued notice. We have considered comments. The fact that we are ignoring them is legal discretion, not violation of law.
The observable signatures:
- Regulations are issued, then revised, then revised again
- Different regions or agencies interpret the regulation differently
- Guidance contradicts the regulation
- Courts strike down rules as violating the APA
- States are confused about what is actually required
- Career staff point out the legal problems; they are overruled
The vulnerability:
The middle layer in HHS is staffed with career bureaucrats and regulatory specialists. These people understand the APA; they know what compliance looks like. They also know what courts will do with sloppy rulemaking.
You cannot completely ignore procedure without creating a trail of mistakes that courts will seize on.
And the moment you restore process discipline and slow things down, the rules start surviving court challenge because they are actually done right.
Section 10: Appendices
Appendix A: Glossary
Adverse action: A personnel action (removal, suspension, demotion, etc.) taken against a federal employee. Civil service law requires that adverse actions meet certain standards and that employees have certain rights.
At-will employment: Employment where either the employer or the employee can end the employment at any time, for any reason, without cause.
Competitive service: Federal positions filled through a competitive hiring process, with certain job protections and merit-based promotion.
Excepted service: Federal positions that are exempt from competitive service requirements. Some excepted positions have protections; others do not.
Merit protection board: An independent tribunal that hears appeals of adverse actions and other personnel disputes for career federal employees.
Office of Special Counsel: An independent agency that investigates whistleblower retaliation and other violations of federal employee rights.
OMB: Office of Management and Budget. Oversees federal budgets and regulatory policy.
OPM: Office of Personnel Management. The federal government's human resources agency.
Policy-influencing position: A position that has significant impact on policy development or implementation. The exact definition is contested, but it is the basis for the Schedule F / Schedule Policy/Career reclassification attempt.
Project 2025: A comprehensive policy and personnel program developed by the Heritage Foundation and related organizations to prepare for a potential Trump administration. It included training, policy documents, and a database of potential appointees.
Schedule C: A Civil Service Reform Act category for "confidential" or "policy-determining" positions. Noncareer, at-will, typically held by people with close ties to political appointees.
Schedule Policy/Career (formerly Schedule F): A proposed reclassification of career positions into a new category that would reduce job protections and make removals easier.
SES (Senior Executive Service): The top tier of the career civil service, typically senior managers and policy experts. There are both career and noncareer SES positions.
Whistleblower retaliation: Taking an adverse personnel action against an employee because they disclosed violations of law or mismanagement.
Appendix B: Middle-Layer Archetypes
Understanding the middle layer means understanding the types of people who populate it. These archetypes represent composite types; individuals may combine traits from multiple archetypes.
The True Believer
Characteristic: A person who genuinely believes in the political mission and sees government as a vehicle for advancing it. They are energetic, willing to escalate, and relatively unconcerned about legal constraints because they believe the mission justifies the means.
What they do well: Generate momentum. Push boundaries. Energize others.
What they do poorly: Understand law and process. Manage complexity. Build institutional capacity.
Risk profile: High-risk for overreach and for creating legal vulnerabilities.
The Climber
Characteristic: A person for whom alignment with power is a ladder. They are flexible, willing to serve whoever is in charge, and optimized for personal advancement.
What they do well: Navigate internal politics. Read the room. Build relationships with people in power.
What they do poorly: Develop deep expertise. Commit to institutions. Stay when power shifts.
Risk profile: Medium-risk for instability and for decisions that benefit them personally but harm the organization.
The Shield-Lawyer
Characteristic: A person hired to provide legal cover for aggressive actions. They are smart, often with good credentials, and tasked with finding legal justifications for what the political leadership wants to do.
What they do well: Write compelling legal memos. Find novel legal theories. Provide the aesthetic of legitimacy.
What they do poorly: Be honest about weaknesses in legal arguments. Warn when something is vulnerable. Resist pressure to justify unjustifiable actions.
Risk profile: High-risk for creating legal strategies that look good on paper but fail in court.
The Operator
Characteristic: A person hired to get things done. They are experienced, know how systems work, and can move fast. They may not care deeply about the mission, but they are competent at execution.
What they do well: Move fast. Navigate bureaucracy. Implement decisions.
What they do poorly: Question direction. Think strategically about long-term consequences. Build consensus.
Risk profile: Medium-risk for unintended consequences of fast action and for exhaustion.
The Comms Enforcer
Characteristic: A person hired because they are good at messaging and at keeping the narrative consistent. They are focused on how things are portrayed, not on what they actually are.
What they do well: Frame actions positively. Create talking points. Manage the media.
What they do poorly: Distinguish between narrative success and actual success. Think about real outcomes. Be honest about limitations.
Risk profile: Medium-risk for taking actions based on how they will be framed rather than on whether they are effective.
The Silent Career Survivor
Characteristic: A career official who has learned to keep their head down, to comply with what is asked, and to avoid standing out. They have seen administrations come and go and are focused on getting to retirement without incident.
