Trump’s Campaign to Dismantle the Government
The president is pursuing the long-standing conservative goal of neutralizing the federal bureaucracy.
By Franklin Foer, The Atlantic
Over the decades, the American right has deployed violent imagery to describe its highest ideological goal: drown government in a bathtub, starve the beast, slash and burn. In less than two weeks of organized chaos, the Trump administration has realized these fantasies, but by deploying tactics both more subtle and more sinister than the movement’s old guard ever imagined.
Rather than eliminating departments wholesale or depleting the budgets of agencies, it has relied on menacing gestures. By arbitrarily placing civil servants on probation, reclassifying bureaucratic positions as political appointments, freezing grant spending, floating a “deferred resignation” offer by mass email, and firing high-profile federal prosecutors and inspectors general, the administration has created the impression that it is making preparations for a mass purge of the government.
