How Much of the Government Can Donald Trump Dismantle?

In the weeks before a President’s Inauguration, it’s common to see a rush of policy activity from the outgoing President, especially when the incoming one belongs to a different political party. John Adams famously appointed a bunch of judges on the eve of his replacement by Thomas Jefferson. The Carter Administration issued more than a hundred and seventy “midnight” regulations just before Ronald Reagan took office. The Biden Administration’s recent actions include extending protection from deportation for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and blocking oil and gas drilling across more than six hundred million acres of federal waters. Donald Trump could immediately move to reverse these actions, but Biden has imposed burdens and costs to deter this. Biden has also been employing the timeworn entrenchment technique of “burrowing in” some of his political appointees, by converting their jobs to civil-service positions so that they can stay on permanently in the administrative state.

The administrative state comprises more than two thousand federal executive agencies created by Congress and is staffed by more than two million people. Several thousand political appointees turn over with each Presidential Administration, but the rest are civil-service or career employees, most of whom cannot be fired at will. Many agencies’ missions are associated with liberal or progressive causes, and conservatives who favor small government or deregulation have historically expressed frustration about the intransigence or even existence of the federal bureaucracy. Gerald Ford said, “One of the enduring truths of the nation’s capital is that bureaucrats survive.” In contrast, of course, elected officials in Washington come and go. Reagan declared, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” Trump managed to reframe the long-standing and rather wonky complaint that a President’s goals can be stymied by a vast and entrenched administrative bureaucracy into the more sinister concept of the “deep state.” Trump didn’t coin the term, but he popularized it in American politics, to condemn the idea of unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch undemocratically conspiring to work against the plans of the President.

Trump’s deep-state rhetoric began during his first Presidency, when, starting in 2017, he alleged that anti-Trump operatives ensconced in federal law-enforcement agencies subjected him to criminal investigation, hiding and fabricating evidence along the way, in order to undermine his Presidency. By 2022, when he was out of office, Trump defined the deep state more broadly, as “long seated Swamp Creatures” who “have been working on sinister and evil ‘plots’ for a long time, even well before I came to office.” His hysterical and paranoid tenor made this easy to dismiss as excuse-making for his difficulties governing in his first term and his myriad legal problems.

Trump’s claim that investigations of him were conspiratorial deep-state operations was unpersuasive; there were, however, people within the executive branch who saw themselves as trying to stop him. During and after his Presidency, high-level officials confessed how they conspired to obstruct his wishes in light of what they deemed to be his incompetence, corruption, and malice. In 2018, an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” described internal efforts to curb the President’s impulses, and became a book the following year, “A Warning.” The author eventually revealed himself as Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Thwarting Trump was also a theme in memoirs by his former national-security adviser John Bolton and by his former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Time reported, in October, that during Trump’s first term, “members of his national security staff actively worked to keep him from learning the full extent” of emergency powers that a President was presumed to have. It has become clear that some executive-branch officials, likely including many who didn’t go public, did deliberately work at cross-purposes with the President’s aims—and, indeed, some might hope for that kind of intentional resistance again in the coming four years.

The fact that such officials described themselves as patriots working in the interests of national security, and that many Americans supported those efforts, obscured the fact that the legitimacy of such actions has long been a subject of debate among legal scholars and experts of the administrative state. To what extent should federal bureaucrats—many of whom may disagree with a particular President—be able to do their jobs insulated and independent from politics? An agency that Congress created for the purpose of protecting the environment, for example, might be full of employees who feel obligated to continue to serve that mission even if a sitting President wants to take actions that would harm the environment. The same goes for agencies devoted to law enforcement, civil rights, education, consumer protection, product safety, and so on. At some point, the divergence between those bureaucrats’ commitments and the President’s wishes might look like subversion. Trump’s campaign agenda in 2023 took a strident position on the side of Presidential political control of agency bureaucracy, in effect, with a promise to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy,” beginning with “the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats.”

