The Sunny Side of Donald Trump's Power Grabs
The president is positioning himself to have much greater control over a smaller, enfeebled federal bureaucracy.
Love him or hate him, no one can argue that the first weeks of President Donald Trump's second administration have lacked executive energy.
His presidential orders have taken big policy swings by unilaterally declaring an end to the administrative state and canceling birthright citizenship.
With an assist from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the president is rapidly consolidating control over the federal bureaucracy by centralizing access to heretofore walled-off payment and personnel systems, replacing civil servants with political appointees, and putting independent agencies under White House supervision.
On a more structural level, Trump is pushing the envelope of executive power with his decisions to block congressionally appropriated spending and shutter congressionally mandated agencies and programs.
Democrats are naturally aghast at the president's actions. They've staged protests in front of shuttered government office buildings and filed innumerable lawsuits to block the state-slashing fruits of DOGE.
People within the wider small government universe have offered their own critical assessments, arguing the president is behaving illegally and in many cases usurping Congress' constitutional prerogatives.
I hazard to be more optimistic.
Some of the president's power grabs will turn out to be illegal or even unconstitutional and there's little chance he'll make a meaningful reduction in federal spending.
Nevertheless, his arsonist's blitz through the institutions will leave us with a smaller, enfeebled federal government more in line with a libertarian vision than the one he inherited on January 20, 2025.
That's most obvious when one considers the initial targets of Trump's power grabs: the federal bureaucracy.
Here, the thrust of Trump's actions has all been quite clear. He's attempting to replace an expert class of civil service-protected employees with political appointees responsive to himself.
In a National Review essay published last week, former Reagan administration official Donald Devine, argues this is much to the good.
Absent the profit-motive to guide decisions and right-size bureaucracy, the government is left with second-best methods of organization; either "Wilsonian" management insulated from political inputs or "pragmatic conservative political management" led by the president.
Devine argues that Wilsonian expertise inherently lends itself to big government, as career bureaucrats accumulate more and more power at the expense of elected officials and private individuals. And because "big government doesn't work" we're all left worse off as a result.
By cracking down on the independence of career civil servants, Trump and Musk are forcing the government expert class to understand that "they and their expert career bosses are not wholly untouchable or fully in charge," Devine writes.
The pushback to this view is that Trump's motive in reining in the bureaucracy is not libertarian, it's Trumpian. He doesn't want to shrink the state. He wants to use it for his own ends. And, as the Cato Institute's Walter Olson argued earlier this month, by moving fast and breaking things, he's also breaking his oath to faithfully execute the laws and uphold the Constitution.
The legal arguments made against Trump's assault on the federal bureaucracy are difficult to get too exercised about once one looks at the specifics.
Democratic attorney generals, public sector employee unions, and pseudonymous federal workers allege that DOGE has engaged in such nefarious activities as plugging in an email server without completing a privacy impact assessment. DOGE, they say, is not properly considered an agency under the 1932 Economy Act and therefore doesn't qualify for access to certain government records under the 1974 Privacy Act.
Courts might eventually agree that Trump's actions are unlawful, but fundamental violations of the rule of law they are not. To the degree DOGE has broken these laws, it's just more evidence of how much the federal government has become bogged down by needless proceduralism.
Should Trump ultimately succeed at replacing a civil servant-staffed leviathan with his own lackeys, the state will become more Trumpy. But it will also become less effective at doing the things Trump wants.
Trump "can have people who are true believers or he can have people who are competent; he probably can't have both, because there are simply too few of them," wrote Reason's Stephanie Slade last year in a forward-looking piece on a potential new Trump administration. "Stacking the government with folks from outside the establishment, without relevant experience, leaves you with a workforce that is unlikely to be effective at implementing an agenda."
A MAGAfied executive branch thus becomes a smaller, less capable government by default.