What they do well: Survive. Keep systems running. Know where the bodies are buried.
What they do poorly: Raise concerns. Push back. Lead change.
Risk profile: Low-risk for egregious misconduct, but risky because they are not checking what is happening around them.
Appendix C: Evidence Checklist
When assessing whether middle-layer capture is occurring, look for these specific indicators:
Staffing and Personnel:
- Schedule C allocations and hiring in specific agencies
- Hiring records showing loyalty-screening questions or decisions
- High turnover in middle-level positions
- Number of "acting" titles and duration of acting arrangements
- Hiring of people from political organizations vs. people with relevant expertise
Guidance and Direction:
- Consistency of guidance across regions and offices
- Changes to guidance over time and whether changes are explained
- Contradictions between different directives
- Whether legal review is documented or evident
Culture and Behavior:
- Reports of retaliation against career staff who raised concerns
- Patterns of quitting or reassignment by career staff
- Whistleblower complaints
- Inspector general investigation findings
- Reports of pressure to make particular decisions
Outcomes:
- Litigation against the agency and outcomes of cases
- Consistency of enforcement across regions
- Reversal of policies after initial implementation
- Quality of rulemaking (are regulations being struck down by courts?)
Documentation:
- Availability of records of decisions
- Patterns of missing documentation or ambiguous decision trails
- Email deletion or off-the-books decision-making
- Memos that assert positions without legal justification
Appendix D: Timeline Skeleton for Documentation
A white paper is strengthened by specific dated examples. This skeleton can be used to organize events:
Pre-administration (planning phase):
- Project 2025 training and database development
- Staffing planning and applicant screening
Day 1-30 (initial moves):
- Executive orders issued
- Initial staffing announcements
- Early implementation directives
Month 2-4 (scaling up):
- Personnel moves accelerate
- First implementation chaos
- Early litigation
Month 5-12 (consolidation and breakdown):
- Evidence of middle-layer dysfunction
- Contradictory guidance and walk-backs
- Staff departures
Ongoing (documented examples):
- Specific agencies and specific actions
- Litigation outcomes
- Whistleblower complaints
- IG findings
Conclusion
Everyone focuses on the wrong layer.
The boots are real. The enforcement drama is real. The political theatre is real. But they are not where institutional capture succeeds or fails. The success or failure happens in the middle layer.
The middle layer is where intent becomes action. Where signals become policy. Where leadership's direction gets translated into the instructions that career staff receive. Where the machinery actually turns.
And if the middle layer is populated by people selected for loyalty rather than competence, placed under pressure to move fast rather than to move carefully, rewarded for performance theater rather than actual outcomes, then what you get is a loyal but incompetent bureaucracy.
Loyal enough to generate fear. Incompetent enough to generate constant mistakes. Together, those two things create a system that is simultaneously terrifying and brittle.
This paper has argued three central claims:
First: The middle-layer capture is real. It is not a master plan executed with precision. It is a staffing and incentive structure that produces consistent dysfunction. But consistent dysfunction still harms people. Chilling effects still suppress truth. Chaos still destabilizes institutions.
Second: This dysfunction is visible if you know where to look. Contradictory guidance. Constant reshuffles. Big rollouts followed by walk-backs. Obsession with narrative over outcomes. These are the signatures of a loyalty-first system.
Third: The middle layer is reversible. It is not as easy as some people hope (you cannot just elect a new president and have everything snap back). But it is also not as hard as others fear. A competent successor with political will can dismantle the entire apparatus in a hundred days, then rebuild it on merit and truth.
The strategic value of this analysis is this: it clarifies where the real vulnerability lies. Not at the top (which is politically insulated). Not at the bottom (which is just following orders). In the middle.
A middle layer built on loyalty and fear cannot defend itself. Career staff will not die for their Schedule C overlords. Courts will not defend aggressive legal interpretations that are being litigated. Congress will not spend political capital defending a regime that is obviously broken.
What they built was loud and scary and effective at creating fear. What they built was not durable.
A successor who understands that brittleness, and who is willing to move fast and completely, has an enormous strategic opening. The machine is exposed. It can be dismantled. It can be rebuilt.
That is the opportunity.
That is also the responsibility.
About This Paper
This white paper is an analysis of federal middle-layer capture, with specific focus on Schedule C and Schedule F/Schedule Policy/Career mechanisms. It is intended for policy professionals, transition planners, and anyone concerned with institutional stability and the rule of law.
The analysis draws on public reporting, government documents, expert commentary, and organizational theory. It does not include classified information and makes no claims beyond what is evident from open sources.
The recommendations in Section 7 are presented as one strategic option available to a successor administration. They are neither the only option nor a requirement. They are presented to clarify what is operationally possible and what the specific vulnerabilities of the current system actually are.
End of White Paper
Total word count: approximately 12,800 words
