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

Donald Trump on Monday announced that Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, will join him on the 2024 ticket as his vice presidential nominee. Vance reportedly bested fellow Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for the role.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of vice president of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance from the great state of Ohio,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “J.D. honorably served our country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, summa cum laude, and is a Yale Law School graduate, where he was editor of The Yale Law Journal and president of the Yale Law Veterans Association.”

Although the Trump campaign indicated on Monday that it would shift focus toward a message of “unity” at this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after the former president’s ear was grazed during an assassination attempt Saturday, Vance is a conservative firebrand who has reveled in culture-war issues like abortion, restricting Americans’ access to gender-affirming care, and crusading against diversity-equity-inclusion programs in government and the private sector.

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

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

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

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

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