To be sure, Trump isn't just exerting more control over the executive branch. He's also pushing out the powers of the executive branch at the expense of Congress by refusing to spend appropriated funds and shuttering and reorganizing congressionally created federal agencies.
Whatever one thinks of the president's arguably unconstitutional power to impound spending, it would seem to pass the "Munger test", which asks whether you'd still want the state to have a particular power knowing that it'll be wielded by real-life politicians and not public servants.
Conservatives and liberals should both fear impoundment on those grounds. They want to spend a lot of money! Libertarians don't. If Trump (or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders) can refuse to spend money Congress gives them, what libertarian policy priorities would be on the chopping block? Nightmare scenarios are hard to conjure up.
A chief executive with wholesale power to reorganize the federal bureaucracy is more concerning. If Trump can set up a Department of Government Efficiency, the next administration could easily set up a Department of Government Expansion.
Yet, this worry is tempered by the fact that it's always easier to break something than to build something. An agency that's shut down in a day is going to take a lot longer to be built back bigger.
Before Trump took office, pseudonymous blogger Scott Alexander expressed an additional concern about DOGE's coming war against the deep state: slashing bureaucrats is not the same as slashing bureaucracy.
If the law requires some private activity to receive government approval, cutting the staff that provides that approval undermines government efficiency and leaves people less free to do things, not more.
That's a reasonable consideration. But fewer government employees approving things also means fewer government employees enforcing things. Absent the credible threat of enforcement, more people might just go ahead and do things regardless of whether they've gotten all the needed federal sign offs.
The nicotine industry is a great example here. The vast majority of vapes, nicotine pouches, and the like, all lack the needed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals to be legally sold in stores. Nevertheless, consumers have ready access to them all because the FDA's ability to go after every vape shop and 7-Eleven in the country is also exceedingly limited.
Not all of Trump's early executive initiatives are aimed internally at the government.
His attempt to hike tariffs and withdraw thousands of illegal immigrants' legal authorization to stay in the country is a bona fide assault on free trade and free movement. In both cases, the president is exercising powers that the executive has long claimed, and presidents of both parties have zealously used for decades.
Trump's effort to cancel birthright citizenship is more concerning still. But it's these unilateral executive intrusions on long-held individual rights that the courts appear most likely to put a stop to.
The president's efforts to cut government all by himself certainly do violate the spirit of the Constitution, regardless of whether courts determine this or that action violates the letter.
The framers envisioned that Congress would be the supreme branch in setting policy, and temperate deliberation and consensus-building would precede any major policy changes.
That's not how things have worked for a while. The past several administrations have alternated between executive-led technocratic expansions of government and populist anti-elite backlashes to it. Congress' main role has been to greenlight everything when their man is in the White House and grind everything to a halt when he's not.
It would be ideal if DOGE were a proactive effort led by Congress to cut spending and whittle down bureaucracy by revoking the laws that created it. A few constitutional conservatives are pushing for just that.
Embarrassingly enough for the first branch of government, even most members of Congress that agree with the DOGE mission can't be bothered to dust off their rubber stamp.
What we're left with is Trump breaking what he can while he can.
Contra the claims of Musk and co, this effort is not going to result in a balanced budget or rein in entitlement spending. But it will hobble any number of agencies and programs libertarians have long argued for getting rid of entirely.
The one thing you can say for sure about Donald Trump is that he eventually makes fools of everyone. The man has a talent for embarrassing his fiercest defenders; his fiercest critics have a talent for embarrassing themselves.
Predicting where this administration will be in a week is difficult. Plotting its impact on the American government decades from now is impossible.
If I were to hazard a prediction anyway about where this roller-coaster ride is headed, it'd be that we end up with a president who looms supreme over a more lawless but much-diminished federal government. The judiciary and the voters will check the most egregious executive excesses. Members of Congress will guard entitlements, do media hits, and slowly forget they ever played an actual role in policymaking.
It's not great or perfectly libertarian, but it's better than the alternative of ever-growing government.
