The city of Washington is partially built on swamp lands, but the metaphorical swamp that matters here is made up of many different human groupings that come together only in their use of federal authority, and the federal budget, to further their own ends. Among those, two in particular stand out:
The echoing swamp is an artifact of the herd instinct: new arrivals absorb herd behavior mainly because they're hugely outnumbered and that's where the social support is - and, of course, this has a ratchet effect because the longer they stay the deeper they sink, and so the more pressure they put on new arrivals to conform.
The metastasizing swamp is an artifact of permanence: politicians and their policies come and go, but automatic monthly deposits are automatic - and therefore all of the career incentives are negative for fundemental change and positive for incremental growth: growth in budget, growth in staffing, and growth in span of control.
History shows that it doesn't take a machiavellian social scientist to affect behavioral change among echoists, all it takes is courage and perseverance. Basically, if a few leaders change their behavior by only a little bit the herd will take immediate umbrage, but the continuation of that change will cause a gradual re-alignment of social and behavioral forces until the entire herd suddenly and unexpectedly thunders off in a new direction.
During the 2016 campaign Candidate Trump had a number of good ideas on forcing change on echoists, among the most important of which were term limits and deplorable speech habits.
Contrary to popular opinion term limits do not need a constitutional amendment or even an act of Congress: the GOP can simply change its rules on the nominations process to limit incumbents to perhaps three renominations for the house and one for the senate - because, assuming the GOP can muster the courage and perseverance to stick to it, the other party will ultimately have to choose between becoming a minor league gerontology or following suit.
Blunt speech has salutary effects because people think as they speak: so a GOP campaign to have people say what they mean without regard to political correctness and without concern about deliberate misinterpretation by political opponents will soon free them to think both more clearly and with less commitment to pre-determined positions - and once a small percentage of those a newcomer comes into contact with develop immunities to the Washington Way, this disease, whose primary diagnostic characteristic is the patient's reliance on contentless verbal diarrhea to shield the self from criticism, will stop spreading.
More subtly, a general GOP commitment to plain speech and clear thinking will be largely unremarked by the people "back home," but the more the democrat media over react to politically incorrect speech by the GOP, the more voters will turn against those whose politically correct speech betrays their perception of themselves as the voter's moral and intellectual superiors.
The contrast between the generally positive voter reaction to Trump's tweets and the contemptuous amusement with which many are greeting the latest attempt by democrats and their media colleagues to pose as normal Americans through frequent recourse to the swearing and violent imagery characteristic of politically correct "gritty" entertainment illustrates this nicely. People know, for example, that wiretaps can be wireless but hardly anyone believes that either Nancy Pelosi or Bill Maher regularly sprinkle profanity into their daily conversations with friends.
The combination of term limits, good candidates, and clearly ennunicated conservative policies can be expected to give the GOP a long term political advantage, but even overwhelming GOP majorities in both houses will remain largely powerless to affect real reform if everything they do falls prey to the civil service enthusiasm gap - under which democrat policies are enthusiastically adopted and enforced, but those originated by conservatives are stone walled and sabotaged.
The enthusiasm canyon is a long term cultural artifact, largely a consequence of the reality disconnect affecting otherwise smart and motivated people who see their automatic, monthly, deposit as a riskless right; have boring, tightly constrained jobs in an inflexible heirarchy; and are continually exposed to leftist babble in the political echo chamber.
Cutting part of the civil service out is an obvious remedy - but, like dieting, it never works in the long run and even removing 50,000 salaries and overheads from government for the duration of the President's term would have a negliable effect on the federal budget.
To succeed, to get a less aggressive, less politically ambitious, smaller, and inherently weaker civil service, we need to make the civil service consume itself. Thus what we need to do is reverse the incentives it responds to long enough to permanently change its culture.
Two programs, implemented in combination, can wchieve this:
If the leave program continues the person's full salary and benefits for up to 60 months of work or study toward any trade, academic, or professional designation in any traditional trade, science, engineering, business, or health care discipline at any traditional institution provided that the person has a reasonable expectation of working, after graduation, for five months for each month for which salary and benefits are continued and may not return to paid government service except in elected or military roles during that work out period, we can expect tens of thousands to take up the offer.
