The federal government is under attack.
That attack is not coming from a foreign government or enemy troops, but from those in this country who consider the federal government the deep state, or want it to do only their bidding. The attack is supported or approved of by some citizens who, for a variety of reasons, have issues with the federal government.
There is no question that the federal government is not perfect and never will be. It is, however, not a deep state, nor should it be a vehicle for others to weaponize on their behalf. The federal government also deserves to be recognized and supported for what it has contributed to this country and continues to do so today.
A proper perspective on the federal government is essential to ensure that revisions or reforms make it not only more efficient, but also more effective in producing results that benefit this nation and its citizens. Absent that perspective, the federal government could be decimated, and along with it the lives of many Americans and people around the world.
The Deep State and the Trump Administration — Round One
The term “deep state” has been used frequently over the past decade or so to refer to the federal government generally. This is unfortunate because it reduces the government at the national level to a contemptuous sound bite that has nothing to do with the meaning of the “deep state.”
There are various definitions for deep state. The definition we prefer comes from dictionary.com which explains deep state as follows:
The term deep state is used in the context of conspiracy theories to refer collectively to unelected government officials who are said to conspire to control the federal government and its agencies from behind the scenes in order to promote their own agenda.
We prefer that definition because it correlates with the rise in the significant usage of “deep state” and related terminology during the initial Trump presidency. Early in 2017, near the start of Trump’s presidential tenure, Steve Bannon, his senior strategist in the White House at the time, advised that they would be working every day on the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
The intent back then was to remove any obstacles or impediments to Trump’s wishes or will in the deep state, and to convert it into the Trump “estate.” That government would have been obligated to do anything that Trump or his minions wanted done, no matter the costs or consequences.
The Trump administration was successful in “deconstructing” selected policies, positioning, and modes of operation of parts of the federal government, but was unable to make sweeping across-the-board changes. Fortunately, one of those areas in which they failed to do so was in implementing an Executive Order Trump signed on October 21, 2020, revamping the civil service by creating Schedule F positions.
Those Schedule F positions would have been mid- and senior-level jobs that had some policymaking responsibilities, which are normally filled through the competitive civil service system. These positions would have been reclassified so that they were no longer filled through full and open competition or protected from political interference or influence.
Joe Biden beat then President Trump in the 2020 elections to become the 46th president of the United States and on January 22, 2021 signed an executive order killing Schedule F.
The Deep State and the Trump Administration — Round Two
With Trump returning to the presidency on January 20, 2025, Schedule F is back on the table, and it appears likely that Trump will issue a new Executive Order reaffirming it. One initial estimate is that Schedule F could impact at least 50,000 civil service jobs located in agencies throughout the federal government.
Schedule F is just a starting point for the “deconstruction” this time. President-elect Donald J. Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an advisory commission improperly named the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). Trump has stated that DOGE is intended to “”dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Elon Musk has declared that he believes $2 trillion can be cut out of the annual federal budget, named people who he would want to eliminate from agencies, and called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In his book, Truths: The Future of America First, Vivek Ramaswamy recommends appointing a “czar” to head and “tame” the administrative state.
The plans that Musk and Ramaswamy will use, and the people they will employ to implement those plans, are not publicly known yet. In an article posted on January 10, though, the Washington Post reports that DOGE has begun sending representatives to do interviews in government agencies, already has 50 staff on board, and expects to have 100 on board by the time Trump takes office on January 20.
What is known is some of the things that Musk and Ramaswamy would like to do.
Faiz Siddiqi of the Washington Post reports they have generated what he calls a “wish list” of moves to make the government more efficient. This list includes: “Delete” the IRS; end the Federal Reserve; and privatize the mail.
Jeff Stein of the Washington Post writes that DOGE would “move rapidly to slash federal rules with plans to have Trump immediately freeze ‘thousands’ through executive order and permanently undo thousands more.”
What is also known is that Musk and Ramaswamy intend to have their DOGE’s work wrapped up, and jobs completed, by no later than July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. This is a very tight schedule — especially given the scope and nature of the federal government and the major results that Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed producing.
Several pundits have commented on the difficulty Musk and Ramaswamy will have in accomplishing their goals. In his commentary, Steve Rattner, in his Morning Joe Charts points out:
The challenge is that much of the federal government’s expenditures are off limits for cutting for one reason or another. For example, Trump has declared Social Security and Medicare off limits (although he has been conspicuously silent about Medicaid, which represents about 10% of outlays). As for defense, while some savings could probably be achieved, most experts believe the overall defense budget needs to become larger, not smaller. And of course, interest on the national debt is sacrosanct — the federal government can’t default. All of that leaves just 25% of the budget — $1.5 trillion of annual expenditures — available for cutting.
