Eight years ago, when Donald Trump shocked the political world by defeating Hillary Clinton, even many members of his own campaign were taken by surprise. Tens of millions of working-class Americans voted for Trump in 2016 out of anger and frustration with the establishment political leaders of both parties whom they no longer trusted to govern on their behalf. They voted for Trump because he was a political outsider with no prior experience in Washington and was therefore free from the taint of insider self-dealing, and the corrupting influence of special interest group lobbying and campaign contributions for which the federal government had become notorious.
But Trump’s lack of experience in the ways of Washington proved to be a serious obstacle to him and his team. They were not quite prepared for the challenge of converting Trump’s bold campaign promises to make the federal government more responsive to the needs of the voters into practical everyday policies. Trump was forced to rely upon the advice of “experienced” Republican political advisors in selecting the key members of his cabinet, his administration, and White House staff who did not necessarily share Trump’s determination to “drain the Washington swamp.”
Nor did Trump and the small circle of loyalists he brought with him into the White House have the experience and technical knowledge needed to formulate his reform measures in such a way that they could withstand the endless legal challenges from a determined Democrat “resistance” to Trump’s presidency which sprung to life on the morning after the presidential election.
TRUMP’S ROUGH START AS PRESIDENT
From that very first moment, as Trump and his White House team were trying to launch their policies while learning the ropes of governing in Washington, they were also forced to deal with the false accusations of the Russian collusion hoax which were invented as a political dirty trick by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
For the next three years, every rumor and lie about Trump and the members of his inner circle colluding with the Russians that were spread by his political enemies was repeated endlessly by the liberal-dominated mainstream media until they were finally exposed by the collapse of the FBI investigation of Trump led by special counsel Robert Mueller which could find no convincing evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump or his campaign. At the same time, the deeply entrenched members of the federal bureaucracy, also known as the “administrative state,” who saw Trump’s reform agenda as a serious threat to their own power and status, took every opportunity to sabotage his administration’s policies from the inside.
At the same time, the Democrats threw up all kinds of legislative obstacles and legal challenges that blocked Trump’s policies, from a clumsily implemented ban on the admission of visitors from countries overrun by Islamic terrorism, to his efforts to complete the erection of an effective security barrier to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border. Meanwhile, anti-Trump reporters and executives in the mainstream media abandoned the principles of journalistic objectivity to cheer on Democrat efforts to undermine Trump’s authority, accuse him of bigotry, and challenge his very legitimacy as president.
TRUMP’S PERSONNEL PROBLEM
The problem was made much worse by the fact that from the beginning of his first term as president, Trump found himself unable to count upon the loyalty and competence of senior members of his cabinet, including his Secretary of State, his Attorney General, his White House chief of staff, and, ultimately, even his vice president.
During the first days of Trump’s presidency, James Comey, the director of the FBI, conspired with senior FBI investigators to deliberately entrap Trump’s newly appointed National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. After Trump fired Comey in May 2017 for his disloyalty, senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI discussed making secret recordings of their conversations with Trump in order to have him removed from office using the 25th Amendment.
The disloyalty of his senior cabinet members and some of his top advisors was a bitter lesson that Trump took to heart, especially after he was declared to be the loser of the 2020 presidential election, which he continues to dispute. During the three weeks he was declared to be the undisputed victor of the 2024 presidential election, both in the Electoral College and the popular vote, it has already become clear that Donald Trump is determined to avoid repeating the early mistakes he made during his first term in the White House.
TRUMP APPROACHING HIS SECOND TERM WELL-PREPARED
The unprecedented pace of his appointments to dozens of posts in his cabinet and administration since November 5 makes it clear that Trump has given a lot of thought, not only to the policies of his second term as president, but also to the personnel he has chosen to place throughout the federal government and entrust to carry them out.
In the press release announcing each of his new appointments, Trump’s designated spokeswoman, both for his transition and his White House, Karoline Leavitt, always includes a version of the following boilerplate reminder: “President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”
The message is unmistakable. Trump alone is taking the ultimate responsibility for the selection of his cabinet and senior administration officials. This time he is not leaving these decisions in the hands of anyone else, no matter how “trusted” or “experienced” they may be.
Trump also doesn’t care whether anyone else agrees with the people that he has chosen to carry out his vision for his second term as president. They may be political bomb-throwers, like former Congressman Matt Gaetz, whom Trump had wanted as his attorney general because of his loyalty, despite serious questions about his prior behavior. Gaetz dropped out voluntarily last week due to the criticism he was anticipating during his Senate confirmation hearings.
