It may be what he’s most remembered for.
Of all the course corrections Donald Trump has pursued since his now-famous escalator ride, the one with the most lasting implications—perhaps barring immigration enforcement—may be his war against the unelected bureaucracy that has anti-democratically governed America for decades.
What the Trump Administration has undertaken in the past few months, and what is only beginning to bear fruit with cases like Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, is nothing less than the opening salvos in a war to dismantle the blatantly unconstitutional technocracy that has defined American governance for at least the last half century. Contra the usual “end of democracy” hysterics from critics, if Trump is successful in these efforts he will be the greatest restorer of constitutional norms in the United States in more than 100 years.
The vision of the American system from Schoolhouse Rock!—a legislature that makes the laws, a president who enforces them, and a judiciary that faithfully interprets the law—hasn’t described how our government actually functions for quite some time. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Congress has behaved largely as a vestigial organ, transferring the legislative powers the American people originally delegated to Congress to a multitude of agencies.
“The Secretary shall” is probably among the most commonly used phrases in legislative language, allowing elected officials to leave the actual decisions to a swarm of alphabet agencies staffed by bureaucrats who never have the inconvenience of standing for election.
It wouldn’t be the Founders’ design in any case, but if those federal employees who actually govern the country were directly accountable to the president, the bureaucracy would at least have some oversight by an elected official. One can imagine a modern bureaucratic government more responsive to the people, as bureaucrats of one political stripe were replaced by another set after every election, in what Andrew Jackson once referred to as “rotation in office.”
Instead, civil service protections have insulated the people who make the day-to-day decisions from the president’s control, leaving a ship of state the size of the Titanic with a political rudder more suited for a dinghy, and federal workers mostly to their own devices and political predilections.
Under the current web of protections, federal employees are almost impossible to fire outside of extremely limited circumstances. Documenting evidence of poor performance and navigating the lengthy appeals process has raised the average time to dismiss a federal employee to somewhere between 170 and 370 days. Federal employees admit in surveys that this crazy process coddles bad workers, allowing them to stay at their posts for years, even decades in some cases.
But the federal government’s infamous inefficiency and incompetence aren’t even its worst aspects. The far larger problem is that bureaucrats insert their own political will in place of that of elected actors, effectively subjecting Americans to government without any democratic oversight.
The USAID grants that DOGE thrust into the spotlight are an illustrative example of how our unaccountable technocratic government functions. The enabling legislation of USAID, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, doesn’t mention anything about sending money to “aid” groups that have reoriented their entire agenda around DEI and climate change or funding drag shows in Ecuador. The entire agency’s legislative existence is hinged on some loose directions about backing up the direction of American foreign policy.
For decades, unelected bureaucrats have chosen the recipients of U.S. taxpayer-funded aid. Their choices and political preferences have formed the actual on-the-ground strategy of our soft power diplomacy. And the people making those decisions believe it’s their right to continue making them, relying on protections from being fired—even if the American people register their opinions in election after election that they don’t want to fund such insanity.
Considering the status quo, cutting waste or overspending is the least important aspect of DOGE’s mission, or of Trump’s reorganization of department after department. Reclassifying policymaking employees as at-will and subject to being fired (like three-quarters of American private sector workers) is not just about saving a few bucks—it’s about restoring a responsive government that changes course when the American people decide it ought to.
A recent poll surveyed federal workers earning over $75,000 (a proxy for being high up enough to have some influence on policymaking) about how they balance their obligations as ostensibly apolitical professionals with their own beliefs. Fully three-quarters of employees who voted for Kamala Harris—representative of the bureaucracy as a whole, wherein employees in most agencies donate anywhere from 70% to over 90% to Democrats—said they would refuse lawful orders from the president if they disagreed with the political substance of those orders. They openly admit to doing “what I thought was best.” Only 16% of the people working for the federal government said they would follow all legal directions from the person allegedly in charge of the executive branch, the person whom the American people voted for in a free election.
After Trump fired a tiny percentage of these entitled overlords, they dropped the pretense, with some laid-off apparatchiks from USAID telling the media outlet NOTUS, anonymously, “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”
So much for the “apolitical” nature of our civil “servants.” The current bureaucratic system as it exists is not only unconstitutional—it’s flatly anti-democratic.
Trump’s constitutional power to remove those under him in the executive branch who refuse his lawful political leadership is a long-overdue corrective for a country that has quietly slipped into quasi-permanent technocratic tyranny. Elections have been replaced with notice and comment, constitutional rights with administrative procedure, and democratic politics itself with the ability to lobby a nameless bureaucrat in the posh restaurants of Washington, D.C.
Each of the president’s removal orders, and likely the proposed regulation to implement his very reasonable executive order on policymaking bureaucrats, has spawned a new lawsuit against federal unions and other interested swamp creatures. Those cases are currently winding their way through the court system. If the Supreme Court has any fidelity to the original design of the American system, the justices will validate Trump’s war against the more than two million bureaucrats who make up the unconstitutional and unelected “fourth branch,” and who continue to feel justified in substituting their political judgment for the voters’.
If Trump succeeds in exerting political control over an executive branch that’s wholly unconcerned with being accountable to the American people, he will have taken the biggest step toward restoring our constitutional republic of any president in our lifetimes.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
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