Recorded July 23, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Don Kettl, Professor Emeritus, and former Dean of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. A genuinely distinguished political scientist, I think generally considered to be the Dean of the School of Public Administration, students of civil service, government, how government works, how government could work better. You’ve written… Recipient in many honors in the political science world, but also involved in advising governments and civil servants, and you were at Brookings I know in some capacity as well as when you were also at the University of Maryland.
I’ve read Don’s work over the years. It’s an excellent book from 2016, Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Commitment to Competence. That was a different era where we thought we were going to reform. We have to reform some of these aspects of the civil service. And now 10 years later, we’re dealing with, I think, a different kind of threat. But anyway, we’ll talk about all that.
And Don has a new book not quite out yet, I think, coming out.
DON KETTL:
No, it’s just out.
BILL KRISTOL:
Just out. Perfect timing. The Right-Wing Idea Factory, which is actually a very important and understudied, I think, aspect of how the foundation was laid for Trump and the Trump administration before Trump and separate from Trump in a way. So people should look at that book. What we’re going to talk about today is what the Trump administration’s been doing with the actual mechanisms of government and especially the personnel, the civil service, which is an underappreciated, I’d say, aspect of what’s been happening and underappreciated in its importance, I think. And obviously they’re only partway through doing what they’re doing since we’re only 18 months in. Anyway, Don, thanks so much for joining me today.
DON KETTL:
It is great to be with you today, Bill. I really enjoy the chance to talk.
BILL KRISTOL:
Good. Well, I’m looking forward to it. Okay, even though it may not be entirely cheerful conversation, but that’s okay. So am I right that what the Trump administration’s been doing with respect to government personnel, let’s call it, the civil service, is really important. You see each of these discreet, you read sometimes the headline, they’re changing some mechanism that most of us don’t even know what it is about how people are appointed or hired or fired or moved around in the government, and then it fades away out of the headlines for two, three months. But you study this, and so give us a little bit of the forest here as opposed to the trees of what’s going on here.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, because I think the people follow this closely, I think you just get gobbled up by all these individual announcements. So it’s hard to step back and take a look at the whole thing. And then for most of us sitting out there just reading the headlines, there’s a blip that comes across, but people I think tend not to pay that much attention to it.
But I would argue that of all the things that the Trump administration has been doing, the thing that’s most important and least appreciated is what’s happening with the structure of government and the people who work for it. And this is just a fundamental remaking of the way in which the executive branch operates at the expense of Congress too at the same time.
And one other point too, and just going back to that new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory, the argument of that book is that Trump really had the advantage of capitalizing on a very strong foundation laid long before he ever got into politics and has a series of ideas underneath it that is guaranteed to continue long after he’s no longer president. And so that the positioning all of what’s been happening in that broader context is even more important because it really suggests a big, big, big, big, big set of changes that go right to the heart of the constitutional power of the president.
And so after that long-winded preamble, what’s really going on is that brick by brick by brick, the Trump administration’s been pulling out a lot of the underpinnings of what had happened before, starting with the civil service, and then building up a new wall that is a fundamental effort to try to seize and shift as much power as possible to the president, to the executive branch at the expense of Congress, and sometimes at the expense of the Supreme Court. The President has been reading, along with his people, the idea that the president is in charge of making sure that the laws be faithfully executed as Article II of the Constitution says. And what they’ve been up to is an effort to try to take that as broadly as they possibly can and take everything having to do with the administration and execution of the law, pulling it to the executive branch away from Congress, within the executive branch, pulling it to the executive office of the president, and then within the executive office of the president, pulling it to the president himself.
And so what we have is a broad effort to try to reshape power in a way that’s fundamentally different in terms of the constitutional balance of power. And it’s been not anything that they’ve announced as, “Here’s what we’re doing is a big thing,” but it’s something that’s been happening bit by bit by bit since actually the evening of the inauguration.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I mean, that’s striking I think in your analysis, and I’ve read some of what you’ve written about this, that it’s pretty systematic. For all of Trump’s personal goofiness and disorganization, you might say, and for all of his people’s blowing themselves up sometimes or making missteps and getting rebuked, it does seem like this effort, which I guess as you say is twofold, one to strengthen the executive at the expense of Congress and the Supreme Court, and states in some ways incidentally also, and the private sector, I guess, in the sense that they don’t think they can… And then secondly, within the executive, and I think maybe this is almost as important, don’t you think, to strengthen the president and his personal coterie of political appointees at the expense of what’s built up over decades, a pretty big structure of civil service and career employees and processes and administrative procedure acts and all these things that indirectly, you might say, curtail the president’s interpersonal power. And so the combination does seem like an awfully important thing.
So say a word maybe about that previous system. We created a big government under Roosevelt. We quickly realized you don’t want a government with a million plus, two million, whatever people, where the president can just have spoiled system and have political decisions governing who gets Social Security. Or even at some point this got a little later after Nixon maybe, don’t really want to have political decisions about who would prosecute, don’t really want to have too much political decisions about who gets promoted from major to lieutenant colonel or from colonel to general. And this whole system was built up over decades. But say a word about maybe the system, but then particularly about how they’ve gone about changing it.
