Loading
Donald Trump’sFFMAGAYour browser does not support the element. politics are so elastic that it is impossible to be certain what he means when he promises, as he did on election night, to “govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept”. Will he judge himself a failure if he does not end the war in Ukraine before he takes office?Of course not. Mr Trump broke plenty of promises in his first term, from bringing back coal to devising cheaper, better national health insurance. No one expects him to check off all or even most of the to-do list he unspooled across the campaign. But nor do they know which promises he might keep. That is why the news media are having to resort to fevered speculation over what a man who has already served a term as president, and campaigned as the Republican nominee three times, might actually do.What Mr Trump’s supporters believe is not that he will satisfy discrete commitments but that he will fulfil an overarching one, to act in their interests. What Mr Trump’s opponents believe is that he will act in his own interests, from getting richer to persecuting his enemies. Regardless of which belief is correct, or whether to some degree they both are, they point to the same correct short-term expectation: Mr Trump will act decisively to remove constraints on his decision-making. That was the hallmark of his endlessly improvised career in business, at the firm his own executives referred to as the Trump Disorganisation because of ever-changing orders from the boss. But in his first term, lacking experience in government and trusted contacts who were expert in public policy, Mr Trump could not create a cohesive, obedient cabinet, much less subject the whole government to his orders.This time, Mr Trump is moving faster than in his first transition and choosing officials he can count on to share his views and follow his orders. He is publicly demanding that Republican leaders in the Senate commit to helping him shortcut the confirmation process through so-called recess appointments. And he has, so far, refused to sign agreements that help secure the transition between administrations, reportedly as his lawyers negotiate over ethics and disclosure requirements.This pattern means that one promise Mr Trump will certainly try to keep is to strip many civil servants of protections against being summarily fired. Presidential aggravation with what Mr Trump calls the deep state is not unusual. One top aide to two recent Democratic presidents liked to call the federal bureaucracy “the enemy”. Past presidents have also, like Mr Trump, threatened to cut whole departments. Many have convened experts on efficiency. There is nothing new in any of that, though Mr Trump’s choice to put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of finding cuts portends more drama than usual.What is new is Mr Trump’s desire to vaporise protections meant not to frustrate presidents from enacting their policies but to block them from degrading departments and agencies by using them for corrupt purposes: rewarding supporters with jobs, contracts or preferential treatment, or manipulating government data. Mr Trump may want only to make the government more responsive to his policy priorities. But changes he has in mind would open doors to such abuses, whether by a president or officials further down the ranks. “What he’s fundamentally doing is trying to blow up traditional government to remove the guardrails that ensure power is being used for the public good,” says Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that analyses government and assists administrations with their transitions. “That is what is truly different. You have to go back to the spoils system in the 19th century to see anything like it.”Mr Trump says he will revive an executive order he signed near the end of his first term to reclassify certain federal workers in a new “Schedule ” category that would make them at-will employees. President Joe Biden rescinded the order, but Mr Trump made reissuing it the “day-one” promise of his plan to “shatter the deep state”. Estimates based on work done under Mr Trump suggest Schedule could apply to at least 50,000 workers, and maybe hundreds of thousands. The federal rule-making process may slow implementation but only by months.Like many predecessors Mr Trump struggled in his first term to fill the roughly 4,000 political positions presidents are already allocated. It is doubtful he could replace hundreds of thousands of civil servants with faithful even if he wanted to. And though federal workers are easy to demonise, they may be less redundant than Mr Trump suspects: the federal workforce is about the size it was in the late 1960s, though the government spends far more per capita. Drastic action that prevents patents or Social Security cheques being issued on time would invite blowback. “Turns out people like those things,” says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. Yet firing even a few workers for perceived disloyalty could have a distorting effect across government, inclining workers not to issue disappointing employment figures or to conduct an honest audit of a president’s campaign donor.Mr Trump has a point: the civil service needs renovating. Too few people get fired. More than 40% of federal workers surveyed in 2023 said poor performers stay on the job and keep doing it badly. From left, right and centre, people serious about good government have pushed for reform for many years.But just as Mr Trump was once dismayed to discover that health care was “so complicated”, he will find, if he wants to fix the bureaucracy, that simply eliminating civil-service protections would make it worse. And he should recognise, as have past presidents who wanted America to remain great after they were gone, that even if he has good intentions, some successor might not.
