What’s the Trump administration doing to the U.S. federal bureaucracy? Francis Fukuyama on the real drivers of waste in the American civil service and the democratic peril in attacking it politically.
Late in his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a little-known executive order that began the process of reclassifying tens of thousands of civil service jobs as “Schedule F” appointments. Given everything else that happened toward the end of Trump’s presidency, this bureaucratic move made few headlines, especially since Joe Biden promptly rolled it back, but it would have been consequential; it would’ve stripped career civil servants in “policy-related” positions of employment protections, letting the president replace them with handpicked loyalists.
Democrats warned that such moves would undermine the American civil service. Republicans replied, asking why civil servants shouldn’t be loyal to the elected president of the United States—and have spent the intervening years compiling lists of people to fill such roles. On his very first day back in office, Trump reinstated Schedule F.
Neither is this the president’s only move in his battle against the American federal bureaucracy—or as he casts it, the “deep state.” He’s reportedly asked three senior officials to leave their roles overseeing the State Department’s workforce and internal coordination. He’s also placed Russell Vought—who’s vowed to shutter large parts of the federal bureaucracy—at the Office of Management and Budget. Recently, as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Vought ordered it to halt nearly all its operations.
Meanwhile, Trump has fired 17 inspectors general, who are tasked with investigating government waste, fraud, and abuse. The Department of Justice has fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on cases pertaining to Trump himself. And it’s forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hand over a list of some 5,000 agents who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot.
Perhaps most conspicuously, Trump has tasked the high-profile billionaire Elon Musk with overhauling the federal bureaucracy with the help of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has now sent his employees into various government agencies, seemingly to take control of their operations. In the case of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), he’s halted it completely—or as he put it, he’s “[fed] USAID into the wood chipper.”
It’s a flurry of initiatives. But what exactly is going on?
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Fukuyama says Trump’s apparent onslaught is actually the culmination of a nearly century-long conservative effort to strip the American civil service of authority. But where previous Republican presidents hesitated, Trump is bearing ahead—because, Fukuyama says, he’s not worried of breaking laws. In part, that’s because the battle with the civil service is profoundly personal for Trump. He believes that the “deep state” has had it in for him ever since he first ran for president, sabotaged his agenda while he was in office, and sought to prevent him from getting reelected. Now, he’s getting his revenge. But he's already pushing the boundaries of the law, setting his administration up for a confrontation not only with the civil service but with the courts too. And yet, Fukuyama says, the bureaucratic inertia that so frustrated Trump in his first presidency is now benefitting him, as the American state’s checks on the fast-moving executive are only slowly beginning to gather any momentum …
Gustav Jönsson: How is Trump’s team going about restructuring the federal bureaucracy?
Pascal Bullan
This article is for members only
Join to read on and have access to The Signal‘s full library.