Even if the DOGE doesn’t achieve its ambitious targets, it’s likely that that the Trump administration will still achieve some deconstruction of the federal government, and its impact this go-round will be more substantial and consequential than in round one. That’s due to the fact that the majority of the nominees to head federal agencies and organizations have been selected because of their loyalty to Trump — and a commitment to disrupt business as usual in their areas of responsibility.
The Federal Government and The US Citizenry
As noted at the outset of this piece, there are some citizens who support the attack on the federal government. They probably view it as the deep state, are “angry,” and would love to see it deconstructed. A Pew Research Center study released in mid-June of 2024 indicates, however, that they are a minority. That Pew study found that “Today, six-in-ten Americans say they feel frustration toward the federal government, while 21% say they feel anger and 18% say they feel basically content.”
Pew goes on to point out that “Frustration toward the federal government is the dominant emotion for both Republicans and Democrats, regardless of which party is in control of the White House.”
Pew does not cite the reasons for the frustration shared by both Ds and Rs. But Annie Lowrey provides an excellent example of one of the reasons in her Atlantic article, which opens as follows:
No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families. …The IRS still does some of its business by fax. Fax.
We’re not certain that the IRS “deserves to be hated.” We are certain that it, and other federal agencies, frustrate many Americans regularly with loads of paperwork to be completed, difficulty being contacted, and slow response times.
That said, we are also certain that many Americans don’t know a lot about the way in which the federal government functions, believe there are too many government employees who are overpaid bureaucrats, and don’t recognize what the government does to make life better for them.
The Federal Government in Perspective
We also believe that if the general public had a more information on the scope and nature of the federal government and the role played in protecting and advancing the interests of the citizens and the nation the attitudes toward it would be more positive.
Based upon the most recent available data:
- There are 15 executive departments represented as agencies in the President’s cabinet.
- There are a total of 438 federal agencies and sub-agencies. This total includes independent executive agencies such as the CIA and government owned corporations such as NASA.
- The federal government spent $6.75 trillion in FY 2024 (10/1/23–9/30/24). The bulk of this money went to pay for costs such as Social Security, Medicare, and transfers to state and local governments.
- There are currently slightly more the 3.0 million federal employees
One of the fundamental misconceptions is that the number of federal employees and their costs has risen disproportionately with regard to the rest of the economy. As Steve Rattner’s analysis discloses, this is not the case. He states:
.. the number of civilian federal employees today is only slightly higher than when Ronald Reagan took office while the population of the U.S. has risen by 47%. Note also that the size of the civilian workforce has grown under every Republican president since Reagan, while it fell precipitously during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Nor is the pay of federal workers out of line. Back in 2011, the average civilian federal worker made about 6% more than a similarly qualified private sector employee. But political pressure has kept raises for federal workers below those awarded to private sector workers, so as of 2022, the average federal worker made 8% less than his civilian counterpart.
Although the number of civilian federal employees has not grown, the “blended federal workforce” has grown exponentially over the past several decades. In a piece for the Brookings Institution, Professor John DiLulio, Jr. writes, “.. while federal employee levels have kept stable, the number of people paid by federal grants and contracts but not counted on the federal payroll rose to around 7 million, a number that reflects 4.8 million contractors and 2.3 million grantees.”
These non-civil service federal employees and civil services employees are distributed in states all across the country. As a result, they bring tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to the states in which they are located.
That’s just one of the overlooked contributions and benefits that the federal government makes to uplift this nation. Consider Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
More recently, consider the loans made to businesses and checks sent to citizens during the pandemic. Consider the initiatives under the Biden administration to lower drug costs and to create working class and middle class jobs through the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Looking back in time, consider: Lincoln’s support of the transcontinental railroad; the Morrill Act creating land grant colleges; bringing electricity to rural America; the WPA projects that helped build the national park system; the GI Bill, the interstate highway system; eliminating polio and measles; NASA and its satellites used for weather forecasting, communication; and the internet. The list of societal benefits could go on and on.
In spite of this, for many people those in government employment have fallen into the Rodney Dangerfield category of not getting any respect. This is unfair and unfortunate.
Best-selling author Michael Lewis and six other well-known authors wrote a series of articles published in the Washington Post on this topic that will be issued as a book titled Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service this March. In his commentary for the Post after the series was completed, Lewis provided the following insight about why so little is known about the good and sometimes great work that government does:
Our government — as opposed to our elected officials — has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them, but to prevent any of their employees from embarrassing the president. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense.
And the sort of people who become civil servants — the characters profiled in our “Who is government?” series — tend not to want or seek attention.
Lewis concludes by noting this lack of information enables the perpetuation and promotion of a negative stereotype of the government worker. As the foregoing discussion reveals, that stereotype is wrong and should be eliminated.