DON KETTL:
Yeah. We’re sitting at a point now where I think if you looked carefully at it from a nonpartisan point of view or, put differently, from a point of view that would annoy the people on the right and the left, my argument would be that we have a system that essentially had run out of gas, that the Republicans have been talking about trying to cut the government, cut the government, cut the government, and had been singularly unsuccessful at being able to do much of anything there. And so even the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s had just petered out.
And the Democrats, on the other hand, had built a government that was more and more focused on policy, but often was not very good at administering some of the programs that it created. And you can see all of the problems that came about through Obamacare and how long it took for them to put that, right?
And so put these two streams together and they collided at the beginning of the Trump administration. And there’s a very, very strong, very interesting, but not very well-recognized collection of folks. And I look at this a bit in The Right-Wing Idea Factory of people who had been really working very hard to put together a new approach to government, which was if you can’t cut the programs, you can undermine the ability of government to administer them. So you can just suck the energy out and essentially gut some of the agencies that you don’t like and find a way to be able to weaken the programs without having to kill them.
You can cut the number of federal employees to try to cut the government down to size. Republicans, for a long time, have been trying to cut the government. They’ve seen that federal employees as, in many ways, the big marker that you can use to try to measure the size of government. And government’s been growing, growing, growing, growing since the Roosevelt administration, as you pointed out. Although an interesting fact is that the number of federal employees from the end of the Johnson administration to the beginning of the Trump administration really hadn’t changed very much at all, even though the country’s gotten bigger and the number of federal programs have really exploded. But that says something about the reliance on the private sector and managing a lot of what government is doing.
But still, if you look at the symbol of big government, it was the faceless government bureaucrat, what the Trump people called the “deep state.” And so what they developed was a strategy for trying to shine a light on the deep state and to weaken it by throwing as many people out of it as they possibly could, and then making as many people as they possibly could who remained subject to dismissal by the president. And so that they’ve got a whole strategy of both cutting the government down to size and then for the governments left, making the people involved in policy responsible directly to the president.
And so nothing could be a bigger jump from what it is that the government had been since the Roosevelt administration with lots and lots of government officials who were managing government programs, but growth in government officials that didn’t match the size of the growth of government, but still the symbol of big government that turned out to be just embodied in the people who worked for government. And so became the target that conservatives just couldn’t resist attacking and the kind of thing that liberals had a hard time defending
And so the Trump people came in and started immediately to try to slice the government down. Interesting backstory, of course, is what happened with Elon Musk and DOGE. And that really wasn’t the game plan. The Republicans had, for four years, been working on a game plan to come in and to try to remake the federal government. And Russell Vought, head of OMB, was really the prime mover for a lot of that. And he was appointed to direct OMB and in the driver’s seat for that, except that Elon Musk came in, pushed him aside, grabbed the steering wheel, and then took advantage of it to try to cut government, promised $2 trillion worth of savings, $1 trillion worth of savings, maybe $250 billion worth of savings. And so that it’s just not clear that in the end they really saved much of anything. But what they did do was to develop a strategy for pushing people out of the government.
And as we all know, it’s impossible to fire feds. Turns out not to be true. We all know that people who work for the federal government are there forever, there are ways of removing them. But what the administration did was to develop a whole set of very subtle but very powerful strategies for easing people out.
So then the inauguration, everybody’s out dancing their night away at the inaugural ball. And the Office of Personnel Management, which is in charge of personnel policy, sent out a memo to agency heads and said, “Just remember that the government gives you two powers. One is you’re a probationary employee in the first year or so of your service.” Those people can be fired at will anytime for any reason. And so people say, “Oh, that’s one way of cutting things down.” And within a couple months, they did fire a large number of them.
And then they said, “There’s also a provision in the law that says that if people are determined to be doing jobs not in the best interest of the government, that you can put them on a paid leave.” And this was a really strange and an enormous extension of what had previously been understood by this part of the law that had been passed by Congress, originally passed to make it possible to put people on administrative leave had been charged with some kind of offense or some kind of misbehavior so that they could be investigated, investigated quickly, and then be paid in the meantime. So if it turned out that the charge wasn’t true, that they wouldn’t, in the end, lose any of their pay.
In the end, what the Office of Personnel Management did was to say, “You can do this, but if it turns out that whole office is no longer in the interest of government, you can just put all those people on administrative leave. And then if they’re not in the best interest of government, you can get rid of them.” And so they extended the reduction in force. Then it turns out that—
BILL KRISTOL:
Let me interrupt for one second because that’s so interesting.
DON KETTL:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
I just think it’s so illustrative of the kind of cleverness you might say of Russell Vought and the people working with him and around him. Because I remember vaguely from when I was in government and was chief of staff at the education department, both these provisions, and the first was the firing people who were in probationary status was if, by mistake, someone got hired, which was not competent at all or something, you could get rid of that person. It was understood when he was hired, that he or she was hired, that it was for a year. But I mean, the huge majority of people were doing the job reasonably competently. They continued on.
And then it’s the second, as you say, was really for particular cases where it was inappropriate to have him or her in the office that he was in, but on the other hand, it’s inappropriate to just fire someone or discipline someone before it gets adjudicated by the Merit System Protections Board or the various people who adjudicate these things. So it’s kind of a individualized way of giving someone just an out, giving the manager an out too for two, three, four, five months. And instead they were clever at finding these laws, not exactly breaking these laws, sometimes they did, but taking what was kind of a little exception and making it a massive loophole from which they could do major changes in the federal workforce, right?
