Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.
Trump has long had figures in orbit urging him to act to remake the executive branch, such as Steve Bannon, who called for “deconstruction of the administrative state” at the start of his brief White House tenure. In the chaos of Trump’s first term, such plans didn’t get very far at first. Trump grew increasingly frustrated by what he viewed as resistance to his agenda among permanent federal employees and his inability to get “loyal” people in place.
Meanwhile, younger conservatives on the outside of the administration — like Vance — were wondering why President Trump was struggling to enact his agenda and grappling with the leftward movement of the nation on social justice issues. Many of them gravitated toward explanations offered by writers on the New Right.
The New Right put forth an institutional theory for why conservatives couldn’t get what they wanted. Per this theory, the left had ultimate power due to their control of important institutions, from the media and academia to tech companies and the federal bureaucracy. The task ahead for the right was to fight for and seize control of these institutions.
One particularly extreme New Right thinker is the blogger Curtis Yarvin, whom I profiled in 2022. Yarvin has argued that a new right-wing president should “Retire All Government Employees” — fire them all — and rebuild the government anew. (He also supports toppling American democracy and replacing it with a monarchy.)
Vance cited Yarvin approvingly during that podcast appearance in which he discussed how Trump should fire “every civil servant.” He said: “There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things.”
As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.
This interest in disruption makes more sense once you know that Vance’s top political backers include several famous figures on the Silicon Valley right — like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — who similarly loathe the left and want sweeping overhauls to left-dominated institutions.
Thiel has been perhaps the leading intellectual influence on Vance, who as a Yale law student attended a talk Thiel gave at the school in 2011. Vance was starstruck, later calling the talk “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School” and Thiel “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met.” Vance soon made Thiel’s acquaintance, eventually getting a job at a Thiel-founded investment fund, and much later getting $15 million from Thiel to back his Senate campaign.
Thiel has written about his own disillusionment with American institutions, writing in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He has also backed many in the New Right, including Yarvin, whose startup he funded. (“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email, “just plays it very carefully.”)
Musk, meanwhile, put the “seize the institutions” strategy into practice when he bought Twitter and remade it into a more right-wing-friendly platform. Musk cut about 80 percent of the company’s staff and abandoned most content moderation and hate speech policies, sending liberals fleeing.
Could Trump and Vance try something similar — taking a wrecking ball to the permanent civil service? Even if the courts try to stop them?
We don’t know for sure, but Vance’s selection increases the odds for maximum chaos in the federal government.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in that 2021 podcast, alluding to the fall of the Roman Republic. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
