Illustration by David Plunkert
Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed that it would “be nice if we got along with Russia” during his campaign, and members of the Duma had greeted his victory with champagne toasts. But Putin quickly brushed the notion aside. There would be no point. Though American presidents come and go, he said, nothing ever really changes: “Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark-blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.”
Putin’s cold-eyed assessment is a minority view now that Trump is back in the White House. Trump himself boasts that he can revolutionize the way America is governed. Announcing the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by his henchman Elon Musk, Trump claimed that he would “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy.” At other times Trump promised to “shatter the deep state.” Critics take him at his word; the Financial Times columnist Edward Luce summed up prevailing fears under the headline trump’s demolition of the u.s. state, and compared Trump to Caligula, who “killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself.” The Atlantic, an ever-reliable bellwether of elite opinion, forecast “a constitutional crisis greater than Watergate.” Trump’s choice of appointees, derided by the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie as a “set of cranks, charlatans and apparatchiks,” confirmed the widespread belief that Trump poses an existential threat to the Republic. And Project 2025, the more-than-nine-hundred-page wish list of right-wing policy proposals assembled by the Heritage Foundation, was invoked by the Democrats in the 2024 election as a terrible warning of what a Trump victory would entail.
The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero, pithily labeled Trump a “one-man constitutional crisis,” citing his pledges to deport more than eleven million immigrants and ban travelers from Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, along with sundry other violations of the Bill of Rights. But Romero’s diatribe was penned back in July 2016, four months before Trump’s first election victory. As it turned out, his initial term as president largely confirmed Putin’s assessment. Promises to wall off the Mexican border, abolish Obamacare, largely eliminate the Department of Education, and exclude Muslims from entering the country either went nowhere or achieved only limited success. Despite his fiery rhetoric, Trump succeeded in deporting fewer immigrants than Obama had during either of his terms, and about the same number as Biden went on to deport.
To Trump’s fury, the FBI lent credence to the ill-founded conspiracy theory that he was in treacherous collusion with Putin. Despite his qualms, Trump was unable to counter the concerted drive by public-health officials to impose social restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as closing the schools—surely one of the most glaring exercises in untrammeled bureaucratic power in this country’s history.
Most important, Trump’s effort to cling to power by interfering in the 2020 electoral process was a total failure. His objections were rebuffed by the courts, even though he had appointed many of the judges handling the cases. The rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 with his encouragement failed to delay the official certification of his defeat by more than a day.
In some areas, the bureaucracy did shrink. The Environmental Protection Agency shed just under 5 percent of its workforce, who either quit, took buyouts, or retired, including many involved in climate research. The Department of Labor took the hardest hit, losing more than 10 percent of its head count. Other agencies, notably the State and Education Departments, also contracted, but their core functions remained largely unmolested.
One particularly striking example of Trump’s inability to get his way was related to me by the retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor, a senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense at the end of Trump’s first term. In the immediate wake of the 2020 election, he said, he advised Trump on issuing an order to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. On receipt of the directive, the Pentagon high command erupted in a storm of outrage. Senior generals reportedly labeled the plan catastrophic and rushed to the White House to tell Trump the order was unfeasible. Unwilling, as he often was, to push back against powerful opposition, Trump beat a speedy retreat and rescinded the order. “There was a Trump presidency,” Macgregor told me. “There never was a Trump Administration.”
Having had four years to brood on his inability to impose his will and whims on the bureaucrats, Trump has returned to office more determined than ever to implement his pledge to “dismantle bureaucracy,” or at least bring it under his control. Rather than stocking his Cabinet with figures acceptable to the Washington establishment and the mainstream media—such as the former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, the retired Marine Corps general James Mattis, the investment banker Steve Mnuchin, or the corporate lawyer Christopher Wray, four appointments he later regretted—Trump has reached for less conventional figures whose loyalty he deems dependable. The big question is therefore whether he can really demolish the state, or at least confirm widespread fears that he will discard democratic guardrails.
