Even though it’s been in circulation for around 20 months, the rediscovery of a video and statement Donald Trump made back in March 2023 is causing a lot of buzz thanks to his resounding win last week.

It was made at a time when Trump was imperiled by lawfare and his political future was in doubt. But fate determined otherwise, which means Trump’s “Agenda 47” will be unrolled over the next couple of months. And the deep state is scared.

With a vow on Day One to reinstate Schedule F — an executive order that reclassifies thousands of government employees as “at-will” civil servants who can be dismissed without cause — as well as a promise to relocate federal agencies outside Washington to be closer to those they serve, thousands of those who have gummed up the federal works for decades are weighing their options. (This despite Joe Biden’s efforts to thwart Trump with rulemaking last spring.)

“I believe there will be a significant exodus among the one-third of our workforce that is eligible to retire,” said Nicole Cantello, a former lawyer for the EPA. That agency is a prime Trump target, and as Cantello confided to The New York Times, “Many of them will be unwilling to relive all the hostility they experienced four years ago.” But what the Times reporters saw as “exhaustion” on the part of federal employees is truly a realization that a new populist-controlled broom by the name of Elon Musk may be sweeping things clean.

“Now, for the first time since Grover Cleveland returned in 1893, the folks who staff the agencies and handle everything from tax receipts to meat inspections to air traffic control have actually seen how the president-elect behaves,” noted Politico’s Playbook. “And they have good reason to be concerned.”

As do the American people about unelected bureaucrats.

Trump’s argument regarding bureaucratic inertia holds weight. “Currently, removing corrupt or poor-performing federal workers is time-consuming and cumbersome,” Trump claimed in that 2023 “Plan to Shatter the Deep State.” “Firing underperforming employees takes a year or longer and is often completely impossible.” He added, “One study found that over a 10-year period, federal employees were fired at a rate of less than one in one thousand per year.” That’s not because they uniformly do excellent work.

In many cases, it seems the desire to be a public servant and solve problems has yielded over time to that of keeping a job and collecting a paycheck regardless of its utility.

Moreover, let us remind readers that there were those anonymous turncoats in the federal workforce who decided it was important to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” believing Trump acted “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

It’s not only civilian government employees who are concerned, though. “Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back,” said a CNN article from the collective pens of Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britzky. While Biden has troops along the border to assist in its security, the question being discussed at the Pentagon is about what happens if the military is called in via the Insurrection Act to deal with the deportation of illegal immigrant criminal gangs and whether that runs afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limits the use of the military for law enforcement.

That will certainly be for the courts to decide, but the popular mandate now enjoyed by Donald Trump dictates that these criminals must go, and things in the federal government must change. “Trump has spent the last decade fighting the Deep State, which you could call ‘the blob,’” David Strom points out at Hot Air, “and in most cases, the Deep State won. In fact, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election due to the machinations of bureaucrats who abused their power to subvert his direction, who leaked, lied, and disobeyed his direct orders. The entire COVID disaster was caused by Trump being outplayed by Fauci and Birx. Never again.”

To be honest, it’s pretty simple: There’s a new sheriff in town, he’s conveying the people’s marching orders, and these deep-rooted deep-staters are (supposedly) public servants.

If they’re disinclined to do things his way, the highway awaits.