Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

Trump’s first term as president is a case in point. Bored by policy and process and frustrated by legislative horse-trading, he was unable to make good on his promise to drain the swamp. His administration ended up increasing the government’s size, adding, when you count contractors and grant recipients, more than 2 million government-backed jobs. And Trump’s attempts to cut back the regulatory state were repeatedly thwarted, not because there was a conspiracy against him but because his team was too often sloppy in execution and too rarely strategic.

Poorly drafted or overambitious executive orders and regulations were frequently challenged in court, usually with success. Of 258 Trump administration deregulatory actions that faced court challenge, only 58 survived intact. And even those were vulnerable when President Biden took office and began rolling back much of what Trump had achieved through administrative fiat.

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Which brings us back to OPM’s new rule. In October 2020, Trump issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” class of civil service, including “employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions.” This would have reclassified a large number of federal workers — it’s not clear exactly how many — as at-will employees who could be fired more easily than is currently possible. This was, of course, the point: It gave the president more control over the bureaucracy.

Whatever you think of this idea, the executive order was a major strategic blunder.

Schedule F wasn’t some base-pleaser that had to be put in place before the 2020 election. (Trump’s base does not, mostly, spend its days reading the Federal Register.) And if he lost, it was guaranteed to be rolled back, as it was as soon as Biden took office. Rushing to get this done before the election only put the bureaucracy on notice, and when Trump lost in November 2020, it had four years to respond. The OPM’s new rule is that response; it effectively blocks the president from involuntarily reclassifying career civil servants or stripping their job protections.

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Unforced errors like these will keep happening to Republicans unless they get serious about reform. This means more focus on the patient work of laying the legislative and bureaucratic groundwork for lasting change and less focus on showboating executive orders or sweeping denunciations of government on Fox News or social media. Republicans need to remember that they are the government and that they need to take some responsibility for fixing........

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