What Happens Next?

The administrative state under a second Trump term

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years operating on a couple of assumptions: a) that there was a good chance Trump could return as President and b) that his return would dramatically alter the administrative state. As someone who studies public administration, I figured there was some obligation to communicate those risks. Now that Trump will, in fact, return, I want to summarize what are the most likely outcomes based on my prior writing. Doing so also forces me to make predictions, which is a good practice for being explicit about expectations in the present, and being humble about what I will get wrong when I look back at these predictions at some point in the future. And trust me, I would really like to be wrong by overstating the damage to come.

Trump will reinstate Schedule F, the Executive Order that will allow him to reclassify federal civil servants to be political appointee, and then to fire them. Trump cares intensely about controlling both his own appointees and the bureaucracy, demanding loyalty from them, and being able to dismiss them when that loyalty is not shown. His disdain for the administrative state is both deep and personal, not abstract or rhetorical. He may seek a court judgment to overturn the Biden rule to constrain Schedule F, or issue an interim final rule, but if these routes are not successful, a new rule will likely be in place within six months of his inauguration. By that point his appointees will have identified a) which employees will be reclassified, and b) who will be fired. Some more specific predictions:

• I expect 50,000 will be the minimum number of career officials to be reclassified (we currently have 4,000 appointees, so, yes, this is an enormous change).

• The initial wave of firings will be much less, say, in the realm of 1,000-2,000. Why? It is more rational for the administration to scare the bureaucracy into submission, and then use their capacity to get things done, then it is to engage in mass firings and then realize they don’t know how to run the government. Call this the “heads on pikes” strategy.

• The number of Schedule F appointees will be proportionally higher in agencies that are viewed as liberal leaning (think HHS, Education, regulatory agencies), and lower in agencies viewed as more conservative (e.g. Customs and Border Patrol). It will be higher in agencies with a legal focus, e.g. DOJ, than it has historically been. Trump will especially target General Counsel and other legal positions in the government.

• Once the initial round of firings has taken place, it will be used more selectively to remove public officials that Trump’s actual appointees have disagreements with. “Resistance” which might take the form of suggestions that the administration follow the law, will be grounds for dismissal.

• There will be a court case seeking to overturn Schedule F, but this Supreme Court will suddenly forget the major questions doctrine and decide that the President has the right to put in place the biggest change to the civil service system since it was created in the 1880s.

What I am outlining assumes a relatively rational President that still recognizes and values administrative capacity. In other words, I see this as a best case scenario. But people around Trump (such as Vance and Musk) have called for broader purges, and Trump himself does not really care for competence. If they decide to make a gutting of public employees a central theme of their administration, the outcome could be much worse: hundreds of thousands of reclassifications and firings. I don’t think that is the most likely outcome, but neither is it unlikely.

A second Trump term will still be chaotic, but more competent. In his first term, Trump really did face resistance, as much from his own appointees as much as from the bureaucracy. The type of appointees in a second term will be much less like John Kelly or Jim Mattis — people with a lot of public experience who see serving the President as a public duty — and more like Russ Vought or Stephen Miller — smart and capable appointees who know how to manage the bureaucracy, and are either personally loyal to Trump or see him as the best vehicle to achieve their shared goals. As described above, Trump will have new tools to quash dissent within the bureaucracy. So, I expect that a second Trump term will enable him to achieve more of his goals, even as I also think this will result in worse public services. For example, expect a general gutting of regulation.

This does not mean that Trump will revert to being a normal President, albeit one with far right goals. Trump appears to enjoy the chaos and has little interest in governing. Some of the appointees he attracts and favors will be the same. Some of these are also big egos — think RFK Jr. or Musk — who will fall out with Trump at some point. So the chaos will not disappear, but that does not mean that the government as a whole is not changing in dramatic ways.

Trump will bring a new era of corruption to government, which will largely go unpunished. A feature of Trump’s Presidency is that he has not abided by norms to reduce conflicts of interest between his public and private roles. He has more business interests than he had in his first term (notably in social media and crypto) that foreign governments can use to curry his favor, or threaten his net worth. He will not set aside those interests.

The potential for corruption goes beyond Trump and can take different forms.

• Trump will engage in a mass pardon of people who broke the law to serve him, including those who attacked Congress on January 6.

• A huge proportion of federal money goes through the contracting process. The chances that a lot of federal dollars will now go to Trump supporters has increased.

• Musk faces regulatory oversight of his businesses from the federal government, and benefits from federal contracts. Giving Musk, in turn, oversight of those agencies as an efficiency czar generates even bigger conflicts of interest than those of Trump. It may be that Musk loses interest in this role, but even having some sort of advisory role allows him to pick up the phone and make suggestions about which regulator should be fired. Other major donors are in the same position.