Amid the preinaugural assortment of eccentric choices, one sounded a serious alarm: the selection of Russell Vought—a fervent Christian nationalist and a key architect of Project 2025—to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Trump confidently declared, “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People.” In an interview with Tucker Carlson in November, Vought explained that the OMB has the power not only to prevent agencies from spending money appropriated by Congress, but also to pass judgment on whether agency spending is “good or bad.” “It is the president’s most important tool for dealing with the bureaucracy and administrative state,” he said. “And, you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that.” Vought is now in charge of the budget machine, eager to succeed in defeating what he calls an “amorphous oligarchy, administrative deep state,” citing precedents in Nixon’s use of the OMB to “tame the bureaucracy.”
Vought, however, is not a newcomer. He already served as a deputy director and later as the director of OMB during the first Trump Administration. Though charged with essentially the same mandate he has now, Vought had little to show for it by the time he departed. In his talk with Carlson, expounding on his views of the detested federal bureaucracy, Vought took as his first example Trump’s efforts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in 2019. “We cut the money off. And it was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy,” he said. Trump’s effort, apparently a means to elicit political dirt on the Biden family, was considered so outrageous that the Democrats successfully impeached him—but the funds went through anyway. Further Trump efforts to stop the provision of money for such things as disaster-relief funding, grants for sanctuary cities, and infrastructure dollars for blue states—attempting to punish California in particular—hardly fared better.
Though Vought previously came into office pledging to slash the federal deficit and eviscerate costly regulations, the deficit in fact soared to more than $3 trillion by the time he left. Nor was the administration’s drive to cut regulations much of a success. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity, of the 258 attempts to effect a change in regulations during Trump’s first term, fewer than a quarter survived court challenges.
Among Trump’s principal targets is the so-called administrative state, meaning the power of federal agencies to interpret legislation, essentially giving them lawmaking powers. Thanks to a recent decision by the Supreme Court that struck down essential features of the Chevron doctrine (the outcome of a 1984 Supreme Court decision upholding the legitimacy of delegating policy interpretation to government agencies), the new administration could have a potent weapon in pursuit of this goal. Instead of agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency having the power to determine how laws are enacted, such authority will now be in the hands of the courts.
As a further instrument of enforcement, Trump is reviving a change to the civil code dubbed Schedule F. Enacted late in his first term and swiftly canceled by Biden, it removes job security from career civil-service employees deemed to have roles that influence policy—a group whose members could number in the tens of thousands—by reclassifying them as political appointees who can be fired without cause. Biden’s cancellation is easily reversible. And efforts late last year by congressional Democrats from Virginia, home to many government workers, to insulate them from Schedule F through legislation went nowhere. The cause suffered from lack of continued interest from the Biden Administration and the Democratic congressional leadership.
Frustration over balky bureaucrats has been a feature of political campaigns stretching back generations—at least since the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace made his denunciation of “pointy-headed bureaucrats” a central feature of his 1968 presidential campaign. (As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Wallace should be credited for “creat[ing] a national platform for a kind of right-wing populism . . . so infectious that it . . . has come to be adopted by pretty much everyone, across the political spectrum.”) Ronald Reagan made it a crucial plank of his appeal—one of his favorite quips being “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”
In office, Reagan duly set up a commission to root out waste and inefficiency. But the national debt almost tripled during his two terms, while the federal workforce expanded by more than three hundred thousand employees. Later on, Bill Clinton announced that “the era of big government is over” and entrusted Vice President Al Gore with the task of “reinventing government.” (The federal workforce did contract under Clinton, albeit by privatizing many of its functions, with numerous former government employees doing the same jobs at lower pay for private contractors. The same approach led to Clinton’s eager elimination of significant financial regulations, resulting inexorably in the 2008 Wall Street crash.) George W. Bush avidly pursued the notion of a “unitary executive,” invoking the authority of the Constitution’s Article II, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In 2012, Barack Obama announced an ambitious plan to merge six federal economic departments and replace the Department of Commerce, all in the interest of an “effective, lean government,” but the scheme died out.
