Deep, Deep Trump State
Trump wants to replace the so-called Deep State with a 19th century-style federal regime deeply invested in a president's political and personal interests. MAGA will regret it.
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President Trump is replacing the so-called Deep State with a Deep Trump State.
There’s no other way to describe what happened yesterday: Unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s deputies gained access to a sensitive Treasury Department system responsible for trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments after the Trump administration ousted a top career official at the department.
That official, David A. Lebryk, was a veteran career employee. He worked for decades in Republican and Democratic administrations, part of a civil service workforce MAGA claims is a “deep state.”
The payment systems have never been in the hands of political appointees — never directly controlled by all the presidents’ men.
Until now.
“The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually,” the Washington Post reported. “Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.”
“The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks,” The New York Times reported.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration. It was put together at Mr. Trump’s direction by Mr. Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal work force and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Mr. Musk and his aides.
Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies control the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.
In a well-planned purge that Trump and his allies promised the country during his 2024 campaign, the new administration is firing or demoting career civil servants throughout government, urging millions of others to resign, and taking an Orwellian scrub brush to federal data sites that public servants rely on to do their jobs.
Look, the federal government is objectively too large and too wed to 20th century conventions. The institution most invested in building public trust in government, the Democratic Party, has not even bothered with lip service about reform in more than a generation, when President Bill Clinton tapped his vice president, Al Gore, to “reinvent” government. Clinton knew that he couldn’t win public support for safety net spending, much less win re-election, without convincing voters that he was responding to their issues with government.
Modern Democrats don’t get it. They defend the status quo when nobody outside the gilded corners of Washington can stomach the status quo.
Into that vacuum walks Trump and transactional pal Musk, a man who makes billions of dollars from government contracts through his automobile and space companies. Mr. Conflict of Interest is now in charge of how government spends its money, and will remain so unless Trump tires of him.
Together, they are taking on another imperfect but important institution: The civil service system.
The 2.2 million employees who make up the civil service system perform virtually all the functions of the federal government, from national security to national parks. The total number of federal civil servants today is roughly the same as it was in the late 1960s, although the U.S. population has since grown by more than 60 percent.
The system is the result of 19th century reforms to a government rife with cronyism and corruption, when the party in power purged the former administration’s political hacks and replaced them with hacks of their own. Cycle after cynical cycle.
The civil service system ensures that government employees are hired and fired based on merit and are empowered to exercise independent judgment without fear of political retaliation. Trump is proudly and profoundly seeking to dismantle the civil service system to return U.S. government to 19th century cronyism.
He has a plan. He has a fellow billionaire in charge. He has a compliant Congress. He has a neutered opposition. It’s hard to bet against him. After all, nowhere is it written that government transformation needs to be a positive change.
Returning the U.S. government to a pre-reform system that doesn’t rely on career civil servants will be bad for everybody.
Democrats would immediately rue the day their incompetence got Trump elected.
And MAGA voters would come to regret it, too, when their president is no longer in power and there is no check against a Democrat-orchestrated purge.
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Your article builds a strong case against Trump and Musk’s restructuring of the federal government but has notable weaknesses. Some claims rely on speculation rather than concrete evidence, particularly regarding the long-term consequences of dismantling the civil service system. While it critiques the erosion of bureaucratic independence, it does not fully explore how inefficiencies within the current system may have contributed to public frustration with government. Additionally, it assumes the status quo is preferable without considering whether reforms—though controversial—could address legitimate concerns about waste and inefficiency. Lastly, while it draws parallels to 19th-century cronyism, it overlooks key differences in modern governance, such as legal safeguards, regulatory oversight, and institutional checks that could influence the impact of these changes.
This is a significant discussion on a subject that warrants further investigation. My gut instinct suggests we're likely to uncover a substantial sum of taxpayers' funds being wasted and perhaps criminal activity.
So, considering that 90% of Federal expenditures (multi-trillions of dollars) are routed through Treasury, how would YOU investigating expenditures without access to the payment system. And if YOU were directed by POTUS to allow access to those EXECUTIVE BRANCH payment systems by LEGAL contractors, and you refused, wouldn’t YOU expect to be shown the door?