Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’

I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention.

Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy.

A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.

It has three major parts.

The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.

These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.

The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.