Donald Rumsfeld was particularly determined to subjugate bureaucracy. Installed as defense secretary by George W. Bush in 2001, he arrived at the Pentagon pledging to transform the military. He claimed he would cut costs, jettison expensive weapons programs, privatize the vast military health system, and ensure a proper audit of Pentagon spending, all in the pursuit, he said at the start of his term, of meeting “the demands posed by an expansion of unconventional and asymmetrical threats in an era of rapid technological advances.” He liked to talk about “changing the culture” of the Pentagon and the need to implement new “tactics, techniques, and procedures.” But little came of these plans. Rumsfeld succeeded in canceling just one weapons program, a vastly over-budget artillery battery in development by the Army. Officials subjected to peremptory orders gradually realized that ignoring them carried little penalty. Less than nine months after taking office, Rumsfeld admitted defeat. In a bitter speech delivered to the Pentagon workforce on September 10, 2001, he castigated the Defense Department bureaucracy as “an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States. . . . With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.” Fortunately for him, the following day’s events gave him a different role to play.
Despite Trump’s alarming proposals and appointments, many people with experience in the vast apparatus of the federal government are skeptical that he will be more effective than he was the first time around. At the heart of his problem is the inability of anyone outside the bureaucracy to understand its inner workings at the operational level. The manuals of government departments provide intricate guidelines and procedures, totaling an intimidating morass of rules—guidebooks that the bureaucracy can use to justify its actions, or lack thereof. It is certainly difficult to see how outsiders, however ideologically fervent, can navigate these subterranean pathways. The Department of Commerce’s Alternative Personnel System Operating Procedures Manual, for example, runs to 105 pages. Homeland Security devotes 8 pages to regulations governing the proper use of the department’s letterhead. Deep in the Health and Human Services website is “Human Subject Regulations Decision Charts: 2018 Requirements,” a guidance that spans 15 pages. Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Public and Indian Housing has a 13-page document covering “Cash Management and Closeout Procedures for the Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHV) Program funds, and Supplemental Information.”
“It’s very difficult to change things when the bureaucracy sees you as a sworn enemy,” the former official Ike Brannon told me. Brannon has deep knowledge of the inner workings of the machine, having revolved at a senior level through a variety of positions in veiled but influential offices, including the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (a little known but immensely important component of the OMB), and several powerful congressional committees.
To illustrate his point, Brannon mentioned a seemingly obscure effort in which he was personally involved: winning compensation for kidney donors for their expenses—travel, absence from work—during the necessary tests and operations. (For the roughly ninety thousand Americans, disproportionately black, Hispanic, and Native American, currently waiting for a kidney transplant, there’s nothing obscure about it.) After lobbying by Brannon and others interested in the cause, Trump issued an executive order in 2019 directing the secretary of health and human services to devise a plan within thirty days to implement the directive. “But very little happened,” Brannon told me. “Because there’s an office deep down in Health and Human Services”—HRSA, the Health Resources and Services Administration—“and I heard some officials there thought it ‘grotesque’ that people should get money for donating their kidneys.” HRSA adopted a rule that essentially nullified the directive by setting the proposed compensation level far below what was needed, requiring the majority of recipients to pay the donor’s expenses. “It’s bullshit,” Brannon told me. “We’re going to ask a guy who’s on dialysis, who’s making ninety thousand dollars a year, to cover their costs?” The bureaucracy, he concluded, “can definitely stop stuff.”
These speed bumps may frustrate many of Trump’s initiatives, but they operate on a bipartisan basis. Biden, after all, pledged trillions of dollars in his climate, clean energy, and infrastructure projects. But by one estimate, more than half of that money has been halted, waiting to be appropriated or made available to agencies; $42.5 billion in broadband investments have so far led to zero new connections, and $7.5 billion for electric-vehicle charging stations across the country to only a smattering of new hookups. Though the machinery of bureaucracy may appear welcome when it hampers right-wing administrations, it does the same to liberal projects.
