The 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has a plan. That plan is the large-scale dismantling of the “Fourth Branch” of the federal government — the “Administrative State” – over 4 years.
Through the first 50 days of his Administration we have seen only individual components of this plan as they have been put into play. In some instances I believe we have only seen test cases — efforts to establish authority to take steps as the Executive that others have not taken before him. The earlier failure to do so have contributed to the unchecked growth of the Administrative State since the New Deal.
But the plan is more broad and multi-faceted than seems obvious at this point. I see four primary axes of attack coming into focus – so far. But each axis should result in a level of deconstruction of key components which can be expanded over time once the foundation is laid. The deconstruction will be difficult to reverse in the future, particularly if there is a diligent “small government” Republican party standing watch over what President Trump leaves behind.
- First Axis: Substantially reduce the size of the federal civilian work force.
- Second Axis: Close down permanently federal facilities that house large parts of the bureaucracy.
- Third Axis: Decapitate Leadership of Administrative Agencies to slow their work.
- Fourth Axis: Starve the network of private NGO’s that are the patrons of the Administrative State of the funds they need to survive.
Reduction in the Civilian Work Force.
The first axis began with the offer to federal employees to resign in exchange for 8 months of severance pay. The reporting I have seen is that approximately 4% of the federal work force accepted the offer. That is about the same number of employees who would normally quit/retire during any 8 month period of time so it is likely that most of that 4% were federal employees who were already planning to leave for one reason or another. But there is still a reduction achieved here if the bulk of that 4% of the work force is not replaced as would normally be expected to happen.
The first axis accelerated approximately three weeks ago when a sizable percentage of “probationary” employees across most government agencies were terminated. Again, this was a relatively easy way to reduce the size of civilian work force. All of them were hired in the final year of the Biden Administration, and in many government agencies the hiring decisions tend to favor the political orientation of those doing the hiring. So, while not uniform, it can be assumed with a relatively high degree of confidence that the bulk of the probationary employees were going to of a similar political orientation of the overall federal workforce, i.e., heavily favoring Democrats. Not bringing in new hires to replace these probationary employees will also result in a significant downsizing of the work force. However, I expect that this will be one situation where the Trump Administration, now in charge of hiring, will replace a significant number of these probationary employees with new hires of its own. “Personnel is policy” is the old saying about the government work force. For the Trump Administration to implement and enforce its new policies, it is going to need a significant component of the work force to have views that are in sync with those new policies. That is unlikely to happen unless new personnel are brought in who will last beyond Trump’s four-year term.
The third — maybe final — component of executing this first axis can be seen in the large-scale layoffs coming to specific federal agencies and even entire Departments. USAID, the State Department Agency responsible for distributing foreign aid grants and monitoring the programs it funds, laid off about 80% of its work force, including most of its workers stationed overseas who administer and monitor the work done with the grant funds.
Maybe the highest profile example of this third component was the announcement earlier this week that nearly 50% of the employees of the Department of Education will be let go as part of a restructuring of how that Department executes its mission. The plan is for more money appropriated by Congress for education to flow to state and local government entities, with less of the money going to overhead and operations of the Department itself. This will allow for the amount of funding needed to run the Department to be cut in every budget cycle going forward.
There will be hiccups along the way as efforts are made to derail this “reduction in force.” But Trump has the authority to do it, and it will eventually get accomplished.
I expect more announcements like the one for the Department of Education after the Administration uses that to create a template for how this is going to be accomplished across a wide swath of the bureaucratic state.
Shutting Down Government Facilities
There have been anecdotal stories of government agencies cancelling leases on commercial office space, and other agencies moving out of government office space in order to make room for some other government agency moving in.
According to this article by AP, regional managers of the General Services Administration received instructions from the agency’s D.C. headquarters to begin the process for terminating as many as 7500 leases of commercial office space nationwide.
GSA is the agency that acts as the federal government’s “property manager.” Federal agencies work out of both government owned buildings as well as commercial buildings where the government leases offices. Through a combination of downsizing the workforce and a reduction/consolidation of operations, the Trump Administration seems determined to reduce the size of the federal government’s “footprint” where it does business. To a significant extent it means putting some agency operations back into buildings owned by the federal government.
Much like reductions in the federal work force, reversing this policy in the future will be expensive and require substantial expenditures by GSA and a significantly increased budget. The process of expansion has played out over decades for the federal bureaucracy to get to the point it is now in terms of leased office space. Undoing the cuts that the Trump Administration is putting in place will be difficult IF a future GOP serves as an impediment to that happening.
