The Sunny Side of Donald Trump’s Power Grabs
Love him or hate him, no one can argue that the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second administration have lacked executive energy.
His presidential orders have taken big policy swings by unilaterally declaring an end to the administrative state and canceling birthright citizenship.
With an assist from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the president is rapidly consolidating control over the federal bureaucracy by centralizing access to heretofore walled-off payment and personnel systems, replacing civil servants with political appointees, and putting independent agencies under White House supervision.
On a more structural level, Trump is pushing the envelope of executive power with his decisions to block congressionally appropriated spending and shutter congressionally mandated agencies and programs.
Democrats are naturally aghast at the president’s actions. They’ve staged protests in front of shuttered government office buildings and filed innumerable lawsuits to block the state-slashing fruits of DOGE.
People within the wider small government universe have offered their own critical assessments, arguing the president is behaving illegally and in many cases usurping Congress’ constitutional prerogatives.
I hazard to be more optimistic.
Some of the president’s power grabs will turn out to be illegal or even constitutional and there’s little chance he’ll make a meaningful reduction in federal spending.
Nevertheless, his arsonist’s blitz through the institutions will leave us with a smaller, enfeebled federal government more in line with a libertarian vision than the one he inherited on January 20, 2025.
That’s most obvious when one considers the initial targets of Trump’s power grabs: the federal bureaucracy.
Here, the thrust of Trump’s actions has all been quite clear. He’s attempting to replace an expert class of civil service-protected employees with political appointees responsive to himself.
In a National Review essay published last week, former Reagan administration official Donald Devine, argues this is much to the good.
Absent the profit-motive to guide decisions and right-size bureaucracy, the government is left with second-best methods of organization; either “Wilsonian” management insulated from political inputs or “pragmatic conservative political management” led by the president.
Devine argues that Wilsonian expertise inherently lends itself to big government, as career bureaucrats accumulate more and more power at the expense of elected officials and private individuals. And because “big government doesn’t work” we’re all left worse off as a result.
By cracking down on the independence of career civil servants, Trump and Musk are forcing the government expert class to understand that “they and their expert career bosses are not wholly untouchable or fully in charge,” Devine writes.
The pushback to this view is that Trump’s motive in reining in the bureaucracy is not libertarian, it’s Trumpian. He doesn’t want to shrink the state. He wants to use it for his own ends. And, as the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson argued earlier this month, by moving fast and breaking things, he’s also breakin
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