What I wrote in the New York Times about Trump's authoritarian plans

The stakes are high, and so are the odds

Credit: Kyle Ellingson in the NY Times

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have heard a lot about attacks on the administrative state and how a second Trump administration will be much more effective at moving the US toward authoritarianism. I wrote about this in the NY Times this week. You can read the piece here and I also include the text below.

Trump’s planned assault on the administrative feels like a topic that is simultaneously a) enormously important, and b) not well understood. I know a lot of smart people who are very concerned about Trump, but are unaware of the risks to the administrative state, or unfamiliar with Schedule F.

Which is perfectly understandable! A measure of a functional society is that bureaucracy should be boring! It should not be a task of citizens to understand how Schedule F political appointees are different from Schedule A, B, C, D, or E. The fact that the constitution requires public employees to take an oath to the constitution itself, rather than to the President, should be an obscure piece of Founding Fathers trivia rather than a consideration in thinking about how the next President will rule. You should not have to understand the role of General Counsels, or how our democracy hinges on the willingness of the Supreme Court to go along with novel legal theories like the unitary executive.

But all this stuff matters now. It really does.

Jay Rosen, a professor of NYU who studies the media, uses the term: “not the odds, but the stakes” as a shorthand for how we should think about the relationship between politics and political risks. In other words, media and other elites should direct more attention to what could go badly wrong if one party is elected (the risks), and less attention to political horserace coverage (the odds). We should be disproportionately concerned about democratic backsliding and creeping authoritarianism, even if its not a high likelihood event.

A plot to undermine the bureaucracy is a classic example of a topic that has huge and poorly-understood stakes, and does not lend itself to horserace coverage at all. One of the reasons I started a blog in 2021 was a desire to write the dangers of politicization. The risks felt more remote then. Trump was out of office, and it was hard to imagine how the force behind January 6th could return to the Presidency. But in the interim, Congress failed to act, and it is clearer than ever that Trump will be next GOP candidate, with a realistic shot of winning. The risks are great, and the odds are worryingly high.

For a long time, writing about these risks felt like a lonely task. This is beginning to change. Trump’s supporters have developed a sophisticated and explicit plan to kneecap the administrative state, and to give a leader with clearly authoritarian tendencies extraordinary powers. A small number of investigative journalists have done terrific work in uncovering these plans. For all the loose talk about how Trump is a threat to democracy, this coverage revealed an actual plan. Trump was not going to cancel elections, but was going to co-opt the machinery of state power in the way that Viktor Orban has done in Hungary.

But even with more attention to this topic, I am not sure it is breaking through, even amongst those who are predisposed to oppose Trump. It is critical that this changes in the coming year. I and a growing number of people concerned about the dangers to public services will do our best to explain to the public about how bureaucracy really does matter to their democracy. The piece in the NY Times is part of this process, and you can help by highlighting these dangers any way that you can.

Anyway, here is what I wrote in the Times.

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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.

Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”

Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.

Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.

When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.

The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.

This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. He has made the case for the president using military forces for domestic law enforcement. He has also written a legal analysis arguing that “the U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” while Mr. Paoletta told The Times, “I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.” If government lawyers will not defend norms of Justice Department independence, Mr. Trump will use the department to shield himself from legal accountability and to pursue his enemies.

We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.

American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.

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Ok, that was the piece. You might notice how the writing is a cut above my usual blog, which reinforces the point that talented editors really do make a difference.

It turns out that if you publish something in the NY Times you get a lot of feedback! Here are some responses to a couple of reasonable objections to my argument:

• “The courts will not allow this” — the courts will absolutely play a role in adjudicating how far Trump can go, especially when his General Counsels come up with agressive interpretations of the law. But bear in mind that a) Trump has the right to hire what appointees he wants (with the exception of Senate-approved appointees), b) my guess is that SCOTUS would allow him to weaken civil service protections, and c) the majority of SCOTUS shares a Federalist Society instinct to undermine the administrative state, it is just a matter of how far they will go (though see this response to my piece by Chris Geidner, who argues that in some cases, the Federalist Society desire to reduce the administrative state may conflict with Trump’s goal of a Trumpist administrative state). In short, don’t count on the the courts to save us.

• “Congress won’t allow it” — Trump’s plan is to use executive power in unprecedented ways, rather than get legislative permission from Congress. This means that to stop him, Congress has to do something, and it has done little to protect the civil service since Trump left office. Democrats did pass a bill to block Schedule F in the House, but could not get GOP Senators to agree to stick this into a must-pass defense authorization bill. Congress might block a few of Trump’s more radical appointees, in which case Trump would just rely on “acting” officials as he did in his first term. Congress absolutely should play a role here, even if just to protect its own powers, but this requires a few brave Republicans to step forward.

• “Trump is too incompetent to pull this off” — Trump has not become more organized since his time in office. But he has become more sincere in his hate for the administrative state and more attentive to the value of personal loyalty to him. Therefore, he will empower supporters who learned a lot from Trump’s presidency, are very attentive to the nuts and bolts of government, and have developed real plans to take control of it and move it in a radical direction that matches Trump’s preferences. Trump does not have to be more competent to be more effective in his attack on the administrative state, when a machinery has formed around him to serve that purpose. This does not mean that every appointee in Trumpworld will be as effective as Stephen Miller was in the immigration space. But many more of them will be made in that mould. It is also possible for ineffective appointees to do a lot of damage. As the former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was fond of saying, “any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” We are in a era when the people most politically invested in American governance want to toss out the carpenters, and hands their tools to the jackasses.