DON KETTL:
Exactly. And in fact, just a week or so before the inauguration, the Biden administration outgoing and cleaned up some of the regulations and had laid out that, in fact, people individually could be put on paid leave. And the Trump administration came right in and said, “Ah, look what we got here,” and used some of the language created by the Biden folks to begin what amounted to a massive layoff there.
And that’s an important point that you made, Bill, because there’s some very, very, very clever people who are working on some of these pieces, that the amount of legal work that is backing this up, the kind of ingenuity of using existing laws, the ingenuity of taking existing laws and stretching them past what it is that anybody had done before is pretty outstanding. And some of this has been taken to court, but there’s all the talk about what the administration lost in terms of challenging the 2020 election. This is the flip side of that story because they’ve won most of these along the way. Or when it came to this expansion of putting people on paid leave, and that was really successfully contested in court to begin with.
And so here they have this extremely clever collection of people doing the kind of imagineering that Disney would’ve been thrilled by just sitting there trying to figure out what can we do within the law as it’s written? And so instead of going to Congress and saying, what we’d like to do is to change the law to make it easier for us to fire people, they went rooting around the existing laws and procedures to find just what they needed to try to make things happen. And so it’s that cleverness that is hiding behind what’s often the president’s bluster. There are people out there very smart working some of this stuff out.
And as I said, then Musk ended up riding in, and a week after the election, he sent out a memo to all federal employees called “The Fork in the Road Memo.” It’s a fork in the road, and you have a choice of either staying with the government if you want, but, as you know, we’re making all kinds of noises about firing people, so who knows what might happen to your job if you stay. Or you can decide to take a paid leave of absence from now until the end of the fiscal year, the end of September, at which point you have to agree now to resign at that point. So this was weird because it went out to everybody. People thought at first it was a joke, but it turned out to be real. It was a very short deadline, but they didn’t know how long the deadline was going to be, putting pressure on people to try and decide quickly.
And then on top of that, people were not sure exactly how to make this work. The people in individual agencies, and at that point, the agencies in some cases were headless or had acting directors or it wasn’t clear what was going on, but this was the Bigfoot DOGE setting out this piece. And then in addition to that, they were committing the government to spend money that hadn’t been appropriated yet either. So it made it even trickier, but they ended up managing to squeak that one through as well and in the process convinced a couple hundred thousand people to decide that, you know what? I don’t want to do this anymore. And people who either had the easiest time finding other jobs or the people who were near retirement or all kinds of other kind of conditions left.
And so they found a way to be able to do something that nobody had done before. The buyout that had been available was the same amount that was the case back in the Clinton administration and it was about $50,000 and that was the cap. So they announced to everybody, “Well, we’re not going to ask you to accept the buyout. You’re just going to resign now and take a leave of absence for which you’ll be paid for the next few months and then you’re going to be out and you’re going to agree to resign.” So this was a sort of buyout that wasn’t a buyout that again was a very clever piece of law.
BILL KRISTOL:
And then, it’s amazing how… I mean, previous administrations, I remember this again from my [inaudible], you have a budget and you sort of… Paid leave is expensive if you’re an employer in the private sector. There’s a reason people aren’t thrilled about giving too many employees paid leave, for obvious reasons. You do it sometimes, of course you have to do it and you wish to do it.
But of course, one thing people don’t understand—I’ve noticed this talking to other people—is well, they wouldn’t do that because it’s bad for their agency. But if you don’t care about the agency, if you want to downsize the agency radically, if you want to radically change what the agency does and get rid of a lot of expertise, honestly, expertise you don’t like or that you think is polluted by woke politics or something, you’re fine with the agency paying these people money not to work. So let’s get it off your back.
No one is personally liable. It’s not like you’re running a store with eight people and you lay off three people on paid leave and then you’re paying them out of your profits, here you’re paying out of the taxpayer, right?
DON KETTL:
Yeah, exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
I thought that was kind of clever of them that they… I know a lot of people, I live up here in the DC area, I know a lot of people who took that early buyout. It was a little more generous than what you would get later on. It gave you a lot of notice, honestly, to go look for another job. You saw what was happening with DOGE, you thought, “Geez, do I even want to be around here for the next three, four years?” If you’re at all near to the end of your career, you think, “I’ll just go now and not try to make it through this. And then what, work two more years and then leave?” The number of people who left, as you say, it’s pretty astonishing, right? A couple hundred thousand.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s not a small number.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, [inaudible].
BILL KRISTOL:
And it freed up a lot of space for them, I think then to operate. Yeah.
DON KETTL:
Exactly. And part of it, one of the memos said, “What can you spend your time on?” They said, “Well, you can spend time at home, you can relax.” Or they actually said this in writing that, “You can even take a vacation you’ve always been thinking of.” And it was like, “You really said this?” But they did.
But the other piece of it is part of what you suggested there, Bill, which is that they were interested in trying to gut the government as much as possible, just get people out the door. And the goal was to try to shrink the size of the federal workforce without paying attention to what it is the people were actually doing. In the private sector, typically, if you’re trying to downsize, you would connect the downsizing with the mission. So how can we make sure we can still stay in business to do what we want to do? And what people do we need to make sure that we can still do it? And in this case, there was no concern about that. It was just get them out the door.
