Donald Trump has allies Laying out the sweep plan If he returns to power, plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government include likely firing thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But just how far will Trump go in trying to dismantle what he calls the “deep state”? The answer is not clear.
In choosing J.D. Vance as his vice president, he chose someone who would really take him far.
“If I had given him a piece of advice” for the second term, Vance said In a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat in the administrative state, every single civil servant, replace them with our people.”
It was no idle talk. Somewhat unusually for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He was deeply influenced by thinkers in the movement known as the New Right, who sought to seize and transform social institutions that they believed were dominated by the Left.
A big part of that will involve a reined-in President Trump checking any resistance to him or his powers from the executive branch.
Vance is deeply committed to the project of taking over institutions away from the left
There have long been figures in Trump’s orbit who have called for him to work on reshaping the executive branch, viz Steve Bannon, who called for a “restructuring of the administrative state” at the start of his brief White House tenure. In the chaos of Trump’s first term, such plans didn’t get very far at first. Trump became increasingly frustrated by resistance to his agenda among permanent federal employees and his inability to get “loyal” people in place.
Meanwhile, young conservatives outside the administration — like Vance — were wondering why President Trump is fighting to enact his agenda and the nation’s left-leaning movement on social justice. Many of them were drawn to the interpretations offered by the writers of the New Right.
The New Right presented an institutional theory of why conservatives couldn’t get what they wanted. According to this theory, the left had ultimate power because of its control of key institutions from the media and academia to technology companies and the federal bureaucracy. The task ahead for the Right was to fight for these institutions and seize control of them.
A particularly extreme New Right thinker is blogger Curtis Yervin, whom I profiled in 2022. Yervin argues that a new right-wing president should “retire all the public servants” — fire them all — and reorganize the government. (He also advocated the downfall of American democracy and the replacement of the monarchy.)
Vance quoted Yervin approvingly during a podcast appearance in which he discussed how Trump should fire “every civil servant.” He said: “There’s this guy, Curtis Yervin, who writes about some of these things.”
Vance will likely push Trump to go further in rebuilding the government
As Trump prepares to leave office in 2020, he finally gets around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issues an executive order known as Schedule F.
The order laid the groundwork for reclassifying the jobs of 50,000 career civil servants as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it was implemented, however, and Biden quickly retracted it.
There are many fears that Trump will restore this policy in his second term, replacing many of the shifty career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt agenda.
Such action can be implemented in any way from the more limited and less disruptive to the more sweeping and highly disruptive. Given Trump’s seemingly intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I thought that how this would play out would depend on who staffed his administration, since he could be pulled in different directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political shock may suggest restraint.
Vance wouldn’t do that. He will be the main voice of the Trump administration urging him to go really big.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance said, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’
That is: Vance insists that Trump will radically reshape the executive branch even though the Supreme Court has said it is illegal to do so.
Vance’s Silicon Valley backers also want to impose major restrictions on the federal government
When you learn that Vance’s top political backers include several famous Silicon Valley figures — such as Peter Thiel And Elon Musk — who alike hate the left and want sweeping changes in left-dominated institutions.
Thiel is perhaps the leading intellectual influence on Vance, who as a Yale law student attended a lecture by Thiel at the school in 2011. Vance was starstruck, call later The speech was “the most important moment of my time at Yale Law School” and Thiel “probably the smartest person I ever met.” Vance ready soon Thiel’s acquaintance, finally got a job Thiel-founded investment fund, and much later received $15 million from Thiel for his Senate campaign.
Thiel wrote of his own fascination with American institutions, Written in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He has supported many in New Rights, including Yervin, whose startup He financed. (“He’s completely enlightened,” Yervin later Thiel wrote about In an email, “just plays it very carefully.”)
Musk, meanwhile, put the “capture the institutions” strategy into practice when he bought Twitter and rebuilt it. on a more right-wing-friendly platform. musk to cut About 80 percent of the company’s staff and most content abandoned its moderation and hate speech policies, fleeing liberals.
Could Trump and Vance try something similar – take a wrecking ball to the permanent civil service? Even if the court tried to stop them?
We don’t know for sure, but Vance’s election raises the odds for more chaos in the federal government.
“We are late for a republic,” Vance said on the 2021 podcast, alluding to the fall of the Roman Republic. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to be pretty wild and go pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives are uncomfortable with right now.”
