Trump has a plan to consolidate power in a second term, and it just might work
From the moment he entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump was at war with the government he led; as his close adviser Stephen K. Bannon said at the time, the administration’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was a war Trump mostly lost. But as he campaigns for another term, his loyalists are planning to refight that war, and win.
There are reasons to think they could fail again. Yet there is also cause to be deeply concerned about this aspect of a potential Trump presidency in the future.
As we say in Washington, personnel is policy. And the personnel of a second Trump executive branch would be very different from the first, both in who its members would be and in their plans for remaking the federal government.
The “administrative state” is composed of all the people and agencies who carry out policy, enforce laws and provide services, much of it designed to be somewhat insulated from political influence. That independence has long rankled right-wing thinkers, who have held that the Constitution gives the president almost unfettered authority over the executive branch. For decades — though mostly when a Republican is in the White House — they have sought to expand the power of the president.
This effort is now focused on expanding Trump’s power in a second term. Working through established conservative organizations and newer Trump-centric ones such as the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s associates are developing a plan to concentrate federal authority in his hands. It involves firing large swaths of the civil service and staffing those positions with loyalists, seizing authority from independent agencies and refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The more sweeping their ambitions, the more likely they are to fall short at least some of the time, because they are restrained by either the courts or their own incompetence, something that is never in short supply where Trump is concerned. But many of their failures the last time around came when they were scrambling on the fly to carry out some harebrained scheme (such as stealing an election). This time, they’re planning carefully.
The Heritage Foundation’s massive plan for the next GOP administration states, “Nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state.” And as the organizer of Heritage’s effort to assemble lists of potential administration appointments told the Economist, devotion to Trump is nonnegotiable: If you have “fought against the Trump administration,” including by blaming him for the insurrection, that will get you struck from the list.
This effort is meant to avoid a repeat of the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration. Unlike politicians who rise through the ranks to the presidency, Trump came to Washington without a network of aides and associates ready to move into the executive branch. So he cobbled together an administration of GOP apparatchiks, inexperienced ideologues and grifters. But often, he was foiled by the occasionally principled people he appointed, who displayed integrity at key moments.
“A lot of Trump’s frustration with what he called the deep state was as much as anything frustration towards his own political appointees,” says Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies government administration. “He has solved that problem,” because now he has “thousands of vetted loyalists” ready to staff the executive branch.
The civil service, with its strong job protections and mandate for nonpartisanship, is being targeted for a purge. Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order called Schedule F, which would have enabled him to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to political appointee status, meaning he could fire them at will and replace them with his own cronies.
It came too late to have an impact, and President Biden rescinded it when he took office. But reviving Schedule F is at the heart of the Trump force’s plan to break the civil service. The president now makes around 4,000 political appointments, already a preposterously large number. Trump’s people believe that with Schedule F, they could increase that number to more than 50,000.
They’re trying to “change the equilibrium of public sector work, possibly for a generation or more,” Moynihan told me, making it difficult to recruit skilled people who want to serve their country in a nonpolitical way.
That could make government both more corrupt and less capable. “This feels like the biggest bomb that’s waiting to go off under the next Republican administration,” Moynihan continued. “And it’s not like they’re doing it in secret. They’re very upfront about what they plan to do.”
Should Trump become president again, he would pursue a standard Republican policy agenda — tax cuts, abortion restrictions, environmental deregulation. But his biggest impact could be a wholesale remaking of government, of a kind not seen since the New Deal — and it could be one of his most lasting and harmful legacies.