And so you put out a memo, this fork in the road memo, encouraging people to leave, and the more people who left, the better. And it didn’t pay any attention to what happens if a National Weather Service office is not staffed enough? What happens if you’re having a hard time answering, say, Social Security calls? What happens if the time it takes to process an IRS tax refund goes up? What happens if we have people who are not in a position to advise the president on what would happen in the Middle East? “Well, we’ll deal with all of that later. Get them out the door.”
And so unlike any reform that the government has tried since the 1990s, and every president’s had some kind of reform thing, this one was unique because it was clever in pushing people out the door and it didn’t pay attention to government’s performance. The idea of what do we need to do the job was not part of the calculus. It was part of the Musk strategy when he bought Twitter and turned it into X. It’s let’s just get everybody out and then we’ll rebuild what we need. And so that was really their strategy.
BILL KRISTOL:
Do you think that Musk, the DOGE thing, which I think you wrote at the time that Vought and the more systematic, the types who had systematically thought about how to change, reform, politicize, cut government and the civil service were unhappy with DOGE in some ways, but it caused a huge amount of ruckus and their plan was a little more, I think, to do a lot of stuff, as we’ve been saying, a little bit beneath the radar and not get in huge trouble with the courts.
Do you think in retrospect though that it… Well, I’m curious, A, am I right about that? What do you make of those months of DOGE in general? And B, did it end up helping them though in a sense because it blew a lot of stuff up and then they could look more… Everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief when DOGE ended and stopped paying attention to what Russell Vought was doing? I don’t know.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, I think so. I think on both counts. And if you’re Russell Vought and the conservatives who had been sitting there for four years financed by, and I tried at one point to calculate how much money was behind them, but it was hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on trying to put together a game plan for the Republicans to come back in. They really had a game plan of what they were going to do. And all of a sudden Musk comes in and shoves everybody aside because he had the president’s ear and because he was doing big stuff. And here’s a guy who’s now a trillionaire who knows something about running a business, so why not let him do what he can do for the government? So elbowed everybody aside so that the best laid plans had been pushed aside. And the people at OMB in particular were side and bit players for a little while.
But at the same time, Musk needed them to try to actually make some of the mechanics of the stuff work. And so they were building their base and getting their operation in place to be able to work. But then the other thing is that even though it wasn’t their plan, Musk had created so much ruckus that the really bold things that the people in the right-wing side of the government wanted to do looked pretty mild by comparison. So they’re talking about doing away with the appeals process for federal employees. Well, that’s not nearly as bad as what Musk was doing or they’re talking about trying to reduce the power of unions. Well, that’s not nearly as bad as what Musk was doing. Or we’re talking about making it possible to be able to fire federal employees who are not saluting the president that are in policy positions, but it’s not nearly as bad as what Musk was doing.
And so although it’s not nearly the plan for Musk to come in and do what he did, it made a lot of the rest of what it is the administration has tried to do a lot easier by comparison because in part a bulldozer had gone through a big chunk of the government and also in part that you get rid of the big headlines and a lot of the attention on what they really wanted to do started to drift away.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. So since Musk, the biggest further changes they’ve managed to make?
DON KETTL:
Biggest further changes were there’s big downsizing of the workforce. The workforce is down about 11% or so since the beginning of the administration. So that’s a lot of people, over 200,000. They, in addition to that, have stripped away as part of the effort to try to deal with the independence of independent regulatory commissions, they’ve taken that away. The Agency for International Development is now a tiny shell of what it used to be. They’ve been working very hard in the Department of Education to… Well, Congress creates a department. The administration can’t unilaterally close it, but you know what we can do? We can hire lots of employees or get people to leave so now the workforce is half what it used to be. And then they can take some of its functions and transfer bits and pieces out to other departments so that there was a program, for example, for Indian education that got shipped over to the Department of the Interior. There was work for efforts to try to deal with disadvantaged students. They shipped that over to Health and Human Services.
And so if you can’t eliminate the department, you could at least make sure that there’s not much of a left to run. And so they’ve done that. They have, in addition to that, something that is loved in detail only by wonks, but there’s a Schedule P/C thing that they’ve done. And I still can’t believe, by the way, that a conservative group of people managed to create something called Schedule P/C because it’s anything but politically correct, but it’s actually Policy/Career. And what they did was to create an authority for the president to identify people who were involved in policy related positions and then move them out of their protection of the Career Civil Service into a new schedule from which they could be fired at will by the President at any time without appeal.
And so this is a pretty big deal. The idea of having a civil service was to have people in their jobs who were experts who would have that expertise carry over from administration to administration. They were responsible for administering the law and they were accountable to the president in terms of the way in which they did their jobs, but they couldn’t be dismissed because they were not of the right kind of political stripe or saying things that were inconvenient. And so this is a very big deal. They originally said, you know, this is going to be as many as 50,000 federal employees. And then they finally put out a list a couple months ago and turned out to be, they say only 8,000. But first of all, it’s only 8,000 for now.
