When President-elect Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, he talked about “draining the swamp” and fundamentally changing Washington. Trump’s administration could count many successes, especially on the economy and trade, and in curbing illegal immigration before the COVID-19 pandemic derailed him. Yet the D.C. establishment and its army of federal bureaucrats survived more or less intact. Indeed, many of these “deep state” warriors at the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., and the intelligence agencies played a role in aiding and abetting the Russia collusion hoax that did so much to undermine Trump’s first years in office.
Part of the problem was that many of Trump’s appointments to key posts, including Cabinet secretaries, failed him. With most of those who would normally serve in Republican administrations shunning him, Trump had few loyalists able to take on major responsibilities. His first cabinet picks were often establishment figures; they were either not on board with his reformist goals or lacked the will to prevent the permanent government employees in their departments from slow-walking or sabotaging Trump’s agenda.
He’s not making that same mistake again.
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The legacy corporate media and veteran swamp-dwellers have been leading a chorus of horror over Trump’s choices for roles in his second administration, deeming them unqualified or unfit for office. No doubt, it’s possible to criticize some of his appointments as ill-judged and unlikely to gain confirmation. Certainly, the cloud hanging over the reputation of former Rep. Matt Gaetz and the fact that he is deeply hated by most fellow congressional Republicans may doom his hopes of serving as Attorney General. But the pearl-clutching about other Trump picks says more about the panic inside the Beltway—that this time, Trump won’t be stopped from transforming Washington—than it does about his judgment.
Similarly, Trump’s decision to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services has earned pushback from those who remember Kennedy’s troubled past, his support of radical Leftist causes, and his intention to promote nanny state ideas about what we should eat. But Kennedy’s skepticism about the health establishment reflects the sentiments of most Americans who are still angry about the lies they were told by the “experts” about misguided COVID-19 policies like lockdowns, as well as masking and vaccine mandates.
Putting someone like Fox News host and author Pete Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defense is considered an outrage since he is neither a former senior military officer (though he is a decorated veteran of three wartime overseas deployments) or someone who has previously run a major company or bureaucracy. But that’s the point: Trump wants Hegseth at the Pentagon because he is not only a Trump loyalist but is dedicated to reversing the policies of his predecessors that have downgraded military readiness in favor of a woke agenda that prioritizes radical “anti-racist” and toxic diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
The same principle applies to naming Rep. Mike Waltz as C.I.A. director and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Both are fierce critics of the intelligence and foreign policy establishments, both for their roles in trying to subvert Trump and for decades of failed policies that helped set the stage for the war in Ukraine and the Oct. 7 massacre staged by Iranian-backed Hamas that forced Israel to fight against Islamist terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon.
And whoever it is that Trump finally puts in charge of the Department of Justice as Attorney General is likely to have the same agenda as Gaetz in purging liberal hardliners from its staff of lawyers who have not only taken part in the lawfare against Trump but also enabled the woke virus to spread throughout the government.
That’s a battle that Americans who understand the grave damage that Leftist ideology is doing to the country know must be fought.
And while some on the left are mocking Trump’s idea of Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, their effort to make Trump’s notion of a vastly trimmed-down D.C. bureaucracy is no joke and a much-needed project to reduce the federal leviathan.
This is not a “revenge” tour. It’s a long overdue campaign to reform an out-of-control federal bureaucracy.
In recent decades, as government power has grown exponentially, the administrative state has assumed the role of a fourth branch of government. Protected by both civil service regulations and the dysfunctional nature of Congress, it makes most of the rules and regulations that govern the country. Only the Supreme Court, with its overruling of the “Chevron” precedent, which gave government agencies the ability to make new law, has had any success in restraining it.
The people that every administration rely on to carry out their policies—the vast federal bureaucracy—are every bit as biased toward Democrats as the press. The “expert” class and their civil servant allies are dedicated to ensuring that liberal orthodoxies on a vast range of issues are not only enforced but survive the efforts of Republicans to rein in or reverse them.
Every study about the bureaucracy shows that it is overwhelmingly liberal and loyal supporters and donors to the Democratic Party. 95 percent of those who made political donations gave money to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It has tolerated establishment Republicans who are willing to play by unwritten D.C. rules that prevent them from putting conservative policies into action. But it didn’t cooperate with Trump, as was clear even before he first took office in 2017.
The same “dread” is being felt throughout Washington today. The only difference is that given a second chance, Trump won’t let the “deep state” beat him again.
Rather than taking politics out of the bureaucracy, as 19th century reformers who created the federal service hoped, the administrative state has become a partisan government priesthood dedicated to advancing the interests and ideas of the Democrats and Left-wing ideologues. There has been little accountability for them or a way to stop the abuses that were baked into the system. That is, until the American people elected for the second time a president dedicated to ending their unelected and seemingly permanent reign.
That’s the context for evaluating the team that Trump wants to put in place. Some are questionable, and he may have gone a bridge too far with Gaetz. But all of them are part of an entirely necessary crusade to enact real change and to restrain a fourth branch of government that was neither envisioned by the Founders of the republic nor chosen by the people.
Even though the chattering classes will squeal about it, the Senate should not use its constitutional advice-and-consent powers to obstruct Trump’s plan to finally drain a Leftist swamp that is doing far more damage to democracy than he could ever dream of doing.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.