Incoming Trumpians are certainly fixated on career bureaucrats’ potential for obstruction. Leading the charge has been the America First Policy Institute. Dedicated to recasting the civil service, the AFPI features on its website a 15,000-word screed on the topic, authored by one of its directors, James Sherk, spawn of the Heritage Foundation, who crafted the dreaded Schedule F plan and has been connected to Project 2025. Sherk lists copious examples of obstruction, including foot-dragging by career bureaucrats in the Department of Education on writing mandated revisions applying to Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding. The proposed changes, which went on to narrow the definition of sexual misconduct and allow accused rapists to cross-examine victims in live hearings, were announced by Betsy DeVos in September 2017. But the final rules, which did indeed make life harder for victims of sex discrimination and harassment in schools, went into effect only in August 2020, almost three years later, and were largely reversed under the next administration by June 2022. Sherk and his fellow ideologues may hope that a reinstated Schedule F will enable them to clear out the footdraggers, but agency rule-making would still remain a cumbersome process subject to congressional review.
Guidance on cutting costs and bringing the bureaucracy to heel will supposedly be furnished by DOGE, the advisory body that Trump called “potentially ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” DOGE is dedicated, according to a manifesto published in the Wall Street Journal by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who was involved in the effort before the inauguration, to sweeping away the “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy” they see as “an existential threat to our republic,” which will be tamed by discarding thickets of regulations along with the unelected officials who devise and enforce them. Musk has blithely predicted that $2 trillion can thereby be lopped off the federal budget through the elimination of “wasteful spending.” Musk and Ramaswamy praised the Schedule F turnabout, for example, as well as Supreme Court rulings like the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, as a means to promote the agenda: “DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.”
As Trump would have it, DOGE will solve all his problems. But Musk will inevitably collide with powerful fellow appointees, who also enjoy access to the boss, and who will command the departments whose operations DOGE will supposedly be overhauling. Diverting accounts of shouting matches involving Musk and rivals while he sojourned at Mar-a-Lago during the transition period provide a taste of things to come, especially given Trump’s penchant for stirring rivalries among his courtiers as a means of maintaining control. As his friend Jeffrey Epstein recalled to the author Michael Wolff: “His people fight each other and then he poisons the well outside.” Despite Trump’s apparent affection for his super-wealthy supporters, there is no reason to suppose Musk will not be subjected to the same treatment at some point.
One former influential government official, who requested anonymity because of administration wrath, gave me a withering estimation of DOGE’s prospects. “They’re going to try two or three things they think will solve everything, which will be thrown out in court,” the official told me following the announcement of Musk’s appointment. “I assume the first thing they’ll do is some kind of hiring freeze, and then, after three months, they’ll realize agencies have started to figure out ways to get around it. And then they’ll try to stop that, and they won’t be able to do that. Then they’ll try to make people come to work five days a week, and that’s going to be difficult because a lot of these agencies don’t have offices for these people anymore. I think it’s going to be one thing after another, and maybe after four years the number of employees will be down 2 percent—maybe.”
Trump’s policies may have far-reaching effects on the U.S. economy, but paradoxically they will arise mainly through the continuation of Biden-era trends—notably the relatively inviting atmosphere for corporate interests. His ambitious scheme for tariffs, with its particular emphasis on Chinese imports, amplifies Biden’s steady escalation of economic warfare against Beijing. Wall Street is breathing a sigh of relief at the departure of Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler, along with his irksome initiatives to police the financial industry, especially its burgeoning crypto sector. But Gensler’s efforts were serially frustrated by court challenges, and the major Wall Street banks, despite their increasing concentration and ever-mounting exposure to risky derivatives, did not suffer unduly under the Biden regime. Trump’s replacement, the ardent deregulator and friend of crypto Paul Atkins, is likely more tolerant of banking excesses, but only in degree.