The second thing is that, well, it’s only 8,000 for now, but you create that authority and you can add people dribs and drabs, ones and twos and hundreds and thousands. And you could, in theory, include as many as a couple hundred thousand federal employees who were in policy-related positions. And so they’ve created this mechanism for, you can debate whether or not it’s the spoil system. Well, it’s really not quite the spoil system. They’re not interested in hiring people who are their fans. In fact, people who are hired into these jobs still have to go through a civil service certification that they’re eligible for the jobs. But it does make it easier to fire people who are not in accord with what the administration’s trying to do. So they’re much less interested in creating a spoil system than they are in creating an accountability system that changes things away from accountability to the law and accountability to expertise to accountability to the president and the president’s values. That’s a really big deal.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s so important. And I think that is the case where the actual number of “political appointees” has gone up, but it doesn’t have to go up that radically. But if you take these civil service appointments, which I remember when I was in government, we were pretty wary and I think we’re told we weren’t supposed to really be involved in a lot of those decisions. There were a lot of, it wasn’t quite like the military with promotion boards, but it was a little more like that and there were criteria and people could of course appeal if they felt they were unjustly discriminated against because of whatever. So including their political views, that wasn’t legit. So that system kind of ran itself maybe too much so some people thought at the time a little bit.
But now once you have political appointees who are willing to throw their weight around and butt in, and once you can disable some of the internal mechanisms that disciplined and stop that Merit System Protection Board and things like that, and the courts are very reluctant, what is it, federal courts are not set up to review tens or hundreds of thousands of personal decisions of the federal government.
DON KETTL:
No. No. No.
BILL KRISTOL:
So oh, well, we can’t do it. You have to go through the appeal process internally first. Well, good luck with that if they control that. I mean the degree to which they have been able, I think again there without probably literally breaking the law to use just the determination, intimidation, willingness to stretch the law, you might say, to reward people who are helping them who might be career to arrange the system to produce the kinds of “career employees” they want. I think that’s my sense just talking to people scattered around the government is that’s been pretty pervasive, especially in the places they care about. I mean, you mentioned education. There’s some agencies they’re okay with. I mean in fact, they’ve increased the size of some and they want to increase the size of the Pentagon and stuff.
But others, they want to [inaudible] they think they’re hostile politically basically. And I think the degree to which they’ve been… I’ve been sort of astonished having to just almost unthinkingly accepting these rules as being okay, they’ve been there… By the time I got to government in the late ’80s, they’ve been there for quite a while and you were supposed to follow them, I had the impression, and I vaguely remember from Watergate that people got in a lot of trouble from trying to politicize everything. And the degree to which they’ve just been able to… Well, it’s a question. I mean, how much have they really reshaped the kind of spirit, the culture, the day-to-day workings? I’m curious about your general sense.
DON KETTL:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Obviously, some agencies will be different from others of these agencies. My sense is it’s a little more than I would’ve expected possible.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, exactly. And they’ve done it in part by, as you say, doing away with what had been routes of appeal by the Merit Systems Protection Board, an agency that almost nobody’s heard of, but was the place where federal employees could go if they thought that they were being treated unfairly. They’ve succeeded in undermining the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was also a place where they could go if there were questions of discrimination. So that’s been weakened as well.
The Merit Systems Protection Board appeals have been pulled into the Office of Personnel Management, which means that they’re going from an independent agency to something that is under the direct control of the president. And then they’ve moved these 8,000 people who are involved in policy related positions.
And what they’re doing is first for these 8,000, you step out of line, that is you buck what it is the administration may want to do, you provide inconvenient advice, you’re not being viewed as a team player, you can be fired at will. So you can be eliminated.
The second thing obviously is that you can terrify everybody into submission. So you don’t really have to fire people wholesale to be able to get the message across. I talked to one person who used to run a big federal agency and said he just really wanted the power to walk in one day and fire one person, just one person.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
DON KETTL:
Because then the word would get around instantly and everybody would know that they had to toe the line. Well, this is very much the case of that. So it’s a way of terrifying people into submission.
And then the third thing is that I’ve talked to students interested in getting jobs in the federal government. I got to sit back and ask myself, “Could I really tell a young person interested in starting a career that now is the time to join the federal government if you’re interested in the environment or if you’re interested in labor policy, you’re interested in health policy?”
And the idea is, well, you know, you got to know what you’re getting yourself into because the probationary people had been laid off so that you can’t necessarily be counting on completing your first year or two. And then if you’re in and you’re doing something, then you write a memo that is not viewed as just viewing the party line, you could be in a position where you could be eliminated. Or you get in there and you start working on something versus, “You know, I wouldn’t quite put it that way. You may want to just go in the other direction. We’re not really pushing that issue this day.”
And so the implications for hiring and the implications for promotions, the implications for scaring people into submission, and then the ability to be able to get rid of people who are not toeing the line all put together is an enormous change in the culture of the federal government in ways that, frankly, it’s been pretty hard to measure so far because it’s fairly new, but this is a pretty big deal. And all of it has to do with an effort that could have been foreseen by anybody who read Project 2025 and by reading carefully some of what the conservative folks were writing in the four years between the two Trump administrations. And ultimately there’s been an argument made, and I’ve talked to some of the people who are directly involved in policymaking now inside the White House; they really view that every federal employee ought to be directly reporting to the president and can be fired at will by the president at any time, so that ultimately where they’re going is an effort to try to weaken the civil service as much as they possibly can.
