Trump Doesn’t Want to Make Government Better—He Wants to Dismantle It

At first, it seemed like merely another Donald Trump tantrum.

Last week, while traveling to disaster zones in North Carolina and California, the president said he was considering maybe “getting rid of FEMA,” the $33 billion federal agency that provides life-saving emergency responses to wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other major calamities. People love to complain about FEMA, and some of its programs have significant flaws. But surely Trump, wound up by a first-person encounter with “Governor Gavin Newscum,” was just lashing out as usual.

Instead, Trump’s musing about possibly dismantling FEMA turned out to be foreshadowing. This week the new administration unleashed a damaging and thoroughly real assault on multiple branches of government, from halting cancer research to freezing foreign aid to offering buyouts to more than two million federal employees to (temporarily) unplugging the Medicaid payment system.

Just eight days before a commercial jet and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River, leaving no survivors, Trump turned the Aviation Security Advisory Committee into a ghost town as part of his anti-DEI purge and fired the heads of the TSA and Coast Guard. Trump, of course, blamed the disaster on the DEI policies of his predecessor. “Despicable,” former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg shot back, adding: “President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.”

None of these cuts should have been surprising. Not simply because Trump, during the 2024 campaign, promised to dramatically overhaul Washington, or because Project 2025—which he attempted, unconvincingly, to disavow—spelled out the specifics of the agenda for 922 pages. But because the right-wing has been fixated on dismantling government for a very long time. Sure, some of the immediate particulars are stunning and unique: Paul Weyrich, a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation in 1973, couldn’t have envisioned Elon Musk. Yet what’s unfolding now is perfectly predictable in the larger context. Trump and company are the apotheosis of a methodical, relentless five-decade conservative anti-government program.

Describing this, I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I tell Vermont Democratic senator Peter Welch, who has proposed a sensible revamping of FEMA. He assures me that I don’t. “This is not a conspiracy. This is an out-and-out effort, well-defined, well-researched, well-funded,” Welch says. “It’s not a commitment to reforming government. It’s about eviscerating it and essentially getting out of the way for a private market unfettered by regulations or restraint. Of course, that’s great for the billionaires who had pride of place at the inauguration.”

Julian Zelizer teaches political history at Princeton University, and he sees Trump as fitting snugly inside a bigger picture. “There’s a continuity to 1981, and to 2001. This has been a conservative project—gutting the tax base of the federal government, staffing agencies with people who are not eager to run them, proposing ways to limit Medicaid,” Zelizer says. “The FEMA example is perfect. A lot of what Trump is planning is undercutting the ability of the federal government to do what it does, other than in a few areas, like immigration. Trump is accelerating some of what Ronald Reagan called for on day one. In that sense, Trump is very much a product of the ’80s.”

Yet where Reagan was able to cloak his hostility in sly humor—“I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”—Trump is chillingly humorless. He also isn’t especially ideological. “Trump didn’t figure out these executive orders,” says Donald Cohen, the founder of In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that studies and advocates for public goods and services, and the author of The Privatization of Everything. “But he’s put in a set of people who are conservative political warriors, who are building on an infrastructure that goes back 40 or 50 years, to Heritage and the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.”

Trump has empowered key aides, like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, who are true believers in the worldviews constructed by Pat Buchanan, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, the Koch brothers, or Grover Norquist, who once described his dream of a government so small he could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Miller, who spearheaded anti-immigrant initiatives during Trump’s first term and is White House deputy chief of staff for policy this time around, is said to have pushed the “flood the zone” strategy of the past two weeks. Vought, Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, sees himself as righteously battling against an unelected and accountable “fourth branch” of government, “the work and weaponized bureaucracy.” In 2023, Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One evil genius aspect of their crusade is that by stripping down the government, Trump’s team sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy: See, government doesn’t work! We need less government! Never mind that government, as imperfect as it can be, is still often the difference between hunger or health, between education or ignorance, and between a safe or dangerous flight.

Congresswoman Laura Friedman calls me from Los Angeles, where she’s driving through her district, talking with constituents reeling from the devastating fires. “People are very grateful that they’re receiving help from FEMA right now,” she says. “It’s not a question of whether it should exist, but how well it is operating. The Republicans want to privatize a lot of what government employees do because it puts money into the pockets of the people who finance their campaigns. I think we’re at a turning point, because we have an administration that is willing to throw the Constitution into the waste bin to get what they want.”

And what they want is the enfeebled federal government that conservatives have been working toward for a very long time. “Trump isn’t talking about making government better,” Welch says. “He’s basically talking about destroying it.”