One of the defining features of the second Trump administration will almost certainly be the battle between the elected, constitutional branches of government and the vast federal bureaucracy.
With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, President Donald Trump will have a significant mandate for leadership in the next few years.
The most significant impediment to effective policymaking during that time, other than Republicans stepping on their own feet, will be the government itself—not elected Democrats who stand in opposition, but unelected bureaucrats who have unilaterally decided they know what’s best for the country and use their protected positions within the federal bureaucracy to thwart the change in direction the American people voted for.
When the innumerable left-wing media pundits and Democrat politicians in recent years shouted about “losing our democracy”—assuming they had had any coherent thought about what that meant at all—what they really meant was that the power of their precious bureaucracy was being threatened.
There’s an amusing, yet insightful, Newsmax post going around on X. On it, every time a pundit shouts “our democracy,” artificial intelligence replaces it with them saying “our bureaucracy.”
That’s much more accurate.
To hold power, the Left relies on a cabal made up almost entirely of unelected institutions—nongovernmental organizations, corporate media, academia, and government agencies. That has been the “regime” that governed the country during the Biden administration, which was little more than a figurehead presidency.
Academia comes up with the deranged ideas, and the NGOs push those ideas into politics and especially federal agencies. The agencies turn that into action, and the legacy media celebrates it as a great victory. Hence, open borders and gender transition surgeries for minors.
This all happens whether the American people want it or not.
What’s important to note here is that the bureaucrats who helped pump these policies won’t simply go away once President Joe Biden is gone, and they won’t be too eager to work with the new, democratically elected president to reverse course.
On the contrary, many can be expected to throw as many administrative wrenches into the process as possible to paralyze the incoming administration. That’s precisely what they did during Trump’s previous time in office—and what they’ve typically done anytime a Republican is in the White House.
And the media were all too happy to praise those efforts to subvert the will of American voters.
Take, for instance, this piece in The Washington Post from 2017, in the first few weeks of the first Trump term, in which bureaucratic resistance to Trump was promoted and celebrated.
This line says it all: “The permanent bureaucracy, the backbone of the federal government and the bulwark against many presidents’ activist intentions, is designed to be at least a step removed from the crosswinds of partisan politics.”
This is the “deep state” in a nutshell. It’s not just the Department of Justice or the intelligence agencies that have, frankly, abused their power to thwart a president and subvert genuine democracy. This has become the pervasive culture within the fourth—extraconstitutional—branch of government, where an overwhelming majority of supposedly nonpartisan employees support the Democratic Party and its prerogatives.
Several reports from the past few days suggest that deep state bureaucrats plan to run the 2017 playbook again.
For instance, a piece in CNN reported that some anonymous Pentagon officials are already discussing how they can resist the Trump administration.
This time, however, things might be different.
Not only do the American people have a lot better understanding of the threat that the unelected branch poses, but Trump seems to understand just how much it worked to undo his first term’s agenda.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News that this time the Trump team will be better prepared to fight against the bureaucracy itself.
“I think they didn’t realize, the Trump administration the first time, didn’t realize how much resistance there would be, not just from the bureaucracy, these unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats,” Hemingway said Monday on “The Ingraham Angle.”
She said that 2024 is a “new ballgame.”
From Hemingway:
The incoming Trump team understands where those threats are. They’re working to combat them in different ways. There are probably many ways that permanent, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy is trying to subvert the will of the people in an unconstitutional fashion.
But the team is so much smarter now. They’ve learned so much from that obstruction and resistance of those previous years. So, when the problems come—and they will come—they’ll at least be not so surprised by them.
I very much hope this is the case.
Way back in 2017, I shouted to anyone who would listen that the Trump administration’s biggest priority had to be getting control of the bureaucracy, using every tool available to not only reduce the power of the government, but to manage and often eject recalcitrant personnel who seem to think that they, and not Trump, were chosen as the head of the executive branch.
There are now more tools for Trump and Congress to restore the proper order of American government. For one, this year’s Loper Bright decision of the Supreme Court ensures that Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, have the ultimate say in policymaking.
And the Trump team seems serious about using Schedule F and other reforms to ensure that deep state bureaucrats can’t simply go rogue and pursue their own agenda. Trump is even creating a Department of Government Efficiency, headed by entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to create more efficiency in the executive branch.
That’s how we restore “our democracy”—that is, our real democracy. If Trump wants to be like his presidential role model, Andrew Jackson, he needs to drain the swamp before the swamp drains his administration of its ability to function. He has backing from the American people and a historic opportunity to ensure that our federal republic is restored and that the people will rule once more.