Trump's War on the ‘Deep State' Will Hurt His Own Agenda

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4 days ago

For nearly a decade, U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters have raged against the 'deep state' and how it has allegedly been weaponized against him and his followers. If one believes the MAGA narrative, a coterie of unelected bureaucrats implacably opposed to Trump's agenda have disregarded their obligations to implement it. Instead, they have engaged in a variety of strategic leaks, excessive lawfare and malign resistance to thwart his America First policies.
A month into Trump's first term, for instance, his chief strategist at the time, Steve Bannon, famously declared war on the 'administrative state.' The first Trump administration's attempts to accomplish this proved to be fitful at best. Just a few months into his second term, however, these redoubled efforts have had greater success at eroding the size and influence of the federal bureaucracy. These initiatives include staff layoffs overseen by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE; the planned expansion of Schedule F employees who can be fired at will; and the trauma inflicted on those bureaucrats who have stayed on.
In other words, the deep state is getting shallower.
The idea that the federal bureaucracy needs reform is hardly unique to Trump and his MAGA supporters. More than a decade ago, my Fletcher School colleague Michael Glennon argued in his book, 'National Security and Double Government,' that the unelected bureaucracy was now exercising unprecedented influence over U.S. foreign policy, superseding the Madisonian institutions that the U.S. Constitution empowered. The bureaucratic politics literature within political science is replete with hypotheses about how institutional imperatives and organizational culture can affect policy implementation. Bureaucrats within the federal government often possess an informational advantage over political appointees, making it easier for them to resist undesired policies.
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Furthermore, these bureaucratic issues have bedeviled presidents since long before Trump. After Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, Harry Truman famously said, 'Poor Ike! When he was a general, he gave an order and it was carried out. Now he's going to sit in that big office and he'll give an order and not a damn thing is going to happen.' And at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. military continued U-2 overflights of the USSR despite heightened tensions, John F. Kennedy bemoaned, 'There is always some [expletive] who doesn't get the word.'
The bureaucracy has similarly stymied Trump's foreign policy preferences on occasion. During his first term, Trump often found himself rolled by the Pentagon on questions of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. In 2020, his outgoing Syria envoy infamously bragged to the press about the 'shell games' he and others played in order to obfuscate how many troops the U.S. had in the country after Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria in 2019. Even in his current term, there is evidence that elements of the national security bureaucracy are still up to their old tricks. When Trump asked for metrics to measure progress in the short-lived U.S. bombing campaign against the Houthis, for instance, U.S. military commanders reportedly responded 'by providing data showing the number of munitions dropped.' Relying on quantitative metrics that are only loosely related to the stated policy goal is Bureaucratic Politics 101.
As the Trump administration's efforts to winnow the bureaucracy have made inroads, one might expect to see a more docile bureaucracy that keeps its head down and tries to accomplish its assigned tasks. In actuality, however, the political science literature offers multiple cautionary tales against assuming that life is that simple.
The most obvious and direct problem is that the ways in which the Trump administration has attacked the bureaucracy have weakened the state's capacity to perform any essential tasks. One can complain about unnecessary red tape all day long, but Americans like knowing that nuclear weapons will not accidentally explode, airplanes will land safely and extreme weather events will be detected and responded to. Despite its loud denials, however, the Trump administration's myriad staffing cuts at the National Nuclear Security Administration, Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Emergency Management Administration have put all of these essential government functions at risk.
And despite the claims of the libertarians in the administration, like Elon Musk, the private sector will not necessarily be able to pick up the slack for the erosion of public goods. Indeed, the provision of public goods often facilitates the functioning of private markets. Unfortunately, that can work in reverse as well. The elimination of positions at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, will make private insurance more difficult to issue.
A related problem is tasking bureaucracies with multiple, conflicting goals. That is a surefire way to reduce government efficiency, and yet this is exactly what Musk's DOGE has done time and again during the first half of this year. For example, the Social Security Administration, or SSA, has a longstanding history of efficiency at fulfilling its primary task: accurately and speedily processing payments to retirees and other beneficiaries. Its skill at this task was so good that James Q. Wilson made it one of his exemplary cases in his classic text, 'Bureaucracy.'
As has been well-chronicled, however, DOGE's efforts to install anti-fraud measures at SSA proved debilitating to the agency's core mission. The DOGE-led staff reductions have slowed the pace of claims processing. DOGE's changes are causing the SSA's website to crash on a near-daily basis. Wait times on the phone have increased dramatically. All the while, minimal amounts of fraud have been detected, mainly because the claims of Social Security fraud, waste and abuse were wildly inflated among Trump's MAGA base.
Perhaps the most pernicious effect has been in the areas where the shallow state is trying to comply with the administration's priorities, as the bureaucracy is often picking the lowest-hanging fruit to reach those goals. This has been on prominent display in the efforts to adhere to Trump's executive orders prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives as well as his crackdown on immigration.
On the former, the bureaucracy's efforts to scrub anything DEI-related from official websites has led to absurd overreaches, such as wiping any references to the World War II-era aircraft that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, because its name—the Enola Gay—probably tripped a keyword filter. Trump's defenders have accused the bureaucracy of 'malicious compliance.' But the problem also stems from the lack of clarity in Trump's directives, which can lead to overzealousness from bureaucrats seeking to avoid opening themselves up to charges of dereliction of duty.
Even in areas where the administration has not cut staff to the bone, the shallow state is implementing Trump's preferred policies in a shallow manner. Consider the efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and deport undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States. Trump and his subordinates initially signaled that criminals and gang members would be the priority for these deportations. Over the past four months, however, the shallow state has implemented deportations in ways that expose myriad bureaucratic shortcuts, badly warping the process.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents have relied on caricatural metrics, like tattoos and hoodies, to identify gang members, with unsurprising results. The Cato Institute recently concluded that more than 20 percent of the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador in March had entered the U.S. legally and committed no criminal offense. ICE has also scooped up those who have scheduled meetings with immigration officials because, according to political scientist Auston Kocher, they are the easiest people for ICE to collect. Kocher's analysis of ICE data shows that detentions of immigrants with no criminal record have grown three times greater than those of convicted criminals. This has led to the internment of individuals who have endeavored to comply with all the rules.
Trump might very well succeed in eviscerating his fantasized deep state. The result will not be a more efficient bureaucracy, however, but a shallow state that is unable to perform its vital functions—including carrying out the directives of the president of the United States.
Daniel W. Drezner is distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is the author of Drezner's World.
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