Trump’s picks include fast-rising fresh faces in national politics, such as Upstate New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanic, who will become America’s next ambassador to the U.N. Some are well-established and highly respected Republican lawmakers, such as our next Secretary of State, Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Others are successful entrepreneurs such as longtime Trump supporter and professional sports executive Linda McMahon, who is moving from the Small Business Administration which she ran for Trump during his first term as president, to the Department of Education, whose duties and funding she will seek to return to the states, while restoring the emphasis in public school curriculums to teaching the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, instead of indoctrinating young students with “woke” liberal anti-American and immoral ideologies, without their parents’ knowledge or permission.
SHAKING UP AMERICAN HEALTHCARE
Trump has designated longtime environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his director of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with a mandate to shake up the American medical health establishment of which RFK Jr. has been an outspoken and highly controversial critic.
Trump has also tapped two well-known physicians to work with Kennedy to improve the quality of health care in this country.
TV health personality and heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz is Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which provides mostly government-funded healthcare for more than 150 million senior and low-income Americans.
Trump said Dr. Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”
Trump named Dr. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins University to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Makary was a nationally recognized authority on patient safety before he became a critic of the federal government’s positions on herd immunity, as well as mask and vaccine mandates during the Covid pandemic.
In announcing Makary’s appointment on social media, Trump said that the “FDA has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator.” Trump is relying on Makary to “restore the FDA to the gold standard of scientific research and cut the bureaucratic red tape at the agency to make sure Americans get the medical cures and treatments they deserve.” Trump also expects him to work closely with RFK, Jr. to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs.”
Trump also named Dr. Dave Weld, a former Florida congressman and physician to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Like RFK, Jr., Weldon has been a critic of the safety of vaccines which include the preservative containing mercury known as thimerosal, which is being slowly phased out of vaccine production.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Trump has chosen former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as his Director of National Intelligence (DNI), because she shares his skepticism of the effectiveness of U.S. military interventions abroad, in sharp contrast to the consensus in the 18 spy agencies that she will be overseeing. She will prepare Trump’s daily presidential intelligence briefing. Meanwhile, former Texas GOP Congressman John Ratcliffe, who served as Trump’s first-term DNI, will slide over to become his new director of the CIA.
Trump has also tapped Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a highly decorated former U.S. Army soldier who has seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who shares the president’s distaste for today’s Pentagon leaders who seem to be more concerned about meeting the far-left’s “woke” climate, race and gender standards than maintaining the U.S. military’s war-fighting capabilities.
Trump made it clear that he was not concerned about the issues surrounding Gaetz’s prior conduct, or the fact that both Kennedy and Gabbard had been loyal Democrats and had run for the Democrat presidential nomination, or that Hegseth had no prior experience to indicate that he would be capable of managing the Pentagon.
TRUMP PRIZES LOYALTY ABOVE ALL ELSE
Trump chose them because they agreed with his views, and he felt that he could trust them to carry them out. In his mind, nothing else counted in making his final selections.
Trump also does not care whether a majority of senators will be willing to vote to confirm his selections. If necessary, the president is willing to bypass the Senate by giving his picks recess appointments, because he is determined to put his second-term agenda into motion as soon as possible after he takes office in January.
Trump has also demonstrated that he has contingency plans in place to deal with unexpected cabinet personnel setbacks. Within hours of Gaetz’s decision to drop out as Trump’s designated attorney general, Trump announced his replacement with Pam Bondi. She more than makes up with her 18 years of experience as a prosecutor and Florida attorney general, and as a member of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment, what she may lack in comparison to Gaetz’s firebrand political reputation.
HOW TRUMP CHOSE BETWEEN TWO GOOD CANDIDATES FOR THE TREASURY
Trump has also made it clear, even to the most prominent people in his camp, that he will not allow himself to be manipulated by their personal political ambitions. For example, Wall Street billionaire executive Howard Lutnick, who emerged as an influential economic adviser to Trump over the past year and who has been leading his post-election transition team, was passed over by Trump in the selection of his Treasury Secretary in favor of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent.
Both men had proven themselves to be loyal Trump supporters and fundraisers during the 2024 campaign. But Trump felt that Lutnick had been too eager in campaigning for the Treasury appointment and that he had overstepped his authority as an advisor to a president-elect who reserves the right to make those kinds of decisions for himself. Trump still rewarded Lutnick for his loyalty and contributions, however, by designating him as Commerce Secretary, a somewhat less prestigious cabinet position.
At the same time, Trump gave Bessent the top-ranking Treasury post, even though he had spent four years, starting in 2011, as the chief investment officer for international currency speculator George Soros, who is one of the largest and most influential Democrat and donor to other liberal political parties, in the world. Bessent had also given money to the Democrat presidential campaigns of Al Gore, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. But the more important fact for Trump was that he felt that Bessent could be relied upon to fight for Trump’s economic policies. These include rolling back the Biden-era subsidies for green energy, extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, deregulating the economy, expanding domestic fossil fuel energy production, and utilizing tariffs to generate additional government income while stimulating American manufacturing.