And so this is not just a little bit here, a little bit there, maybe a little bit of policy here as well, “We’ll fire a few people that we don’t like.” It really is part of a wholesale basic effort, bit by bit, step by step to try to change the way in which government works, change the culture of government, to change the way in which the president has the power to be able to control policy, the way in which the Office of Management and Budget in particular becomes a kind of uber agency with its thumb on every scale across the government, and in a way that really shifts the fundamental power within the constitutional balance of powers toward the president in ways that frankly the founders never intended.
So not to be too apocalyptic about all this stuff, but at the very least this is a pretty big deal.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s very important, I think. And as we both said earlier, probably underappreciated in its importance. I was talking to someone who was fired from the Justice Department actually by Todd Blanche, now up for confirmation for Attorney General. He was Deputy Attorney General and didn’t like a memo she wrote actually. She wasn’t challenging the decision they were making exactly. She was explaining certain things. And maybe he knew that deep down she was not really on board.
And I think Justice is a little different if… The lawyers may have a slightly different legal status than career employees at some other agencies. There was a little more at the discretion of the Attorney General. But basically… And she’s actually challenging her firing, but it’s a year later and it’s in court, and an awful lot of other people saw that and decided, “Well, I’m not going through that, and so I’m going to…” And she’s not on administrative leave since she’s not getting any money right now, and so a lot of other people looked at that, and she gets this huge wave of resignations. And then these are still a lot of the nominally career positions, but they’re being hired by people who are making very political-type ideological decisions.
So I think the degree to which it can change the character of these agencies, including very sensitive ones like the Department of Justice, is very strict.
Without anyone ever explicitly saying. I mean, they also incidentally are arguing in court and have to some degree already started arguing that the entire civil service structure, which goes way back, is sort of illegitimate or these protections really can’t … They’ve gotten rid of some protections for the independent agency heads and so forth put to commissioners, but they’re clearly going as deep as they can.
And the courts may stop them at some point. It’s a little unclear honestly about exactly how, but they can do an awful lot before we even get the Supreme Court saying, “Well, actually, there are some real civil service protections.”
DON KETTL:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
Even so, the amount you can do informally just turns out to be… It’s sort of legally, I guess you might say.
DON KETTL:
Yeah. That’s—
BILL KRISTOL:
Questionably illegally, but not obviously illegally is so much greater than I appreciated and I…you know? Just—
DON KETTL:
Yeah. Well, and understanding the question of whether or not something is legal really depends on whether or not the courts allow you to get away with it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. Right.
DON KETTL:
Because there are competing interpretations of what the law says and you can say, “Here’s what we want to do.” And as I said, the Trump administration’s been winning those.
And there was an important case a couple months ago, the Slaughter case, that allowed the president to fire people who were heads of independent regulatory commissions, according to the court. And so it’s one question about whether or not relatively small commissions that really are not super important in the overall scheme of things have people at their head that the president ought to be able to fire.
That may not seem like a big deal, but if you start digging deeply into the opinions, it’s clear that there’s a potential majority forming on the court that says that, “You know, we’ve been doing this civil service thing for maybe 140 years,” but they say if you go back and read what the founders had in mind, they really had in mind that the president ought to have the ability to fire anybody. And then they try to construct a history since then that says that the civil service is really illegitimate because it conflicts with what the founders had in mind.
And so, again, brick by brick by brick, they took the independent regulatory commissions away and said that Congress can’t really create a commission independent of the president’s power. So simultaneously they weaken Congress and increase the president’s power. And you read those opinions that are beginning to form from Alito and Thomas and others, there’s the beginning of a potential majority that could make that even greater.
But they’ve been clever here again, the administration folks, and the legal advice that they’re getting in trying to pick the cases that they think they can go after. And again, bit by bit they’re allowing the conservatives within the court to begin to lean further and further and further toward what’s called the unitary executive model of presidential power, which is that once the law is passed that the court has the power to say whether or not what you’re doing is legal or not, Congress has the power to fund it, but otherwise it’s the president’s power to decide how all this works.
And this is a huge shift of power, and it’s possible in a time when Congress is unable to act on much of anything and certainly where the Republicans are not willing to challenge the president, and where a budding majority on the Supreme Court is allowing and deciding with the president on this, and where the administration is picking bit by bit cases that allow them to build a case law on this.
If you’re interested in trying to just follow the overall course of American government and push the code of Trump’s personality aside for a second, what’s going on here is a huge and enormous and fundamentally important question of the balance of powers. And so that’s a pretty big deal.
But you can then take it to ground and say, “Well, why should I care?” And the answer is, well, you can weaken the Centers for Disease Control and the FDA, and all of a sudden you’re not exactly sure what’s going on with this contamination of lettuce. And so the implications of shifting the power has real implications for people who are thinking about going out and having a salad for lunch today.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, that whole explanation you just gave is so helpful, I think in getting a sense of what’s happening and a basic sense of what’s happening, an important sense without … Obviously there are going to be differences in different agencies.
I’m curious. So there are two sort of obvious questions one would want to raise. The first you just raised. I mean, how much does this just decrease expertise, historical knowledge, you know, just ability to have sensible policies that are relatively in some cases not ideological, but just have a government that can give you good, accurate advice on diseases or on many, many other things? Or as you say, answer phone calls or emails in an adequate way or process tax returns.
So there’s sort of the competence of government side of things. And then I’m also interested in your judgment of how much has that been reduced? Is it maybe … Maybe there’s a lot of extra fat there, so to speak. You’re not really cutting into muscle. Or are you?
