Published: November 27, 2023
Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a zealous convert to Donald Trump’s cause, once offered an expansive vision
of how Trump should rule in a second term: “fire every single midlevel
bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace
them with our people.”
Polls a year out
from the 2024 election suggest Trump has a good chance of winning it.
If he does, he and his allies want to be ready to run the country in
ways they were not in 2016.
For more than a year, groups supporting Trump have been publicising plans to fill government roles with proven Trump loyalists if he wins a second term.
Trump believes his first term was undermined by “deep state” bureaucrats, “weak” lawyers and even “woke generals”. Some of his opponents argue that government officials indeed acted as “guardrails” during Trump’s administration, saving the country from his worst instincts.
There seems to be a near consensus among Trump’s friends and foes that his authoritarian second term plans would require more cooperative government officials than he had last time around.
But how much could Trump genuinely reshape the United States government?
Theory of bureaucratic politics
In 1971, political scientist Graham Allison wrote Essence of Decision,
an analysis of the Kennedy administration’s actions in the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Allison argued that foreign policy decisions of the
United States government could not be understood simply as rational
responses to external situations. Decisions are political outcomes
resulting from complicated “games” played between different actors
within the government.
Even in foreign policy, a domain where the US president has a lot of power
compared to other areas of policy, the president needs help making
decisions. Those decisions reflect bargaining between cabinet
secretaries, military figures, diplomats and advisers, all of whom have
their own interests and viewpoints.
One of the book’s earliest reviewers, the realist international relations scholar Stephen Krasner, was unimpressed
by this analysis. He believed it would be popular with high-level
policy-makers because it obscured their responsibility for the decisions
they made. In the end, Krasner argued, there is a single decision-maker
in US foreign policy, and that is the president. Games may be played
among the president’s staff and bureaucrats, but they are games whose
rules are written by the president and whose players are chosen by the
president.
Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Author Bruce Wolpe on the "shocking" consequences for Australia of a Trump 24 win
Allison’s theory would resonate with those who imagine a “deep state”
establishment thwarting the president’s agenda. Trump is not the first
president to rail against entrenched opposition in his own
administration, especially in foreign policy. Barack Obama’s staff
complained of “The Blob”, a militaristic establishment that included Obama’s secretary of defense.
Other Democratic presidents also used blob-like metaphors. Allison
noted that John F. Kennedy described the State Department as “a bowl of
jelly”, while Franklin D. Roosevelt said that trying to change anything in the Navy was “like punching a feather bed”.
But we should remember Krasner’s warnings that presidents and their
allies would use bureaucratic opposition as an excuse for the
shortcomings of systems they controlled. Trump was frustrated at times
by appointees who ignored his orders or refused to carry them out because they were illegal.
But such people usually didn’t last long in the administration after colliding with Trump.
Trump’s administration set records for turnover among White House staff and Cabinet positions, and had a very high vacancy rate for Senate-confirmed appointments. By the end of his presidency, nearly anyone who disagreed with him was gone, and his Cabinet was filled with acting secretaries. This, he said, gave him “more flexibility”.
The inexperience and incompetence
of Trump’s people were bigger problems for Trump in the end than
disloyalty and opposition. Selecting high officials for their loyalty
alone could be a recipe for another four years of domination without
control.
Read more:
Trump has changed America by making everything about politics, and politics all about himself
Smashing the administrative state
Trump’s allies have ambitions beyond enforcing loyalty to Trump, who
can only serve one more term. His former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon
called early in Trump’s first term for the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. This may sound new and radical, but it broadly aligns with the aims of conservative policy ever since Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Congress delegates many of the powers of government to dozens of independent regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board.
These bodies are given the power to do things like setting and
enforcing clean air standards, investigating and publishing consumer
complaints over financial services, and conducting elections on union
representation.
The legitimacy of these agencies has long been attacked by conservatives,
who believe they bypass legislatures to advance liberal policy goals.
Lawyers in the Reagan and Bush administrations developed the theory of the “unitary executive”, which asserted the right of the President to fire uncooperative civil servants and questioned the constitutionality of independent government agencies.
Towards the end of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to create Schedule F,
which would reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as
political appointees, stripping them of their employment protection.
Biden rescinded the order a few days into his presidency, but Trump’s
allies now see it as the key to finally taking control of the administrative state.
Trump’s plan to punish those who disagree with him and replace them with loyalists could prove dangerous.
Branden Camp/EPA/AAP
Their stated aim
is to remove public servants likely to obstruct Trump’s agenda and
replace them with people committed to it. This would theoretically
increase the president’s power.
However, the long term effect of flooding the civil service with thousands of political appointees hostile to government
would be to reduce the capacity of all government, regardless of the
president. The quality of government services would degrade, and public
faith in government would further erode.
Not all conservatives like this plan.
Some warn it would return America to the “spoils system” that existed
before the neutral civil service, where public sector jobs were rewards
to be doled out to political supporters. But the conservative ascendancy
now belongs to those who can best align their ideologies with Trump’s
grievances.
Control is still an illusion
The activist conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation boasts
that “the left is right to fear our plan to gut the federal
bureaucracy”. The mass firing of political enemies fits well with
Trump’s focus on “retribution”. But Heritage and other organisations are selling an illusion that is likely to leave Trump or any other president frustrated.
It’s easy to blame scheming bureaucrats and administration “traitors”
for the failures of Trump’s first term. The reality is that all recent
presidents have faced the same intractable problem: it is increasingly
difficult to get any major legislation through a polarised Congress. It is the failure to legislate that forces presidents to rely on inherently flimsy executive orders.
Trump also had the problem that much of what he wanted to was illegal. While his allies are now searching for administration lawyers who “are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject”, Trump would also need the cooperation of judges to implement plans such as “strong ideological screening” of immigrants.
The hundreds of judges that Trump appointed to federal courts, including three Supreme Court justices, have certainly made it easier to pursue a conservative political agenda. But they wouldn’t help Trump when it came to the issue he cared about most: overturning the results of the 2020 election.
Trump may find that the lifetime appointments from his first term
have created a new conservative legal establishment that can help his
allies but is at odds with his personal ambitions.
Various biographers
of Trump have suggested he will never be satisfied with any level of
power or prestige. He is unlikely to get what he wants out of a second
term in the White House. But plenty of others will see it as a great
opportunity to settle longstanding scores.