Donald Trump won the 2024 election after promising to wage war on elements of the federal work force. “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,” he said in the first major rally of his campaign. Russell Vought, whom Mr. Trump has tapped to head the Office of Management and Budget, has said he wants bureaucrats to be “increasingly viewed as the villains.” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the leaders of Mr. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, promise to enact “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”
Yet Mr. Trump has also signaled a desire to use the administrative state to advance his policy goals. His vice president-elect, JD Vance, has championed bank regulation, rail-safety standards and other forms of administrative oversight. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, says that he is looking to impose new regulations, promising, for example, to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals.” Mr. Trump vows to raise billions of dollars by “taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
These two impulses — to destroy and to wield the power of the federal bureaucracy — are bound at times to conflict. But they need not always. Mr. Trump can and should fuse these two impulses into a single governing ideology. What he should seek is neither the libertarian dream of a vanishing government nor an ostensibly independent bureaucracy, but a leaner administrative state that is ready to execute the will of the people, as reflected in Mr. Trump’s governing priorities.
To make the federal bureaucracy more responsive to democratic outcomes, Mr. Trump will first need to be able to appoint civil servants who will carry out the agenda on which he successfully campaigned. At the core of this effort is Schedule F, an executive order that would allow the Trump administration to reclassify tens of thousands of government workers as “at will” employees, making it easier to remove those who are unwilling to enact his policies. Mr. Trump issued this order at the end of his first presidency (only for President Biden to rescind it) and has vowed to do so again.
Critics have objected that such streamlining would erode the political neutrality of the federal bureaucracy. But there is good reason to regard that neutrality as a fantasy. In 2024, Kamala Harris received 100 percent of donations to the two major presidential campaigns made by employees of the Education Department, 99 percent of those made by employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, 97 percent from the Energy Department and 96 percent from the Commerce Department, according to data compiled by the publication Government Executive. (Broadly similar figures were reported in 2020 and 2016.) By replacing civil servants with political appointees, Mr. Trump would engage in a rebalancing, bringing the ideology of the bureaucracy closer to the views of the country that elected him.
This approach may be compared with that of Andrew Jackson, another populist who sought to replace long-serving bureaucrats with political appointees. To be sure, his reforms gave rise to real abuses by promoting political patronage, and Mr. Trump’s are likely to have downsides as well. Among other things, replacing civil servants with political appointees will reduce the experience and expertise of the federal bureaucracy.
But presidents, like voters, value competence most when it is aligned with their political goals. And as historians such as Sean Wilentz have argued, Jackson’s reforms had a democratic effect, opening up the civil service to a broader range of candidates. Those reforms also made clear, as Jackson said, that in America the people are sovereign, and when they speak, government officials are “bound to obey or resign.”
More recently, presidents of both parties have complained about the intractability of the federal bureaucracy, and conflicts have been particularly acute over foreign policy. Franklin D. Roosevelt inveighed against a Foreign Service that was slower to recognize the fascist threat than he was. He also lamented that the Treasury Department was so “large and far-flung and ingrained in its practices” that he could not control it even with a sympathetic secretary. Today, higher education levels increasingly correlate with more progressive political views, widening the ideological gap between credentialed bureaucrats and many of their fellow citizens, and increasing the need for political accountability.
A leaner, less autonomous bureaucracy should appeal to otherwise disparate factions of Mr. Trump’s coalition. There is a clear attraction for populists like Mr. Vance who see the administrative state as a necessary means to resist private forces of oppression — be it corporations that pollute rural communities or universities that discriminate against applicants who aren’t seen as contributing to diversity. But even conservatives who view the administrative state as violating the separation of powers envisioned by the Constitution can embrace a powerful executive as a means to restrain the federal bureaucracy. And Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can applaud a strong president who clears bureaucratic impediments to startups and space exploration.
In theory, extensive presidential control over the bureaucracy should appeal as well to those leftists and liberals who place democracy above technocracy. It is easy to imagine a left-populist president whose attempts to change American foreign policy are resisted by career employees. Such a leader would be more likely to succeed if Mr. Trump’s reforms are already in place.
The left-wing government of Mexico is already pursuing a similar approach. The country’s previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ran on a platform that promised simultaneously to lift up the common people and to punish what he called the country’s “golden bureaucracy,” an array of officials who he believed acted for their own benefit. He championed a “minimal state” in which poverty was reduced through direct cash transfers, while institutions like government-subsidized day care centers lost funding. Critics have accused Mr. López Obrador of breaking with left-wing commitments by attacking government, but his protégée Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidency in June with nearly 60 percent of the vote, reflecting popular approval of his policies.
If Mr. Trump is to enjoy his own success, he will need not only to pare back the public sector but also to offer policies that help working-class voters. We can already see the outlines of this approach in his promise to promote tariffs while cutting environmental regulations, to preserve Social Security while reducing the number of federal employees. But he will have to do something more general, too: He will need to demonstrate that if the Democrats are the party of government, then the Republicans are the party of governance, promoting effective programs as they cut unhelpful bureaucracy.
The post Trump Hates the ‘Deep State.’ But He Also Needs It. appeared first on New York Times.