And then secondly, on the more politicization side, I mean, how worried are you about justice, obviously Homeland Security, intelligence agencies, defense, where you really don’t want presumably, at least for decades, and I’d say this actually does go back to the founding, you haven’t wanted to have individual people be prosecuted because the president or the AG person doesn’t like that person. You don’t want military officers to be promoted because they… And so there’s been a little of this of course, but because their views are in accord with the temporary Secretary of Defense or various service chiefs, or because they in a previous administration served loyally and now are being published for that because the previous administration is one the current one doesn’t like. How much are you worried about the expertise side of it, I guess maybe that’s one bucket, and then the politicization side of it?
DON KETTL:
Yeah, and two different sides obviously of the same coin. And we’ve always in this country struggled with a question about how to try to balance those two things because you don’t want a bureaucracy out there running amok, too huge, too enormous, that doesn’t pay any attention to anybody. It’s not clear that’s what we had, but certainly that was the image that had been created.
And I’ll make my friends on the left and the right mad at me simultaneously, but on the one hand, there wasn’t a single federal agency out there that couldn’t have benefited from a haircut. There undoubtedly were people who were hired who were doing things that weren’t required. But on the other hand, there’s a basic problem of competence, and this administration really hasn’t paid much attention at all to that, to the question of what kind of expertise do you need to do the job?
And as I mentioned before, the prime criteria for cutting was cutting wherever you could cut without figuring out what people that you needed to accomplish the mission. So I really worry about that.
There’s the old story that I know you’ve heard a thousand times, Bill, but if a new political party comes in and you’re a career person working for the person, there are two things you can do to destroy them.
The first is that you do nothing of what they say. You just simply say, “Nope, I’m not going to do that,” or you find ways of dragging your feet because you’re so skilled at being able to do that. The other way of destroying them is you do everything that they say and you don’t tell them about the iceberg that they’re about ready to sail into.
And so as a career person, you can really cause a lot of trouble both ways, and we know about that, but you look at what are the implications that are starting to creep out of what’s going on?
Well, on the one hand, it’s pretty clear with what’s going on with the outbreak of the contamination of the lettuce that we don’t have an information system that allows us to track. We don’t really know how many cases there are because grants to support local public health people have been cut. We know that there’s a major problem in Michigan, but is that because we just are not measuring it well enough elsewhere?
And I suspect that the question is that we know where the outbreak is worse just because some people are measuring it and other people have chosen not to. And so if you lose the capacity, you don’t really know what’s going on. So we’ve got that as a problem.
On the flip side, you look at what’s going on in Homeland Security and especially at ICE, and it’s pretty clear that some of these folks are being put out there with either inadequate screening for doing the job to begin with or without adequate training for the job they’re trying to do. You listen carefully to what it is that people in local police departments say about traffic stops and you don’t just pull people over and pull guns on them. There are other ways of being able to apprehend people, but there just isn’t the right kind of training for people who are out there doing these jobs.
And so you can have an increase in people who aren’t skilled to do what they need to do and cuts in people who need to do stuff but aren’t there. And so we’ve got flip sides of both of those things that are going on. We can see some of that in FEMA because FEMA has been cut and leadership has been weak, and the risk is that we may be one hurricane away from discovering the costs of that. So there’s all of that piece.
Then on the other hand, in terms of politicization, the flip side of draining the capacity of government is politicizing the leaders and the people who work for them. And so what we have, I think, is a system where we still do have a civil service, but it’s not what it was. We still have an expectation that people in the civil service will be accountable to their leaders, but now they’re much more directly accountable to the point that they may be fearful of telling people what it is that they know they don’t want to hear. And you listen just on TV now, you listen to some generals and admirals who have been in those jobs and they all say, “It’s not our job to tell the president what to do, but we better warn him about some of the things that he at least needs to know about.”
And if you either fire people in advance that you know are not on board with what you want to do, or you fail to promote people who might cause trouble, or you just simply send out the word that I don’t want to be hearing about this, then you can really risk a problem that both has to do with capacity, but also the risks of increased politicization. We know that civil service is kind of a mess and it needs reform. If you want to get everybody in Washington to agree on one thing is that the civil service system is a mess. Everybody, everybody will agree on that.
But on the other hand, it’s important to remember why we created this thing to begin with. And we created it because we had presidents who were struggling to try to get the capacity and the competence to do what had to be done. Lincoln used to spend a third to a half of his time just simply dealing with people who lined up outside his office demanding jobs to the point that he had to install a secret escape door at the back of his office just so he could get away from all of this stuff. President Garfield, as we know, was assassinated by somebody who was convinced that he had given the speech that really put him over the top and made him president and presidents were being put upon all the time by people who really thought that they deserve jobs.
So we decided what we wanted to do was to create a civil service that was at least distanced a bit from all the political pushing back and forth, so we could get people who were competent to be able to do their jobs. And we know some of that story, but what was going on in the private sector at the same time was the Gilded Age and Robber Barons who were running railroads and steel companies and elsewhere who were finding ways of pushing their own policy or ignoring governmental policy. And government was simply going to that struggle with both arms tied behind its back because they didn’t have the capacity. And people were being poisoned by food, they were discovering that people were being maltreated at their jobs. And so we began creating a government that was capable of being able to at least reverse some of that.