Since people on study leave would continue to hold their positions replacements could not be hired and total civil service costs for salaries and benefits would not change. Since this offer would be of greatest interest to the youngest, brightest, and most aggressive in the civil service, the organization's overall demographic make-up would slowly shift to the older, more risk averse, keep-your-head-down 9 to 5 and don't give a s*t crowd - and, because their workload would increase with each new departure, the incentive to "prioritizing work" (i.e. stripping the mandate) would quickly become irresistible.
Initially, of course, the bus drivers and garbage collectors would go on strike - or, more literally, the more visible programs conservatives favor would formally move to the bottom of the priority list; but, because high level budget allocations are directly under the control of the political appointees in each agency or department, this type of obstructionism is both more obvious and more easily defeated than strategies such as those aimed at silently increasing costs, reducing efficiency, or creating emotionally compelling victim stories.
In the middle term the educational leave program would both defang and shrink the civil service because having the best people leave early in their terms of service would quickly exacerbate conflicts between line managers and HR, increase the stakes for intra-departmental budget negotiations, lead to disruptive re-organizations in those areas of the civil service where the real mandate is weakest, and leave only older and relatively weaker candidates for promotions as key players retire or otherwise leave the service.
In the long run, furthermore, the program should prove self-extinguishing because continual pressure for increases in the number of years of service needed to qualify will combine with pressure for other work-arounds to turn it into little more than a combination of paid early retirement and nepotist scholarship programs - but, by then, the civil service will have stablised at perhaps two thirds of its present size and be, on average, older, less arrogant, and more focused on delivering programs of actual benefit to the taxpayer.
During the program's effective life, furthermore, hundreds of millions in federal wage and benefits money that would otherwise merely feed the swamp would instead leave Washington for traditional university and trade school centers across the country, the better schools still teaching core sciences and related disciplines would see an influx of highly qualified, highly motivated, students who don't need part time jobs and can therefore spend more time on learning and research - and, for anything from six to twenty years there'll be a steady stream of new graduates who, instead of wasting their lives and skills spending taxpayer dollars, will re-enter the economy as net tax contributors.
The educational leave program will change civil service demographics while the second program, the imposition of responsibility for decision making, will change its incentives and thus its culture. Right now the civil service is extremely risk averse, but the risks it sees are mainly those of exposure, of offending against local mores, and of offending against broader standards of political correctness.
Under the uniform code of military justice an officer cannot obey an illegal order - and, while this didn't exactly work out for Lt. Colonel Lakin, it's been that way since at least 1796 and provides a critically important control against breaks in the chain of command.
Apply the same ideas in the civil service: put in place penalties stopping just short of firing squads for civil servants who act on illegal orders, and you ultimately change all its behavioral incentives - and do so in the name of freedom, order, and the maintenance of constitutional law. Many of Obama's pen and phone programs, including the Obamacare "risk corridor" payments, transfers to Iran, partial amnesties, and the devaluation of unsecured assets in the Chrysler-Fiat transactions, would never have been acted on by a civil service aware that its own careers, incomes, and assets could be lost if those orders were successfully questioned in court.
The situation is analogous: when congress says one thing and the president does, as Obama regularly did, something else entirely then what we have is a break in the chain of command - and the military remedy is appropriate because a legal order, however, repugnant to the civil servants involved, will still command obedience, but extra-curricular abuses of power, particularly executive power, will be stopped.
More subtly, this will eliminate much of the civil service enthusiasm chasm because democrats in politics and the judiciary are working with the deep state now to stymie any republican action that has even the slightest chance of being declared illegal by a compliant judge - but after the first few senior civil servants lose their positions, salaries, entitlements, and other assets we'll see this type of work to rule action applied roughly equally to policy initiatives from both sides.
In summary, Washington's social swamp is best drained from the outside: by bringing politicians closer to their constituents and forcing them to use language in ways that commit them to both actions and consequences; but the bureaucratic swamp is best draining from the inside, by taking out top performers before they're promoted, by forcing individual civil servants to take responsibility for their actions, and ultimately by using limitations on the available human resources to force the re-alignment of organizational incentives with policy success, not with expenditures or growth in responsibilities.