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Donald Trump was barely into his second week back in the White House when he declared that his latest presidency already heralded the “golden age of America”. Others reached for more ominous characterisations of the barrage of orders from the new administration that have rocked the US government: blitzkrieg, shock and awe, criminal.
Trump came out of the starting gate fast with a “crowd-pleasing” crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the cancellation of federal diversity programmes and the wholesale dismissal of independent anti-corruption inspectors from a raft of federal agencies.
But the most far-reaching orders amounted to a power grab by the White House, with a purge of senior officials regarded as insufficiently deferential to Trump from the justice department to the national security council, a demand for the mass resignations of civil servants and an illegal attempt to snatch control of trillions of dollars in government spending from Congress.
The president has not had everything his own way. The White House was rapidly forced to back down over its spending freeze in the face of legal challenges. But that may prove no more than a bump in the road for Trump as he works to remake the entire federal government in his image following a blueprint laid out by rightwing strategists.
William Galston, former deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton, said Trump had unleashed a “deluge” of policies to overwhelm opponents, from pardoning about 1,600 rioters convicted of the January 6 insurrection to attempting to strike down the constitutional right of citizenship for anyone born in the US.
“This is a deliberate strategy. Shock and awe. You try to do so much on so many fronts so quickly as to confuse and overwhelm the opposition through volume and speed to make it impossible to unite in resistance. Think of it as a blitzkrieg,” Galston said.
“So far it’s been quite effective. It’s as though an army has punched through the enemy lines in a number of different places. Trying to regroup to resist is very difficult, and it takes time.”
To the delight of many of his more ardent supporters, the early days of Trump’s second tenure in the White House have felt very different from the beginning of his first term eight years ago. Back then he was inexperienced and restrained by establishment figures he was advised to appoint. This time Trump has surrounded himself with those driving his policies, including authors of the Project 2025 plan for an authoritarian takeover of government.
Leading the charge are the multibillionaire Elon Musk, who has already placed a trusted cohort from his own businesses in several federal agencies to carry out deep cuts and purge those deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trump agenda, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who is at the forefront of the assault on immigrants and diversity initiatives as well as the justice department’s halt to pursuing new civil rights cases.
Trump campaigned on a promise to “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”.
“We’re getting rid of all of the cancer – I call it cancer – the cancer caused by the Biden administration,” he told reporters as he signed an executive order stripping civil servants of many of their employment protections.
On Tuesday, the office of personnel management (OPM) sent an email to about 2.3 million federal workers encouraging them to resign by offering eight months pay if they handed in their notice within a week. Although the move fitted the broader pledge to downsize the government, it also contained a clue to a more insidious intent as it spoke about the need for a “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” workforce.
The email bore Musk’s fingerprints. The world’s richest man has promised to slash and burn his way through the federal bureaucracy as Trump’s choice to head a “department of government efficiency (Doge)”. The subject line of the email, Fork in the Road, is the same phrase Musk used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff.
Musk’s political action committee, America Pac, said the administration wants to be rid of hundreds of thousands of federal workers “which could lead to around $100 billion in savings”.
Not coincidentally, the OPM also released an order giving federal agencies 90 days to identify which civil servants should be stripped of legal protections barring them from being fired for political reasons. The order was so broadly worded that it potentially applied to large numbers of federal employees including those in “important policy-making or policy-determining functions”.
The move is an attempt by Trump to bypass the 1978 Civil Service Act assuring that career federal workers are hired on merit, not political loyalties, and cannot be dismissed arbitrarily. Trump issued a similar but less wide-ranging order in 2020, but it was overturned by Biden.
Everett Kelley, president of the largest federal workers union, the American Federation of Government Employees, accused the Trump administration of an assault on the independence of the civil service.
“This offer should not be viewed as voluntary. Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to,” he said.
Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute transparency group, said the Trump administration’s long-term vision was to remake the American government by pulling down the separation of powers so that no part of it is independent of the president’s will.
“There has been a long strain within Republicans to advance the unitary executive theory, which is basically that the president is a king and can do whatever they want. There have always been people who view Congress and the legislative branch as an impediment to the policies that they wish to advance and which shouldn’t be allowed to stand in their way,” he said.
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“Now that the Republican party has been either largely purged or the dissenters driven into silence, and has effected a takeover of the legislative, executive and judicial branches, and is also going after independent actors like the inspectors general, there’s not a whole lot of surprise that they’re doing things that will maximise their ability to exercise power.”
Musk has inserted longtime allies into top positions in federal agencies. They include Amanda Scales, who recently left Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, as the OPM’s new chief of staff and Brian Bjelde, who worked at SpaceX, as an adviser to the agency. Steve Davis, who led cost-cutting at Twitter, is now working at Doge.
Still, Trump has already run into problems.
On Wednesday, the White House was forced to back down just two days after imposing a broad freeze on spending about $3tn in federal grants and loans that threatened support for schools, medical research, police departments and a slew of other recipients. A judge blocked the move on the grounds that the president had no authority to override how Congress allocates money.
The move is the brainchild of Russell Vought, head of the office of management and budget during Trump’s first term and the president’s choice to take over again. Vought, founder of the rightwing Center for Renewing America thinktank and one of the authors of the Project 2025 strategy, is looking to get the issue before the supreme court in an attempt to overturn a 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, preventing the president from blocking funds allocated by Congress.
Schuman, the American Governance Institute executive director, said that if the supreme court were to strike down the law it would remove a major constraint on Trump’s power.
“Were this an authority the president had it would tremendously weaken the legislature and give the president extraordinary power to reward his friends and punish his enemies, which is where we seem to be going,” he continued.
“The consequence of allowing the administration to engage in impoundments would be to fundamentally destroy a primary power of the legislative branch, which is the power of the purse.”
The White House said it was not retreating from its position and would still be reviewing all spending with an eye to deep cuts, a position widely supported by Trump’s voters.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist for the first months of his last administration, praised the pace of change on his War Room podcast.
“All pedal, no brake. Drive it, drive it, drive it,” he said. “When you’ve got this kind of momentum, you do not stop, you do not think. You go, you go, you go.”
Whether Trump can keep up that pace of change, and the US system can survive it, remains to be seen.
Galston, the former Clinton policy adviser, is sceptical.
“If President Trump and the Republicans overplay their hand, there could be a major pushback in the midterm elections and that would bring the legislative phase of the Trump presidency to an end,” he said.
“But if he has four years to work his will, I think we’ll be looking at a different country. That would require him to maintain the kind of popularity that he gained during the presidential campaign and now enjoys, and I am skeptical that he can do that on his current course once the American people have time to learn about the things he’s doing. But if the administration plays its cards well and doesn’t overreach, then it could very well have four years. And if it does have four years, then I think the country will be changed significantly.”