Federal Government Reform in Perspective
That’s not to say that there are government employees who don’t perform well or some jobs that are unnecessary. It’s also not to say that there is no need to reform or revise the way parts of the federal government operate today. There is.
That’s not just our opinion. It is shared by many experts who have studied or worked in the federal government over the past several decades.
The best commentary that we have seen on this comes from Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management of the Brookings Institution, who begins her piece by stating, “The Trump administration should be congratulated for making government efficiency a high priority. Absolutely no one, liberal or conservative, wants to see their tax dollars wasted.”
In her commentary Kamarck observes:
So how do you cut government? With a scalpel, not an axe. I know because between 1993 and 2000, the Clinton administration ran a program called the National Performance Review, which I directed under Vice President Al Gore. Nicknamed REGO for “reinventing government,” the program became the longest-running reform effort in American history — resulting in 426,000 cuts to the federal workforce. We conducted a thorough review agency by agency, something the DOGE program would be wise to repeat. That resulted in hundreds of recommendations, two-thirds of which were enacted with $136 billion in savings. ..We closed superfluous offices, cut 16,000 pages of regulations, passed a major procurement reform bill, and fixed longstanding challenges in agencies from FEMA to the FAA…
She then adds “But that was thirty years ago. It’s time to do it again.”
We agree that “it’s time to do it again” and that DOGE should seriously consider emulating the type of agency by agency review done by the National Performance Review team.
We first advocated such a review in our book, Renewing the American Dream: A Citizen’s Guide for Restoring Our Competitive Advantage, published in 2010, in which we acknowledged the progress made by the National Performance Review and recommended the following:
- Have each federal government agency conduct a zero-based organization assessment and develop a strategic blueprint to become a high-performing organization.
- Implement a government-wide operational excellence initiative with maximum feasible employee involvement.
- Ensure on-the-job training and mentoring to transfer essential knowledge and skills to new government employees.
Those recommendations were presented with the understanding that there is a right way and a wrong way to do governmental reforms and revisions. They should not only cut costs, make units smaller, and processes simpler. They should also improve organizational performance, customer satisfaction, and employee morale. They should do this without unfairly benefiting those involved in the reform efforts.
Need to Avoid a DOGE Disaster
To date, there is little evidence that DOGE is putting a well-designed plan in place to satisfy these requirements. Elaine Kamarck opines, “But so far, the unrealistic approach DOGE has taken has in it the seeds of its own failure, both from a policy and political standpoint.”
She cautions that “Americans won’t like it if the border becomes more open or if airplane safety is dramatically imperiled. And don’t mess with Social Security checks.” Those are potential dramatic negative consequences. Other negative consequences related to failing to make the government work better for the working class and middle class people are seeming more and more probable.
One of those consequences is not being able to lower the costs of groceries, gas, and other normal consumer goods. President Trump repeatedly promised to be able to do that almost immediately if he was returned to office. In his interview with Time magazine after he was named Person of the Year, Trump walked away from that promise, stating “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” “You know, it’s very hard…But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down.”
Another group who Trump could be walking away from are those citizens living in rural areas who voted overwhelmingly for him in this election. Ron Brownstein highlights this possibility near the opening of his Atlantic article, in which he writes:
Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing vouchers to send their kids to private schools.
The quality, or lack thereof, of the members of Trump’s cabinet, and those in leadership and middle management positions in federal agencies and sub-agencies, will have a substantial effect on whether the Trump administration will be constructive or destructive on the future capabilities and competence of the federal government.
At this point, the signs are not good. It appears that we may be headed down the destruction path toward what academics Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call “ungoverning,” which they define as “the willful destruction of state capacity.”
In the preface to their new book, Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos, finished months before the 2024 election, they state:
“It is tempting to think the future of the phenomenon we call ungoverning depends on that election. But ungoverning is not the project of one person. The objective of deconstructing the administrative state is carried by a reactionary movement, by elected officials in the Republican party, and by justices of the Supreme Court.”
The shift toward ungoverning could also be accelerated by the “billionaires” being brought into government leadership posts by Trump. They could transform it into a kakistocracy — government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.
The words “ungoverning” and “kakistocracy” don’t matter. What matters is the future of the federal government.
The federal government does not need or deserve to be attacked or destroyed. It needs to be reviewed, renewed, and reformed.
An informed and educated citizenry will understand this. Unfortunately, part of that educational process may have to be experiencing the negative consequences of a government that becomes incompetent, irrelevant, and invisible.
We hope that will not be the case, and that calmer and cooler heads will prevail within the Trump administration. If they do not, concerned citizens will have to stand and deliver and be prepared to take corrective actions.
As we noted in our blog before this one, we are in a pivot point period. It will be a trying and testing time in which those who believe in a fairer and better country, and recognize the importance that the federal government plays in creating this state, will need to come together as pivot persons to enable this nation to move forward rather than backward.