Don’t mix up Donald P. Moynihan with deceased New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who played footsie with Nixon and was best known for an anti-welfare stand that had a bit of a racist odor. As far as I can tell Donald is not related to Daniel. He’s an Irish-American political scientist, who wrote the highly acclaimed book The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform. He teaches at Georgetown and yesterday the NY Times published his guest essay, Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’. His field is bureaucracies and urges everyone who would normally ignore the topic— pretty much everyone other than his students— to start paying attention since Señor Trumpanzee has some plans: “‘Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.’ This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy… This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts.” (It’s part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.)
The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.
These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.
The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.
Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials— with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on— into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.
Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.
The third part of Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for the New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.
This is not about conservatism. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
…We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.
American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.
Putin’s investment will have proved to be a bonanza… again. Yesterday, Ben Jacobs reported that “A MAGA bumper sticker often isn’t simply a statement of loyalty; it’s a cultural signifier of community much like the dancing bear bumper sticker is for a Grateful Dead fan… [Trump] has merged fan culture with American politics.” MAGA rallies are more like concerts— or comedy shows— than like political events. In the hick towns he plays, his shows are cheap entertainment for the dregs of American society, morons and racists… but our fellow citizens.
After one show in Iowa, attendees quickly streamed out,” reported Jacobs. “They had seen the show, bought their merchandise, and taken the selfies to prove that they were there. For hardcore Trump devotees, it was yet another milestone for them to mark down. And for those less devoted, it was a rare opportunity that was not to be missed. After all, presidential candidates come to Iowa all the time— but how often does Donald Trump come to your town? Trump loyalists, let alone those motivated enough to attend his rallies, don’t make up a majority of Republican primary voters or general election voters. But they represent a key faction within the GOP and are perhaps the decisive reason for Trump’s political strength— even after 91 criminal charges, four tumultuous years in the White House, and one attempt to storm the Capitol and overturn a presidential election. Even when Trump’s political fortunes were at their lowest ebb after he left office, he still had a base devoted to him, not so much for his politics but for his personality and what that personality represents.”
He can win the Republican primary that way— in a landslide. But the general election? I doubt it, unless his plan is to replace Obamacare with Medicare-for-All. He’d win in a landslide, authoritarianism or not.
