By Joe Saunders November 9, 2024 at 1:57pm
With the fires of war raging in Europe and the Middle East and an invasion of illegal immigrants swamping the American homeland, it might look like the new presidency will have enough on its plate.
But Americans looking at the future of President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration have already gotten a preview of his plan to overhaul the federal bureaucracy.
And it’s the deep state’s deepest fear.
In March 2023, when his return to office was still just a dream for his millions of supporters, Trump released a video detailing a 10-point plan to tame the leviathan of the United States’ sprawling federal government.
The words are clear — free of bureaucratic jargon and likely to resonate with Americans who are furious with being treated like subordinate spectators to the government they are supposed to control.
And they should be terrifying to the kind of arrogant operatives who bedeviled Trump’s first term in office.
Conservative commentator Colin Rugg resurfaced the video in a post on the social media platform X published Friday.
Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Deep State.
1. “Immediately reissue my 2020 executive order, restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.”
2. “Clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
3. “Totally reform… pic.twitter.com/Xhg297uWCe
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024
What’s notable is that No. 1 on the list is an item relatively few Americans, even among Trump supporters, would consider the No. 1 problem facing the country.
But Trump’s announcement that he would bring back his executive order from October 2020 to make it easier to rid the government of employees pursuing their own political agenda versus carrying out the orders of the administration elected by the American people.
This is no minor matter of job reorganization — it will shake Washington, D.C. to its core.
As the first Trump administration showed, the federal government is rife with personal fiefdoms — from high-profile high priests of pomposity like former FBI Director James Comey and his successor, Christopher Wray — to the activist faceless moles buried in the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Education.
The self-described “resistance” operated as a fifth column inside the Trump administration, aiming to foil the duly elected president of the American people, running out the clock on his years in office until the rightful rule — in their view — of regulators and progressive pencil pushers could be restored.
Trump’s order, known as “Schedule F” is aimed right in their direction. It wouldn’t solve all of the government’s problems. It wouldn’t address leadership at the FBI for instance, for instance, but it would go a long way toward restoring some sanity to the situation.
As the swelling of the federal government in the decades since World War II has shown, there may be no greater threat to the republic envisioned by the Founders than the metastatic multiplication of petty tyrants empowered by offices they hold without accountability to the people who are paying their salaries.
Virtually all of the rest of Trump’s plan is a variation on No. 1, in that he’s aiming to tame a government that has become ruinously powerful over the citizenry — from law enforcement and intelligence offices that have become blatantly politicized (see Trump impeachment No. 1) to the courts established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are supposed to protect Americans but made a mockery of that role in the “Russia collusion” hoax.
That goal is included with No. 10 on the list, in which Trump vows to push for a constitutional amendment to impose (the Rugg X post incorrectly uses the word “oppose”) term limits on members of Congress.
Regardless of whether term limits are a good idea — their adoption is well beyond the powers of a presidency.
It would require amending the Constitution, which would need a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress (the very men and women whose government careers could be cut short by the proposal) or the convocation of a constitutional convention. And while a constitutional convention isn’t impossible, it hasn’t happened since ratification.
And while there’s little doubt that the sclerotic nature of the federal government is fed by the fact that election to federal office in many cases amounts to a lifetime appointment for an undeserving hack (e.g. Waters, Maxine: 33 years and counting), there’s plenty of reason to doubt term limits are ever going to happen.
And it’s no small thing to note that Founders could have included term limits in the Constitution if they’d thought it necessary. If James Madison & Co. didn’t think so, contemporary conservatives should at least have their doubts about the wisdom of it. (Messing with Madison is more of a leftist idea.)
Trump and his advisers clearly know all of that. But they’re making a bigger point.
The goal here is to restore the government to its constitutional role as a servant of the people, not their master.
The goals is making federal agencies accountable to the administration elected by the people, not to their own political agendas.
The goal, in short, is to bring the leviathan to heel.
And that’s the deep state’s deepest fear of all.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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