You can tell a lot about a regime by who it chooses to silence.

Heather Cox Richardson’s August 2 report zeroed in on the Trump administration’s crackdown on public sector competence—specifically, its move to gut the civil service and replace career professionals with loyalists. But what caught my attention was the language: “Schedule F.”

Schedule F is more than a bureaucratic reclassification. It is a blueprint for eliminating institutional memory. For purging experts. For ensuring that truth, once inconvenient, could be replaced with loyalty.

The idea is simple: If the facts don’t help you, remove the people who produce them.

That’s not just dangerous. That’s totalitarian-adjacent. The kind of structural sabotage you see in collapsing democracies, not functional ones.

Richardson’s reporting situates this in the broader context of Project 2025—a radical blueprint to dismantle the administrative state. But I see something even more targeted: the assassination of competence.

We’ve seen this tactic elsewhere. Authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Turkey didn’t start by banning elections. They started by eroding trust in the professional class: scientists, analysts, economists, teachers, journalists. The strategy wasn’t brute force—it was slow attrition. Remove one deputy here, sideline a researcher there. Within a few years, the smart people are gone—and the only ones left are those who ask no questions.

Trump’s allies want to destroy what they call the “deep state.” But what they’re actually dismantling is capacity.

And they know it.

You can’t run a functional nation-state with pundits and podcasters. You need engineers, auditors, climate scientists, epidemiologists, linguists, transportation planners. People who didn’t sign up to be partisan warriors—but who know how to keep the lights on, the planes flying, the data clean.

Fire those people and you don’t get “freedom.” You get entropy.

The genius of the American system wasn’t just checks and balances—it was distributed competence. Agencies with guardrails. Departments with standards. Professionals who could operate across administrations because their jobs weren’t about pleasing a president, but serving a public.

That’s what Schedule F is meant to break.

It took hundreds of thousands of positions and turned them into political spoils. That means anyone who tells the truth—about unemployment numbers, census accuracy, clean energy investment, pandemic response—could be shown the door for “disloyalty.”

This isn’t speculative. We’ve seen what happens when facts are replaced with faith.

• Pandemic death tolls manipulated
• Climate reports buried
• Intelligence warnings ignored
• Economic forecasts rewritten to flatter power

This is what institutional death looks like. Not with a bang, but a quiet reassignment.

What we need now is not nostalgia—but vigilance. The civil service was the nation’s immune system. With it gutted, we don’t just lose policy expertise. We lose resilience.

And the next crisis—whether it’s viral, financial, or geopolitical—will hit a hollowed-out state.

That’s not liberation. That’s planned fragility.
And it serves only one goal: power without accountability.

We need to see this clearly.
And we need to say it loudly:

Competence is not the enemy.
It’s the last line of defense.