All of this, featuring quid-pro-quo exchange of money, influence and power, or clear conflicts of interest, satisfies what most people understand to be corruption. But it turns out we were relying mostly on norms and not rules to rein in Presidential malfeasance. The Supreme Court has offered Trump broad immunity in his presidential office, and Trump does not have to run again. With acquiescent General Counsels and Inspectors General, and terrified bureaucrats, there is little reason to expect constraint at this point. Since much of what I described might be in a grey area that does not violate the laws in obvious ways, I expect actual prosecution of corruption will be rare. Trump will control the DOJ, who are already planning to end their investigations of him. His appointees will dominate the courts. The worst stuff may be the legal stuff, or what we come to accept as legal, happening out in the open. As we come to accept it, we accept a degraded version of ethics in American governance.

We will see a decline in competence. We will see an increase in turnover in federal agencies. There will be more firings, of course. But turnover will increase for other reasons. Many federal employees are retirement eligible. In the first Trump term, the size of government did not markedly shrink. But more senior career officials left, and turnover was higher in some agencies than others. There are a lot of retirement-eligible public employees who lived through one Trump administration and some of them will decide they will not do another. Other employees, who suspect that Schedule F will be used to target them, have faced harassment from Trump-aligned organizations, or worry that their agency will become hopelessly politicized, may also decide to quit.

If you think those employees are incompetent, that is good news. But that is largely not going to the case, and a lot of institutional memory will walk out the door. It will also be harder to attract new hires to replace those leaving, at least among those with an intrinsic desire to serve the public. With an outflow of institutional memory, and difficulty in attracting talented new employees, the human capital skills of the government will decline.

Government institutions will become more aggressively authoritarian. This will not occur uniformly. Regulatory agencies with enforcement responsibilities will withdraw from challenging businesses. Some, such as the IRS or DOJ, may use enforcement powers selectively, setting aside the principle of equal treatment before the law in order to target the President’s enemies. And some coercive power will be deployed on the streets of America. This includes the DHS targeting immigrants, with massive round-ups and camps, supplemented with support from National Guard and local police (at least in red states). If people protest, Trump will be ready to deploy the military to subdue dissent. Some may welcome the images of armed officials engaged in the use of force. I suspect for many others it will become the defining and illegitimate face of government power in the coming years.

We will see a decline in the quality of public services. The first Trump administration featured some attention to customer experience, and service delivery improvement in some domains. If you were business owner unhappy with regulations, you might have valued the promise to cut red tape. But in other areas, Trump made public services worse. He looked for ways to pour administrative burdens, such as work requirements, into every aspect of the social safety net. His appointees made some loan forgiveness programs inaccessible.

Trump views access to public resources in a transactional way, and so there is good reason that the quality of public services will be eroded in parts of the country that failed to support Trump, or in programs that serve constituencies viewed as traditionally Democratic. His administration is likely to unwind real capacity improvements that have been made under Biden, such as with the IRS. For a lot of the big public services that the public engages with, Trump will either kneecap genuine reform efforts or impose constraints that make those services more dysfunctional.

The public will notice failures in competence - but it may be too late. Will the public notice that the quality of their government is declining? There are reasons to be pessimistic. The Biden administration oversaw perhaps the most robust economic post-pandemic economic recovery among OECD countries, and saw declines in crime that began to spike during the Trump administration. But Trump was perceived as being better on those issues.

But one major difference is that once Trump is back in office as an incumbent, he will be accountable. He was not a popular candidate. People were not so much voting for Trumpism as against what they thought Bidenism had left them with. There will be no honeymoon period for Trump. His actual economic policies, most notably of tariffs, will increase inflation and harm the economy. If he implements them, and things get worse, it will be hard to avoid blame.

Will the public notice the decline in state capacity? Having, for example, OSHA do fewer safety inspections, or FDA provide less stringent oversight over medical safety issues, are unlikely to have an immediate discernible effect. But eventually, failures will start to mount up. As those failures can be traced back to actions by administration officials who appear to be venal or incompetent, such narratives can break through. One concern I have is that the information ecosystem of the right is robust enough that it will be harder for those narratives to make a difference compared to twenty years ago, when the failure of an incompetent head of FEMA with Hurricane Katrina created significant and lasting damage for the Bush administration. Big, visible failures will need to be bigger and more visible to make a difference. Narratives of corruption will have to be much more appalling to make us pay attention. It will be harder to also get those stories, since Trump dislikes accountability and potential whistleblowers in government may decide it is not worth it to lose their jobs by sharing tales of malfeasance.

