Trump Is The Logical Conclusion of Federalization

A century of lawmakers and journalists aggrandizing the presidency has culminated in Trump's "dictator on day one" approach to governing.

The first three weeks of the Trump presidency is a quintessential century-long example of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes — except on a federal scale.

When President Trump reinstated Schedule F in his second term, allowing for the firing and hiring of federal employees at will, critics swiftly labeled it a reckless attempt to undermine the integrity of federal institutions. But really, it is the ongoing federalization of public policy over the past century that has culminated in what we’re now witnessing. Whether or not it survives legal challenges, the abrasive unilateralism the presidency has acquired is shocking but not surprising given how much of American governance has been outsourced to the federal executive. Vesting more unilateral power in fewer places combined with a media culture that aggrandizes the president into the “dictator on day one” that it fears is how we get someone who believes they alone can fix it. Now, as Trump wields the same tools to shrink the government that his predecessors have used to expand it, the alarm over executive power rings hollow, revealing a political establishment more concerned with who holds power and how power is used rather than questioning the power itself.

The president is continuing with his team’s “flood the zone” strategy of leveraging executive power at a breakneck speed to blunt full evaluation of the policies being enacted. With only about three weeks in office, the president has deferred to a non-government employee, Elon Musk, to purge the federal government of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” conservatives have been crowing about for decades. Trump has unraveled DEI policies, pursued a to-be-litigated forced—though generous—resignation policy, paused select federal grant, loan, and financial assistance spending for at least 90 days, and paused enforcement of the TikTok ban passed by Congress and signed into law by his predecessor. He is pursuing a policy of deportation and has threatened—but so far withheld—tariffs on Mexico and Canada on the condition that they enhance their border security with the United States. Trump has even suggested abolishing the federal Department of Education, something I’ve advocated be done responsibly. As of this writing, the president has signed 61 executive orders and 25 memos or proclamations.

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Elon Musk, on Tuesday, spoke in the Oval Office alongside Trump, speaking in a fair-minded cadence that contrast with the troll persona with which X users are familiar. Musk sought to quell concerns, stating that the goal of DOGE was to restore a “feedback loop” between the people and those who govern them, a loop currently being disrupted by a concentration of power and reckless spending in the executive branch.

It seems a few things are all true at once. Many of these policies are disruptive, and they pursue ends that many on the center-left and even some on the center-right might find adverse. But it seems the ends, already stated in the campaign, are less striking than the means and the pace at which they are occurring. Anecdotes about federal workers with mortgages and children being laid off are centered on contrasting the ruthlessness of Trump’s reputation in the media, not so much on the fact that such layoffs are unprecedented or unique to the current leadership (Barack Obama presided over a relative decline in federal workers). But it’s also true that abolition, rather than reform, of organizations like the much-covered USAID poses ethical dilemmas, particularly in cutting relatively affordable programs that aid some of the world’s sick and hungry.

The force with which Trump is attempting to strike the federal bureaucracy, however, could be seen as directly proportionate to how hopelessly tangled, infuriatingly self-preserving, and autonomous the executive has become. The impulse to meet the various agencies and departments with a sledgehammer—or at least convey the exercise as such to the public—is a byproduct of a culture in Washington that defers excessively to the unelected. For the reflexive defenders of the bureaucracy, the democracy they wax on about defending is less a defense of democracy but a specific order of doing business.

The generations of lawmakers who, over time, have handed unilateral power over immigration, trade, and a range of other domains have culminated in what we’re seeing right now, for better or worse. They include those who passed the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that provides the executive significant discretion in managing federal employees and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 that allows the at-will creation and elimination of rules across the bureaucracy. It includes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which grants the executive branch broad authority in regulating immigration and enforcement priorities as well as the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 which allows the imposition of tariffs if the Department of Commerce deems them a threat to national security — and what isn’t these days?

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The False Promise of Federalization

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What Trump’s intentions are remains unclear because he’s pursuing policies that both empower the executive in ways his critics predicted and, at the same time, disempower many who work for him. Litigation will surely come, as it should—that’s part of the democratic process, despite what Vice President J.D. Vance may think.

All said, Trump’s first three weeks in office are the perfectly logical conclusion of federalization without any limiting principle—of continuing to do the government’s business just because it’s the way things have always been done. Critics can either clutch their pearls and pursue seismic and aggressive executive reform that breaks up the executive, or they can accept that the risks of emaciating American governance and transforming it into a quasi-autocracy are outweighed by the progressive ends federalization is said to achieve.

Sympathetic though one may be to the smashing of the bureaucracy, an United States faithful to remaining a representative democracy wouldn’t have allowed the executive to amass the power it has. Generations of politicians and journalists alike perhaps unwittingly rolled out the red carpet for someone like him to come along. The current generation can either maintain it or roll it back up after he’s gone.