Among President Trump’s opening barrage of executive orders were directives to undo many of President Joe Biden’s actions and to make a sharp break from the way that administration handled immigration. But it is the bucket of orders related to the federal work force and administrative agencies — and his choice to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget — that could have the greatest long-term impact on the shape of American democracy.
Whether that prospect inspires delight or dread will depend in large part on whether you view the evolution of the federal government over the past century with approval or disgust.
If Russell Vought is confirmed as Office of Management and Budget director, he will continue to enact and accelerate the radical, sweeping agenda he began to implement in that same position during the final two years of the first Trump administration.
From that record and his testimony before a Senate committee last week, as well as the executive orders released this week, it’s clear that he and the administration plan nothing less than a full-scale assault on the regulatory and spending powers of the executive branch, reversing trends that have been underway since the early 20th century.
A self-described Christian nationalist, Mr. Vought has elaborated on his views over the past four years, including in a contribution to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the new Republican administration and in a recent, lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson.
Conservatives have railed against the growth of the federal government that started in the Progressive Era, and especially the exponential expansion of what’s come to be called the administrative state — the numerous departments and regulatory agencies of the executive branch.
Mr. Vought has harshly criticized this progressive vision of the federal government’s role in American life, which has been driven by numerous developments in political culture. Congress passed laws that sometimes amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staff the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversee and run.
For Mr. Vought and like-minded conservatives, the results of these developments place the country in a “post-constitutional moment” in which we’ve grown accustomed to being ruled by an unelected and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government.
This “fourth branch” stands above and apart from the separation of powers, imposing its own agenda and defending its own distinct interests, and it is this — “the woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” as Mr. Vought has called it — that he has promised to dismantle. As he wrote in his contribution to Project 2025, “nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.”
In Mr. Vought’s view, presidents (aided by recent Supreme Court rulings that curtail administrative independence) have powerful tools at their disposal to accomplish such a revolution. He calls these tools “radical constitutionalism” — and they are articulated in the text of the Constitution but have grown dormant from disuse in recent decades.
Mr. Vought sees the Office of Management and Budget serving as “air-traffic control” for an executive branch in desperate need of oversight that can “ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.”
Mr. Vought sees four distinct areas of reform that would empower the president and tame the administrative state. The first involves an explicit rejection of the notion of bureaucratic independence. It has applied to dozens of agencies across the executive branch, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve banking system, as well as the Justice Department when it is treated as standing apart from and even above the president.
In Mr. Vought’s view, along with other conservatives who embrace the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea of extra-political independence is “not something that the Constitution understands.” The president heads the executive branch; these departments and agencies reside within it; that puts the president in charge of them, empowered by the voters who elected him. In short, he is their boss, and they must do as he wishes. The idea that they can operate independently of such oversight and accountability is incompatible with self-government.
The second area of reform Mr. Vought highlights involves the president reasserting the constitutional power to impound, or claw back, funds appropriated by Congress. Until 1974, presidents enjoyed broad (though not unlimited) impoundment powers based on the presumption that Congress sets a ceiling but not a floor for federal spending. But with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in response to Richard Nixon’s supposed abuse of the impoundment power, Congress acted to remove this power from the presidency.
In his confirmation hearing last week, Mr. Vought said that he considers the 1974 law unconstitutional and blames it for contributing in a decisive way to the ballooning federal deficits and national debt. During his first administration, Mr. Trump followed such reasoning to withhold funds Congress had appropriated for Ukraine, which led directly to his first impeachment. In the second Trump administration, expect similar acts of presidential defiance, and a likely appeal to the Supreme Court, over the impoundment power.
The third area of reform relates to a few of this week’s executive orders that apply to federal employees. They build on something Mr. Vought came close to carrying out in the first Trump term by an executive order commonly known as Schedule F: the elimination of Civil Service protections from potentially tens of thousands of executive branch employees. A new executive order redesignates many of these bureaucrats as “at will” employees who can be fired at the discretion of the president and then replaced by people firmly committed to the administration’s agenda. (That order is likely to be challenged in court). Precisely how many employees will be affected by this attempted redesignation is unclear. Mr. Vought himself attempted in November 2020 to redesignate as fireable employees 88 percent of O.M.B.’s staff of around 500.
Mr. Vought’s fourth, and vaguest, agenda item is to “take on the system” — by which he means the most secretive (or “deep state”) aspects of the executive branch. His comments to Mr. Carlson imply this could include ending F.B.I. background checks for senior government jobs, eliminating the “overclassification” of documents and ceasing to conceal from public scrutiny the size of intelligence agency budgets.
The idea is to dismantle power and the obscurity of its deployment, including the criminal investigation of people who challenge the system. That’s how Mr. Vought prefers to think of the legal troubles Mr. Trump and other members of his first administration have faced over the past four years — as retaliation on the part of the fourth branch of government for Mr. Trump’s efforts at curtailing or defying their power.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Vought’s approach to this supposed abuse of bureaucratic power is diametrically opposed to what Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., prefers. Whereas Mr. Patel promises to turn the powers of the deep state against Mr. Trump’s enemies on the grounds that turnabout is fair play, Mr. Vought hopes to eliminate such powers altogether.
This stance on the administrative state — to destroy it or to weaponize it — seems contradictory. In his contribution to Project 2025, Mr. Vought resolves this by suggesting that the answer might be both: The “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” by the president, he wrote, “will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial” to return power to the American people. Mr. Trump will boldness “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and self-denial “to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments and states.”
The track record of Republican administrations stretching back to the well-publicized frustrations of the Reagan administration gives us ample reason to doubt the new administration’s ability to land in that sweet spot between boldness and self-denial. This history shows us that it’s much easier to enhance executive power and spending than to curtail them.
That’s unfortunate, because our federal government could use reform and updating, and the conservative critique of the administrative state isn’t entirely without merit. The sprawling bureaucracies of the executive branch are disliked by many and have, in recent years, stumbled (the pandemic offers the most obvious example), contributing to declining trust and confidence in our public institutions.
But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to tear down much of what we’ve built since the early 20th century.
Every modern nation — and certainly a superpower of nearly 350 million people — requires institutions of public administration that regulate aspects of our lives with intelligence and consistency over time. There is no reality in which we could get along without them. Pretending otherwise — or imagining government would work better if its powers were placed in the hands of those who are more narrowly partisan and less broadly knowledgeable than the civil servants we have today — is folly.
What we need are not plans to burn down the federal bureaucracy — or to transform the presidency into a quasi-authoritarian office empowered to micromanage regulatory policy across the entirety of the executive branch. We need smart ideas for incremental reforms that make the bureaucracy at once more nimble and more humble.
Mr. Vought’s alternative — implementing a sophisticated version of what Steve Bannon has called a battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state” — is liable to be far more destructive.
The act of demolition might be easier and more satisfying than the careful but often tedious work of repair. But the latter is the only way to enact lasting change for the better.
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