Trump Hates the ‘Deep State.’ But He Also Needs It.
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.
