Americans have grown accustomed to dramatic shifts in policy each time control of the White House changes between parties. But across a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues, President Donald Trump is now pursuing structural changes to the federal government that could prove very difficult for the next Democratic president to undo.
On many fronts, Trump is seeking not just to reduce spending or to roll back regulation, but to hollow out the federal government’s institutional capacity to influence events both domestically and internationally. Far more aggressively than in his first term, Trump is unraveling many of the key mechanisms Washington for decades has used to advance its goals.
Together with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration has sought to rapidly deconstruct governmental power through, among other approaches, massive reductions in the federal workforce; the sale of federal buildings; the complete elimination of federal agencies, including the Department of Education, which Trump is expected to begin the process of dismantling on Thursday; and the cancellation of grants that sustain extensive networks of nonprofit humanitarian organizations overseas and sophisticated academic research institutions at home.
“We’ve never, ever seen anything that has amounted to a disinvestment in federal capacity like this,” said Donald Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and author of multiple books on the federal bureaucracy. “We have never seen in the history of the country an effort to deliberately try to destroy so much existing infrastructure … with so little regard to what the impact is.”
To the extent Trump succeeds in his drive, he will constrain the options available to his successors. Experts agree that even a future Democratic president committed to restoring a more active role for Washington would face a yearslong struggle to replace fired agency experts, reopen academic research labs shuttered by the loss of federal funding, or find humanitarian partners abroad to replace those incapacitated by canceled contracts today.
For all these reasons, some conservatives believe Trump’s offensive against the “administrative state” could secure a more lasting retrenchment of the federal government than even the vaunted “Reagan Revolution” a generation ago. “This is a bigger deal, it will be a bigger deal,” said longtime conservative leader Grover Norquist, who founded his organization Americans for Tax Reform to push for lower federal taxes and spending during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. “It’s not a criticism of Reagan, but lots of things have changed.”
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In the Bible and other accounts of antiquity, when ancient civilizations conquered and razed cities, they sometimes spread salt on the remains as a warning and curse against those who might try to rebuild. Trump’s attempt to liquidate the federal government’s capacity in a manner this difficult to reverse might be best understood as his way of salting the earth around Washington, DC.