Former President Trump on Tuesday renewed his pledge, made a year ago, to revive an initiative to strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections and “shatter the deep state” if elected again.

In October 2020, the then-president signed an executive order establishing a new Schedule F within the federal government’s excepted service for federal workers in policy-related jobs and exempting their positions from most civil service rules. The edict ordered agencies to identify positions that would qualify for the new job classification and convert employees in those jobs to Schedule F, effectively making them at-will employees.

Although some agencies had begun work on the process of finding and requesting permission to reclassify employees to Schedule F—and the Office of Management and Budget received the go ahead to convert 68% of its workforce to the new job classification—ultimately there wasn’t enough time to implement the order before President Biden was inaugurated. Biden then quickly rescinded Trump’s edict.

In a video message posted to Rumble, a YouTube alternative popular among members of the right that also hosts Trump’s Truth Social social media platform, Trump, who declared his candidacy for president last year, vowed to revive Schedule F immediately upon his return to the White House and to remove bureaucrats in national security and law enforcement agencies, whom he claimed without evidence are “persecuting” conservatives.

“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” he said. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”

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