In his first interview following the announcement of his appointment as Treasury Secretary, Bessent told the Wall Street Journal, that his immediate priorities will be to deliver on President Trump’s promise to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent, eliminate federal taxes on tips, social security benefits and overtime pay, and raise tariffs while cutting federal spending in an effort to “maintain the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.”
BESSENT’S 3-3-3 FORMULA FOR A U.S. ECONOMIC REVIVAL
Bessent also hopes to stimulate the long-term growth of the American economy by using the same successful three-part approach employed by then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to revitalize Japan’s languishing economy more than a decade ago. Bessent’s 3-3-3 policy will strive to cut the federal budget deficit to no more than 3% of GDP by the year 2028, spur the rate of GDP growth to 3% by slashing unnecessary government regulations, and increase domestic U.S. fossil fuel production by the energy equivalent of 3 million barrels of oil a day, which will lower prices across the economy by reducing the cost of energy for both consumers and businesses.
On the other hand, Trump’s selection of Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio to serve as his Secretary of State was widely praised, even in some Democrat circles, due to his service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. Rubio is therefore expected to win bipartisan Senate confirmation without any serious opposition.
It is also worthwhile to note that Trump selected Rubio despite the fact that the two had publicly clashed during the 2016 Republican presidential primary debates. However, during Trump’s first term as president, Rubio served as one of his key foreign policy advisors with regard to Cuba and Venezuela. Rubio also served as a reliable surrogate for Trump during the 2024 campaign. His hardline views towards China and the need to bring the war in Ukraine to a conclusion are also known to coincide with Trump’s.
TRUMP READY TO DEPORT MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Trump also announced his selection of Thomas Homan, who served as a senior immigration official during the first Trump administration, to serve during his second term as his “border czar.” That is the same job to which President Biden had appointed Kamala Harris, and for which she was harshly criticized during the presidential campaign for failing to do anything significant to stop the massive flow of more than ten million unvetted illegal immigrants who streamed across the Mexican border.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our borders,” Trump wrote in announcing the appointment on social media. “Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”
Homan will be working with Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, who will become Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, and who has pledged to “secure the border and restore safety to American communities so families will again have the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.” Homan and Noem will also be working with Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, who is a veteran of the first Trump White House and has long served as the president-elect’s hardline chief advisor on immigration issues.
Noem will also be overseeing the operations of the Secret Service, which has been subject to intense criticism for its negligence in permitting two failed attempts against Donald Trump’s life this year. As of this writing, Trump had not yet named a new director for the Secret Service to replace Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned under pressure this summer after failing to answer basic questions from Congress about the first attempt in which Trump was shot in the ear and almost killed at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
MUSK AND RAMASWAMY TO TACKLE A BUDGET MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
But by far the most imaginative and ambitious of Trump’s appointments are of two wealthy entrepreneurs, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will serve as the volunteer leaders of a newly created agency outside of the formal structure of the federal government, known as the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. Their audacious goal is to cut the federal government down to size by doing away with “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy,” which, they write, is “an existential threat to our republic.” Musk and Ramaswamy hope to realize a total of $2 trillion in savings from those cuts for American taxpayers by July 4, 2026, which is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy claim that two relatively recent rulings by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, empowered them to do away with tens of thousands of rules and regulations issued by dozens of federal agencies that violated the Constitution because those agencies acted without the required explicit authorization from Congress.
In the first case, known as West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the high court ruled that federal agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In the second case, known as Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the Supreme Court overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine which had required courts to defer to federal agencies in interpreting the meaning of the laws passed by Congress applying to them or defining their own rulemaking authority.
According to Musk and Ramaswamy, taken together, the Supreme Court rulings empower President Trump to issue executive orders, based upon their recommendations, ending the enforcement of thousands of rules and regulations handed down by those agencies that were not explicitly authorized by Congress. They claim that President Trump is also empowered by those rulings to terminate the employment of the workers at those agencies who were hired to administer those canceled regulations.
IDENTIFYING AVAILABLE SPENDING AND PERSONNEL CUTS
Musk, Ramaswamy, and the other members of DOGE would work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the administrative heads of each federal agency “to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform [only] its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions,” and to reduce its payroll accordingly.
Musk and Ramaswamy expect that “the number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified. Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”
However, Musk and Ramaswamy insist that the federal employees whose jobs will be “eliminated deserve to be treated with respect. . . DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector, [by using] existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.”
They point out that civil-service regulations only protect federal workers from being fired for political reasons, and do permit administration officials to order “reductions in force” [a.k.a. firings] at federal agencies, as long as they don’t target specific employees.