And the public may simply disagree on what constitutes failure. Advocates for Musk have pointed to Twitter as a reason why he should be put in charge of government reform. He cut staffing to the bone, and the app still works. If your only goal is cutting costs, Musk’s tenure at Twitter has indeed been a success. And for Musk and Trump fans, the experience may even be better. But Twitter is worth a fraction of its former value, and the experience is bad enough that many have left. The polarized response to Musk’s Twitter could mirror how the public assesses the Trump attack on government. The federal government will not suddenly collapse, people will be fired, and Trump supporters will be happy. For others, the shortcomings of Trump’s approach will be obvious from the start, even if the direct effects take longer to present themselves to the mass public. But a split electorate is not enough to change Trump’s approach, anymore than it was to cause Musk to change course with Twitter.

In the long run, the Republican Party, and not Trump, will face whatever penalty emerges from those failures. Republicans may want to look at the Tories in the UK, who were riding high after the Boris Johnson election victory, but who took a historical beating when Johnson departed, and the brand of the party had been deeply tarnished. But currently, there does not seem to be a constituency within the Republican Party for good governance.

In some spaces, failures may be difficult or impossible to unwind. Government capacity is like reputation: it takes a long time to build, but can be damaged relatively quickly. Potential public employees are likely to be skeptical about a career in the public service even after Trump departs, because that choice now involves some risk of working for an authoritarian who could fire you for simply doing your job. In some policy areas, such as the environment, the damage done in the next four years may have a meaningful long term effect on how habitable the planet will be for our children that cannot simply be reversed by a more competent administration.

As the public observes failures, such as declining quality of services, or public health, or workplace safety, or the environment, they may be persuaded that competence and expertise matter. The job of those of us who study public policy and implementation is to provide the evidence to allow them to understand when and why this failure occurs, and who deserves the blame.

Anti-institutionalist politics will extend beyond the federal government, and the use of formal powers. The MAGA movement has an uneasy relationship with institutions. Their politics is defiantly anti-institutionalist. But unlike more traditional conservatives, they show little inclination for smaller government, and greater interest in using government power to achieve their goals. In 2022, I wrote a paper that tried to map out these contradictory tendencies, entitled Delegitmization, Deconstruction and Control which spoke to the strategy of the movement: attack institutions you don’t control, deconstruct those that you do, and exert close control once you have them.

These institutional attacks will extend beyond the federal government, and include higher education, and the media, the nonprofit sector and private companies. For example, philanthropies seen as unfriendly to Trump could have their tax status investigated. In particular, I am worried about the many ways federal officials can use resources and power to politicize what is taught on campus. To a greater extent than in 2016, I expect more institutional accommodation of Trump, rather than institutions advertising themselves as sites of resistance. This is in part because of the threats Trump has made, but also because his worldview has had 8 years to gain support among Trumpists who have perfected their critique of those institutions. For example, DEI was already on the back foot in higher education, whether Trump won or lost. Now higher education institutions have stronger incentives to respond to that critique. While federalism serves as a natural check on federal executive power, grants and waivers can be used to influence state and local governments.

But it is also the case that there are other forms of power that are not formal. Trump has created a movement where intimidation of public officials has become the norm. The use of terror as a governing strategy will continue. Federal public servants will be publicly attacked by the President and his appointees. They were during the first administration. The difference now is that many of those attacks will lead to, or be used to justify, firing those officials. Public officials at the state and local levels seen at odds with Trump can expect the same treatment, joining the host of librarians, teacher, emergency responders, public health and election officials, who have come to experience terror as a feature of their jobs

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There are whole policy domains I have not touched on here, and specific groups of people that face a less certain and more dangerous environment. I honestly don’t know how far Trump will take his promises of exacting revenge, but it is chilling that we have to even think about that question. And while I feel confident that the government we are about to see will be more authoritarian than anything most of us have lived under, it is impossible to know where this ends, and how much democratic values will be damaged. All that I have laid out are the predictable consequences of what Trump has promised, and does not account for a more extreme agenda that may emerge over time.

Some, such as Dave Karpf, suggests this is the “end of the American century” as America goes from the dominant superpower to a significant actor, but not the credible, reliable and capable one that you would want to build international financial and security systems around. It is easy to make variations in this argument in multiple areas. For example, America’s investments in science helped to catapult the country, and its higher education, into a dominant global position. Will this continue when RFK Jr. is guiding where basic science funding goes?

It is possible that the MAGA world will come to see the value of government competence. Anger is not governing. Owning the libs, is not, in fact a real strategy to manage a modern administrative state. They have not shown much evidence of this thus far. Instead, they offer a version of populism that does not offer much in tangible benefits for its supporters beyond owning the libs.

It may also be that the administrative carnage that will occur in the short run will open possibilities for reforming the administrative state in the long run. But here, I fear I am reaching for the sort of self-deluding optimism that made it seem unlikely that Trump would return to the White House. Everything he has shown us, and told us, implies a more politicized and less capable governance model, albeit more adept at pursuing its cruelest goals.