I like Trump but I recognize that he is deeply flawed. The world around us is more complex than we can possibly understand, and America over the next four years will enter situations where the instincts of Donald Trump and the Republicans are not well suited to mastering events (such as Covid).
Here are my fears about the new Trump administration: That it will be characterized by incompetence, corruption and carelessness. I fear that Trump is not particularly good at running things and that he is not much interested in governing.
Dave Karpf overstates his case: “This is, effectively, the end of the regulatory state. Elon and the tech billionaires got what they wanted. All the (non-military) three-letter agencies will be hollowed out. The SEC and FTC won’t have the capacity to monitor financial crimes. The DOJ, EPA, HHS, etc will be run by political appointees whose sole charge is to reward Trump allies and punish Trump critics… The tech billionaires are going to start behaving like courtiers… There will be a parade of corruption and incompetence scandals.”
I support Trump replacing veteran civil servants with his own people but I fear Trump will too often value loyalty over competence. Don Moynihan writes:
Trump will reinstate Schedule F, the Executive Order that will allow him to reclassify federal civil servants to be political appointee, and then to fire them. Trump cares intensely about controlling both his own appointees and the bureaucracy, demanding loyalty from them, and being able to dismiss them when that loyalty is not shown. His disdain for the administrative state is both deep and personal, not abstract or rhetorical…
The number of Schedule F appointees will be proportionally higher in agencies that are viewed as liberal leaning (think HHS, Education, regulatory agencies), and lower in agencies viewed as more conservative (e.g. Customs and Border Patrol)…
I expect that a second Trump term will enable him to achieve more of his goals, even as I also think this will result in worse public services. For example, expect a general gutting of regulation.
Trump appears to enjoy the chaos and has little interest in governing…
Trump will bring a new era of corruption to government, which will largely go unpunished. A feature of Trump’s Presidency is that he has not abided by norms to reduce conflicts of interest between his public and private roles. He has more business interests than he had in his first term (notably in social media and crypto) that foreign governments can use to curry his favor, or threaten his net worth. He will not set aside those interests.
The potential for corruption goes beyond Trump and can take different forms.
Trump will engage in a mass pardon of people who broke the law to serve him, including those who attacked Congress on January 6.
A huge proportion of federal money goes through the contracting process. The chances that a lot of federal dollars will now go to Trump supporters has increased.
Musk faces regulatory oversight of his businesses from the federal government, and benefits from federal contracts. Giving Musk, in turn, oversight of those agencies as an efficiency czar generates even bigger conflicts of interest than those of Trump. It may be that Musk loses interest in this role, but even having some sort of advisory role allows him to pick up the phone and make suggestions about which regulator should be fired. Other major donors are in the same position.
All of this, featuring quid-pro-quo exchange of money, influence and power, or clear conflicts of interest, satisfies what most people understand to be corruption.
We will see a decline in competence. We will see an increase in turnover in federal agencies…
If you think those employees are incompetent, that is good news. But that is largely not going to the case, and a lot of institutional memory will walk out the door. It will also be harder to attract new hires to replace those leaving, at least among those with an intrinsic desire to serve the public. With an outflow of institutional memory, and difficulty in attracting talented new employees, the human capital skills of the government will decline.
We will see a decline in the quality of public services…
As the public observes failures, such as declining quality of services, or public health, or workplace safety, or the environment, they may be persuaded that competence and expertise matter.
If I were to recommend one book that best explains my fears about the next Trump administration, it would be The Fifth Risk (2018) by Michael Lewis. The New York Times said:
He has chosen to apotheosize three obscure government agencies — the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. In “The Fifth Risk,” his heroes are federal bureaucrats.
Why these departments? Well, they are enormous data collection and analysis factories. And Donald Trump either doesn’t care about them or understand what they do, or doesn’t like what he imagines he understands, and has sent minions intent on crippling their work. Lewis believes that essential government functions like protecting nuclear waste (Department of Energy), food safety and feeding the poor (Agriculture) and predicting the weather (Commerce) are under threat. Early on, he introduces us to John MacWilliams — a classic Lewis character — a former investment banker with expertise in the energy sector who is cajoled by Barack Obama’s splendid energy secretary Ernest Moniz to go to work for the government. “Everything was acronyms,” MacWilliams recalls. “I understood 20 to 30 percent of what people were talking about.” But the people were impressive. “There were physicists everywhere. Guys whose ties don’t match their suits. Passive nerds. Guys who build bridges.” And they certainly weren’t in it for the money.
MacWilliams’s job at the D.O.E. was risk assessment. Lewis is a risk assessment junkie — whether it’s the risk of investing in ballplayers (“Moneyball”) or mortgage-backed securities (“The Big Short”). At the D.O.E., the risks are potentially cataclysmic — preventing dirty bombs from exploding at the Super Bowl, tracking nuclear weapons so they don’t get lost or damaged (they’re called “Broken Arrows”), preventing plutonium waste at the government’s facility in Hanford, Wash., from leaking into the Columbia River. Lewis asks MacWilliams to list the top five risks. The first four are predictable: Broken Arrows. North Korea. Iran (that is, maintaining the agreement that prevents Iran from building a nuclear bomb). Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism. But the fifth, most important risk is a stunner: “program management.” Hence, the title of this book.
Lewis defines it this way: “The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”