Meanwhile, corporate America has a lot to say about Trump’s plans. The president might have endorsed Robert F. Kennedy’s dream to Make America Healthy Again, surely a worthy objective, but the pharmaceutical industry’s legendary lobbying clout is likely to be a match for any potential encroachment on its balance sheets. (It is worth recalling that Michael Bloomberg, as an exceedingly powerful mayor of New York, tried and utterly failed to force the soft-drink industry to limit the size of sugar-rich servings.) Headlining Trump’s promised plans has of course been the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Even before the inauguration, the agriculture, meatpacking, and construction industries had voiced their concerns in opposition to the scheme—unsurprising in view of their heavy dependence on immigrant labor. Oil companies, which are major investors in the renewable industries fostered by Biden’s climate agenda, have also made clear their opposition to certain climate-policy rollbacks. More than a dozen Republican lawmakers have advocated for using a “scalpel, not a hatchet” in repealing policies from the Inflation Reduction Act, which created tax credits and jobs that benefited their districts.
It seems unlikely that any Trump pick will succeed in overhauling the Pentagon, certainly not the dramatically unqualified Pete Hegseth. Trump’s selection for deputy defense secretary, the private-equity mogul Stephen Feinberg, is deemed to have credentials in the field by virtue of his investments in defense contractors, including a company that tests hypersonic missiles, a technology with a record of test failures. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will surely find nothing to regret in this appointment, since a defense-contractor billionaire is hardly going to stand in the way of an amplified flow of money into the military budget. High-ranking officers may have quaked momentarily at reports that Trump would court-martial or simply dismiss those involved in the bungled departure from Kabul. But history indicates that Trump will retreat in the face of inevitably fierce resistance from the military services and their allies in Congress and the press. It is more likely that Trump’s promise to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine through diplomacy will come to nothing, and that the proxy conflict with Russia, so gratifying to the defense industry, will continue. Putin would, once again, not be surprised.
The evident capacity of corporations to steer Trump as they wish raises a larger point. Trump may inveigh against the “deep state,” but, as John Dilulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out, “the real deep state is the contractor state,” by which he means all those, led by the giant defense contractors, who are dependent on government spending. So when Musk, for example, talks airily of shuttering the admittedly disastrous F-35 fighter program, which employs more voters than contractors, he’s taking on a very deep and formidable state indeed.
The extent to which the federal government has been privatized across the board is rarely discussed, especially not by would-be cost cutters like Musk and Vought. Yet those federal bureaucrats presumptively headed for the chopping block play a diminished role in the functioning of government. “We’ve turned over the role of implementing laws to contractors,” Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Washington watchdog Project on Government Oversight, told me. An estimated four out of every ten people working full-time for the government are not federal employees—an explosion in outsourced administrative operations that took off with Gore’s exercise in reinventing government, Brian said, and that now ranges across the government. “Even the DOJ has a surprising number of contractors,” she told me. So, far from saving money, she said, contract workers end up costing taxpayers up to three times more than the same work done by federal employees. “They could fire every single federal employee and still not accomplish their goals,” Brian said. Even if Musk and his team want to get rid of regulations, “they’ll need federal employees to do it. It’s further evidence that they don’t know how government works.”
The fact that the contractor state will most likely survive Trump’s onslaught is not necessarily a cause for rejoicing. In so many areas, the system does not deliver—from multibillion-dollar weapons projects that don’t work to welfare benefits that don’t arrive and a health system that denies care. The most tangible result of Trump’s depredations will likely be the further enrichment of his ultra-wealthy supporters; consider the postelection boom in private-prison company stocks in anticipation of mass incarceration for migrants, or the hype around SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar government contracts. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans will grow ever more enraged by the system’s ongoing failures, creating bountiful opportunities for someone who caters to their rage—someone like Donald Trump.
