Report: Trump plans major expansion of presidential power over federal bureaucracies.
Such an expansion is needed, but would likely result in serious abuses under Trump.
The New York Times reports that Donald Trump is “planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025.” According to the Times:
Mr. Trump [intends]. . .to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Specifically:
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
I’m not going to comment on each component of what the Times says is Trump’s plan. Instead, I’ll confine myself to two general points: (1) the president needs considerably more control over the federal bureaucracy, but (2) if Trump were to gain the kind of control he reportedly seeks, the results would, on balance, be negative.
As to the first point, the ability and willingness of civil servants to thwart the will of presidents they don’t like — i.e. all Republican presidents — is a serious problem. Americans elect a president, not a bureaucracy. When bureaucrats resist presidents, democracy suffers.
And federal bureaucrats have been resisting Republican presidents for at least half a century. I saw this first hand when I worked for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (as it was known back then) during the Nixon administration. One of my tasks was to perform research intended to show the disadvantages and unworkability of one of the administration’s pet proposals.
To cite a more recent example, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has been a source of major resistance to Republican presidents — first George W. Bush and then Trump. Indeed, under Trump the division’s leadership had to bring in attorneys from other parts of the DOJ to pursue at least one case controversial it decided to bring.
This state of affairs is unacceptable. The president should be able summarily to fire any civil servant who resists an assignment for ideological reasons.
The Times says that “Mr. Trump and his allies want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.” The key phrase here is “supposed to be.” I have worked with these employees and I live among them in the D.C. area. Few of the ones I know can be called “nonpartisan” or behave that way.
The nonpartisan civil service envisaged by the great civil service reformers of the late 19th century bears almost no resemblance to today’s civil service. A friend of mine compares what happened to the civil service with what happened to America’s professoriate. Both of these bodies (and others I could name) have succumbed to the left’s long march through our institutions.
My problem, therefore, isn’t with Trump’s civil service reform plan, per se. My problem is with the way it likely would work in operation under Trump.
This concern is shared by some who worked in the Trump administration. According to the Times:
Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.
“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
(Emphasis added)
I’m not worried about “gunfights with the Congress and the courts,” per se. I am worried about “removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power” in the hands of a scofflaw narcissist for whom, as Louis XIV may have said, “L'État, c'est moi.”
It’s one thing to fire bureaucrats for poor performance or intentionally impeding the elected president’s agenda. It’s quite another to fire them for their political views or simply out of spite.
The Trump reform plan might respect this distinction on paper. One of its architects told the Times it will. But I agree with the “veterans of Trump’s chaotic White House” who don’t trust Trump to respect the distinction. I agree with General Kelly that Trump would continually exceed the limits required to uphold it. And I fear a return under Trump to something like the spoils system of the 19th century.
Therefore, as long as Trump is in the picture, removing current civil service guardrails strikes me as a bad idea, on balance.
This leads, though, to the following question: If one opposes giving Trump the powers he seeks over the bureaucracy because of his personality and past behavior, shouldn’t one oppose such reform in general? After all, although we may never have another president like Trump, we’re likely to have other presidents whose frustration with the left-liberal bureaucracy and lust for excessive power will lead to major abuses.
I acknowledge the problem. However, I consider the anti-Republican, anti-conservative bureaucracy to be so out of control that measures to curb it should be taken — once the authoritarian wannabe Donald Trump has exited the political scene.