They also insist that the Constitution authorizes lawmaking only by Congress, and not by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats embedded deep within federal agencies. Therefore, Musk and Ramaswamy claim that “the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates.”
Musk and Ramaswamy also recommend that the Trump administration use other permissible executive actions to persuade surplus federal agency employees to leave their jobs voluntarily. These include the relocation of the offices of federal agencies outside the Washington D.C. area, forcing employees and their families to move away from their present homes if they wish to keep their jobs. They also suggest that the federal government follow the example set by several large corporate employers by requiring all of their workers to come to the office five days a week, instead of continuing with the Covid-era practice of working from home.
ATTACKING THE PROTECTED ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
While Musk and Ramaswamy are careful to avoid the use of provocative partisan language in their essay, conservative commentator Roger Kimball does not hesitate to “connect the dots,” by identifying the federal agencies that they are talking about reducing as “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” or more colloquially, the “Washington swamp” which has been fighting Trump’s efforts to reign in federal government bloat and wasteful spending ever since the start of his first term as president.
The unconstitutional transfer of federal legislative power from Congress to a steadily growing number of administrative agencies, and judicial authority from the Courts to those same agencies, began in earnest with the emergency measures taken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression, and accelerated further with the urgent need to mobilize the nation’s resources in order to fight and win World War II.
The 2010 passage of the Dodd-Frank Act added a new layer of federal regulations on Wall Street, the banks, and consumer markets in reaction to the near financial collapse that triggered the Great Recession in 2008. Economist Charles Calomiris wrote at that time that, “we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc diktats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.”
Kimball also cites legal scholar Philip Hamburger who describes this shadow administrative government centered in Washington D.C. as “a state within a state,” and is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.”
TRUMP IS GETTING A SECOND CHANCE TO DEFEAT THE RESISTANCE
During his first term as president, Kimball writes, “Trump made a yeoman’s effort to unwind the regulatory behemoth that our government had become.” But he was unable to do more than just “nibble around the edges of the administrative state,” because, as a political outsider in 2017, Trump “was unprepared for the wall of resistance he would face from the entrenched Washington bureaucracy. . . the same bureaucracy that harassed, investigated, impeached, indicted, and attempted to imprison him. It also worked overtime to upset any serious reforms he attempted.”
But because the “real, implementable, enforceable proposals for reform” from Musk and Ramaswamy, designed to whittle today’s bloated administrative state back down to size, are now high on Trump’s second-term agenda, Kimball sees new reason for hope.
The undeniable voter mandate for change that Trump received from his decisive electoral victory on November 5, and his willingness to use it to empower DOGE under Musk and Ramaswamy, presents them with a “historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.”
The effort by Musk and Ramaswamy, with Trump’s full support, to launch a serious attack on the administrative state has been greeted with enthusiasm from an unexpected source, senior CNN liberal commentator Fareed Zakaria. He admitted to his viewers that he is “excited” by the possibility that DOGE can “deliver” the significant cuts in government spending that Republican conservatives have been calling for in vain from their leaders since the end of World War II.
THE MATH OF BUDGET SAVINGS DOESN’T ADD UP
On the other hand, Zakaria points out the practical difficulties in achieving the magnitude of savings that Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about. “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other mandatory [spending] programs make up around 60% of the federal budget,” Zakaria notes, and Trump is on the record as being committed to maintaining the current level of spending on these programs during his second term.
The Pentagon’s more than $800 billion budget is similarly untouchable in light of the military threats confronting the U.S. today, as are the equally large interest payments required to finance our $36 trillion national debt. That leaves only 15% of the $6 trillion in annual federal spending, roughly $900 billion, to cover the cost of running the rest of the federal government. That includes veterans’ benefits, agricultural subsidies, spending on roads and highways and so much more, from which Musk and Ramaswamy hope to find a way to save more than twice the amount of money that 15% represents.
Zakaria also notes the ironic fact that the only American president to balance the federal budget since Republican Richard Nixon did it in 1969 was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who generated a budget surplus for the four fiscal years between 1998 and 2001 with the cooperation of then-Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Even conservative icon Ronald Reagan, who first came to national prominence as a GOP leader by making a televised speech blasting federal entitlement programs and deficit spending, was unable to balance the budget during his two terms as president.
Zakaria agrees that continuing to run trillion-dollar-plus federal budget deficits is ultimately a formula for economic disaster, but the problem is that the American public has become spoiled by reduced Republican levels of taxation combined with elevated Democrat levels of spending, creating a politically unbridgeable gap. But he also agrees that just the attempt by Musk and Ramaswamy, with Trump’s help, to break the vicious cycle of federal deficit spending, is worth the effort, even if the real-world savings fall far short of their stated goal, because it proves that exercising some semblance of fiscal responsibility is still at least possible.