Firing people formed Trump’s persona in reality television, and, as it turns out, the law of the deep state is effectively the law of who can be told “You’re fired.” The President’s Cabinet is composed of agency heads whom he can legally fire at will —including Trump’s choices of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Pam Bondi as Attorney General, whose Senate confirmation hearings began this week. But the executive branch also includes dozens of “independent agencies,” such as the Federal Reserve System, Federal Election Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission. Congress has stipulated that the heads of these independent agencies serve discrete terms and cannot be fired at will, only for cause, which makes them somewhat less subject to Presidential control. (On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to hear a case in which it could have reconsidered the permissibility of insulating an agency head from Presidential firing.)

Below the agency heads and senior political appointees are layers upon layers of career employees—including economists, physicians, lawyers, scientists, analysts, other experts, and administrative staff—who operate without much public scrutiny and who cannot be fired at will. Scholars of agency bureaucracy have discussed the phenomenon of sabotage, in which some portion of agency employees who disapprove of a President’s agenda may deliberately work to impede it. During George W. Bush’s Administration, E.P.A. employees leaked internal documents suggesting that his “Clear Skies” plan was insufficiently protective of air quality. President Barack Obama’s efforts to close Guantánamo met with strong resistance from the Pentagon. Obama’s program to suspend deportation of undocumented immigrants who arrived as children was immediately challenged in court by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has alleged various instances of bureaucratic resistance to Trump policies, by Education Department employees who produced unusable drafts for Trump’s Title IX rule; by National Labor Relations Board lawyers who refused to draft documents with which they disagreed; and Labor Department staff who delayed producing a regulation.

The administrative state today is deep in the sense that there are many layers of bureaucracy that are removed from the President, which enables some measure of independence from the President’s grip. Trump would like it to be shallow: structured to be more plainly responsive to and controllable by the President. Whether the desire for tight authority over the executive branch strikes an authoritarian note may turn on how one views the President. In 2001, Elena Kagan, then a law professor at Harvard, observed and celebrated how “presidential control” of the administrative state “expanded dramatically during the Clinton years, making the regulatory activity of the executive branch agencies more and more an extension of the President’s own policy and political agenda.” If Trump were to manage to, say, replace many current career bureaucrats with his own political appointees and then successfully burrow them in, a future Democratic President may want to regain control over the bureaucracy by engaging in similar moves.

Two ways to create a more shallow administrative state are to eliminate many bureaucrats, and to appoint people who can be trusted to advance the President’s goals because they share his priorities. Trump seems intent to try for both. He has said that his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will help “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Past Republican Presidents, most notably Reagan, pursued a deregulatory agenda that included slashing budgets and personnel, but Trump has, as ever, put his personal stamp on this conservative impulse, imbuing it with intimidation, threats of retribution, and grievance. Though DOGE is mainly pitched against inefficiency, incompetence, and waste, its threats of firings may tend to increase the President’s control of the bureaucracy and decrease attempts at sabotage.

The irony is that, for Trump to make good on his vow to destroy the deep state by decimating the ranks of government employees, he will need to rely on the personnel and procedures of the bureaucracy. Late in his first term, in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that purported to enable the at-will firing of swaths of civil-service employees. But the Biden Administration revoked that and went further, last April, by issuing a regulation that makes it difficult, though not impossible, to fire them. Trump cannot do mass firings until he repeals the Biden rule, which cannot be done with a stroke of a pen; this policy must grind through the bureaucracy he despises.

One way to understand the so-called deep state is that it is part of how our federal bureaucracy is supposed to work. The administrative state embodies a constant tension between the democratic accountability that comes with Presidential control, and the political independence of experts, which informs innumerable complicated regulations that govern our lives. That tension is a feature, not a bug. There is a well-recognized trade-off between democratic responsiveness and bureaucratic expertise, which would be terrifying to lose.

Still, it’s fascinating that Trump’s grand ambition to restructure the federal bureaucracy, originating in his personal sense of being the most powerful victim of government persecution, may have a historic impact on government. Notable past reorganizations of the administrative state include the creation of agencies with broad regulatory power in the nineteen-thirties, the reform of the civil service in the nineteen-seventies, and the reorganization of the intelligence community after September 11, 2001. The effort to, as Trump puts it, “dismantle the deep state” in the twenty-twenties might end up on that list of reforms. Then again, the deep state may be capable of standing in the way of getting it done. ♦