Decapitating Leadership of “Independent” Agencies
One way to slow down the functioning of “independent” Executive Branch agencies created by Congress — i.e., SEC, FCC, FTC, NLRB, FEC, etc., — is by firing the Presidential appointees installed during prior administration. In nearly every case, the statutes passed by Congress that created these agencies included provisions regarding the commissioners/board members requiring “cause” to terminate them prior to the end of their statutorily prescribed terms in office. The purpose was to provide them with a level of independence from the President that would frustrate any effort to alter the policy direction of the agency when there is a change of parties occupying the White House.
For 90 years the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States has been the basis for lower court decisions upholding the rights of Presidential appointees to these independent agencies to remain in office and beyond the power of the President to remove them without cause. Over the course of that same period, Congress has vested these agencies with more and more authority to pass regulations, bring enforcement actions, and resolve disputed matters outside the processes established by the Constitution, i.e., the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. In many instances these agencies are prosecuting and adjudicating violations of regulations they themselves put in place, making them a “one-stop shop” for regulating the lives of citizens with no input from the three branches created by the Consitution to perform those functions.
The modern trend in the Supreme Court has been to recognize that the intrusion of such independent agencies into the realm of Executive authority — the decision-making about whether and how to pursue enforcement of particular laws or regulations — is an infringement on the Executive power that the Constitution vests in “a President.”
The Supreme Court has already ruled in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Board that an independent agency headed by a single-person who exercises any executive authority can be terminated by the President without cause, and any statute requiring “for cause” termination is an unconstitutional intrusion into the Executive power vested in the President. The Seila Law decision, however, left open the specific factual scenario in Humphrey’s Executor — a multi-person agency board or commission, where Executive power isn’t vested in a single individual and the terms of the board members/ commissioners are staggered such that every President is afforded the opportunity to appoint individuals of his choosing to the board.
The Trump Administration has moved to terminate at least 3 members of independent agency multi-person agency boards. All three individuals filed suit in the federal court in the District of Columbia since the termination notices did not list any cause, and each agency was created by a statute that included a provision that the termination of board members could only take place “for cause.” In all three cases the federal judges assigned have found that the terminations violated the statutes providing that the members should serve their full terms, and ordered them to be reinstated. The Trump Administration has appealed all three cases to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. But the question is not likely to be answered there.
Several members of the current Supreme Court have, at one time in the past, criticized the ruling in Humphrey’s Executor. The Trump Administration is betting that there are five votes to overrule Humphrey’s and restore to the President the authority to manage any Executive branch agency of office pursuant to the vesting of all Executive power in “a President,” including the right to terminate all such individuals without cause since they all exercise authority in his name.
This will allow the Trump Administration to fill all the board/commission seats on all the independent agencies, and do so with individuals committed to scaling back the quantity of work these independent agencies have taken upon themselves that regulates vast areas of day-to-day life. Controlling the agencies will also allow the Administration to work to rescind vast amounts of regulations that have been put in place over a period of decades.
On January 31, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order directing federal agenices to repeal 10 existing regulations for every one new regulation they pass. We already see that effort underway in the form of the announcement by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to roll back much of the regulatory infrastructure put in place by the Biden Administration’s climate change agenda and “Green New Deal.”
The expectation is that deregulation — both through scaling back the enforcement activity and eliminating decades of burdensome rules and regulations — will reduce the costs of regulatory compliance, and thereby bringing down the costs of doing business across entire sectors of the economy.
Dramatic reductions in the staffing levels of these agencies, combined with reducing their impact on the population, will both serve to dramatically shrink the Administrative State. Controlling all the seats on these boards/commissions is the path to putting those policies in place.
Starve the NGOs.
The various USAID cases filed by multiple NGOs — “Non-Government Organizations” — exposed the extent to which taxpayer money flows out of the Treasury to fund a vast network of progressive Neo-Marxist organizations with vaguely worded and often ridiculous mission statements. There is no question that some foreign aid programs are salutary and worth the investment made by US taxpayers for health and welfare purposes that ultimately redound to the benefit of the United States. But the public disclosure by DOGE showed thousands of USAID funded programs — a few of which were mentioned by President Trump during his address to Congress last week — only advanced progressive and Marxist political, economic, and cultural goals. Only USAID and State Department officials made the judgment calls on what to fund and what not to fund, revealing the extent to which billions of dollars in taxpayer money finances the an infrastructure of left wing organizations that keep progressive shock troops employed.
I voted 9 times (66 to ’84) for the man who 8 straight years tried to demolish Ed Depy. Doles topped him. Reason 3 or 4 why I didn’t vote Dole. Been a lover of America 80 years.