The meticulous, ruthless preparations for a second Trump term

PART 2

To that end Mr Trump’s commandos will “deconstruct” the administrative state—the 300 or more federal offices that issue and interpret regulations. The philosophical version of this idea is that, over time, as the role of the federal government has grown from fighting wars and running the postal service into the Leviathan it is today, unelected bureaucrats have assumed powers that should belong to Congress. The Twitter version is that the deep-state liberals who thwarted Mr Trump when he was in office and have persecuted him since he left must be vanquished. Either way, Mr Trump’s shock troops will try to wrest power back from the bureaucracy.

In practice it is hard to see how government would function without the administrative state. Congress struggles to fulfil basic responsibilities like passing a budget on time. To imagine that the same body could act as, say, the regulator of financial markets is a stretch. That may be the point. The maga movement is not libertarian, but in many ways it would like the federal government to do far less than it does now.

The would-be Trump appointees plan to subdue the bureaucracy using Schedule f, shorthand for an executive order issued by Mr Trump in 2020 and rescinded by Joe Biden when he became president. It reflects a view that the federal bureaucracy, whatever its size, should not have any entrenched authority. For the first century of its existence, civil servants were appointed to jobs by the government of the day based on an algorithm of personal contacts and favours owed known as the spoils system. Then in 1881 a deranged office-seeker assassinated the president, spurring the passage of the Pendleton Act, which created a class of professional bureaucrats who stayed in their posts even as the presidency changed hands. Since the 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt was expanding the government, it has been hard to fire federal bureaucrats, afpi complains.

Many political appointees in the Trump administration believe that a minority of civil servants used their protected status to thwart or undermine the president’s wishes. James Sherk, a policy adviser in the Trump White House who is now at afpi, cites two cases on which lawyers in various government departments reportedly refused to work: one against Yale University for allegedly discriminating against Asian-Americans, and one aimed at protecting nurses from having to perform abortions. Schedule f would empower Mr Trump’s appointees to remove perceived obstructionists at will.

“Schedule f is now, I think, Republican doctrine,” says Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Mr Trump. “I don’t know how a Republican gets elected and doesn’t do that.” It would also be straightforward to enact: Mr Trump could just reissue his old executive order. Again, there is a reasonable version of this idea, in which a small number of recalcitrant civil servants lose their jobs, and a campaign version, where Schedule f becomes the instrument of Mr Trump’s righteous purge of Washington.

To be with those I like is enough The combined effect of appointing only loyalists and cowing the bureaucracy would be both to remove constraints on Mr Trump and to ensure his wishes are acted on more often. In his first term Mr Trump’s opponents took some comfort from the idea that not all the people around him were true believers, and were willing to stall his most alarming ideas. The New York Times ran an anonymous piece by a political appointee who claimed there was an internal resistance within the administration that acted as a check on presidential power. In a second Trump term, there will not be any “grown-ups in the room”, as Mr Trump’s detractors called such people.

Once a second Trump administration had bent the bureaucracy to its will, what policies would it pursue? The department-by-department plans being drawn up at afpi, Heritage and elsewhere give some guidance. They involve some predictable fusillades in the culture wars, such as completing a wall along the border with Mexico and directing all federal officials to consider only people’s biological sex, rather than “self-identified” gender. But some of the putative policy agenda is both more sweeping in scope and more of a break with past Republican orthodoxy.

One such area is the economy. The new right is enthusiastic about the kind of industrial policy the Biden administration has pursued. “No one in Ohio…cares that the Wall Street Journal editorial board doesn’t like the chips bill on free-market economic grounds,” J.D. Vance, a senator, recently told a gathering at American Compass, a think-tank, referring to a law subsidising semiconductor factories. In some cases Mr Trump’s supporters would go further: Mr Vance advocates taxing companies that shift work offshore.

The main partisan disagreement over industrial policy is no longer whether to have one at all, but over the Democrats’ habit of smuggling diversity requirements and environmental goals into it. As the Republicans have become a more working-class party than the Democrats, people like Mr Vance have tried to synthesise a new Republican position that is both pro-labour and hostile to union leaders. His advocacy of subsidies for industry without “the woke bullshit” is probably more popular than the Biden administration’s approach.