And with that came a government that had more and more capacity, with the civil service that was protected from political interference. So there’s a good reason why we have the civil service. Everybody agrees that the civil service system we have now is broken. That’s something we need to fix, but the question is whether or not we need to fix it by making it easier for the president to fire people who don’t agree with him. And my own personal view is that we need a stronger system of accountability, but we’re sailing into very, very dangerous waters by robbing the government of the capacity it needs to do what is the people want.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s really well said and really a great, comprehensive view of it. I’ll let you go here in a few minutes, but give me a sense, we’re 18 months in. I guess we’re almost… Yeah, exactly. We’re talking on what, July 23rd. So we’re about 18 months—just over 18 months—into the administration, if my math is right, and about a little over a third in. And so there’s still another two and a half years of this and maybe Congress will do a little more if Democrats were to win one or both houses to stop. But a lot of this stuff is pretty hard to stop from Congress and Congress hasn’t show much capacity to do it anyway, even if the other party might control by narrow majority
So where do you think, does this chug along? Does it keep going for a couple of years? How much of an obstacle is the courts or other things? Is there a sense? Where will we be, in other words, two years from now? I guess is my first question. And what if, let’s assume, well first that partly depends on the answer to that, but what does the next administration do? How hard is this? Some of these things I do think just having been in government and being pretty close to some parts of government over the last 25, 30 years since I’ve been in, it’s a long time, some parts work better than others, but there was a lot that went well. It is like when everything goes okay, no one says it, no one talks about it. We have a pretty massive country here, massive economy, massive food chains, supply chains, massive consumer products, everything. And thank God, a lot of people go about their daily lives without worrying too much about whether the food is poisoned or how the car is as unsafe as it was 30, 40 years ago. And if it is unsafe, there’ll be a recall. And we take an awful lot for granted. I think that’s very much true. I always think of this in terms of international system. We take peace for granted. We take relative control over nuclear filtration for granted. We take pretty decent job actually of dealing with terrorism probably for granted. And we don’t quite realize what the world could look like without all these safeguards and guardrails in place. And there are people helping make these things happen in different parts of the government. Again, there are things that are too slow and things that aren’t wise also.
But once you get rid of a quarter of the Justice Department and once the whole… So many people I know in the intelligence community are just, “Well, I didn’t sign up for this and maybe I’ll leave right away, but I might leave pretty early than I expected.” Talking to someone literally last week requesting transfer abroad because the job that this person was doing was… Here, I shouldn’t even say the gender maybe, but this person though that the job they were doing was more important in DC, but they also though it was becoming just untenable from their point of view, their own personal standards of behavior and truth-telling and so forth. So this person has requested a job abroad. It’s not as important, honestly, but you know what? If you’re at a military base or working for the intelligence community in some far-flung country, you’re probably a little more insulated from the direct political pressure.
So people are making decisions based on that. Again, they always did a little bit, but. So anyway, I just wonder how worried are you that someone takes over in 2029 with the best of intentions, calls you up, calls you, and all of our friends in the public administration world, and other former students of James Q. Wilson, and so forth and of yours, and others, and to say, “Okay, how do I fix this?” I mean, how worried are you about what we might be facing?
DON KETTL:
The answer to the last question is a lot. There are two things. One is that they’re not done yet in terms of the big policy ideas. The people who are working on the legal strategies, the people who are considering the opportunities for being able to push this forward, the other ideas that are on the table, there is a long, long, long glide path ahead of them of ideas that they have already cooked. And so it’s more of the same, and more expansive, and more designed to try to increase the president’s power even further. And this dramatically weakens the power of Congress, which has already done a pretty good job of doing that themself. But on the other hand, it could weaken that even more. So it’s a pretty big deal. They’re not done yet and they have a lot more time to go.
And it’s a big mistake to look at just the president and what he’s doing, and what he’s saying, and whether or not he’s a strong leader, or whether he’s crazy, or whether he likes rallies. There’s all this stuff going on behind the scenes that most people don’t watch that is far more fundamental to the country. And so what happens in 2029 when a new president comes in? Either party. A Republican, it’s kind of hard to say that a Republican is going to say, “Trump set the table for me and now I’ve got a whole lot more power than a president had say when Biden came in and I’m not going to give that up.” A Democrat comes in and the pressures for retribution are going to be enormous. And now the Democrat’s going to have a lot more ability to be able to do what was possible in a way that was not possible before. And so I’m worried that what we’re going to do is to sink into a cycle of retribution, flying back and forth in a way that, given the fact that the politics in this country are so divided.
And on top of that, the fact there’s so much fuel being sent up from state and local governments as well that it’s going to be really hard to resist that. Is it savable? I think it is, but not to be too pollyannish about it, but I think it begins by trying to rebuild community and community that focuses on us talking about the stuff that matters and how it is we deal with each other in a way that’s civil that can reshape some of the politics going on. But then on the other side, on the wonky side and less esoteric side, to really focus on government’s performance. What do we want to do? I kind of think that I want to be able to go to the supermarket and buy a bag of lettuce without worrying about whether it’s going to get me sick. I would kind of like to be able to get on an airplane and make sure that I’m going to get there in one piece.
I’m living here in Austin and there’s a forecast of a tropical storm and it’s sort of moving in our general direction. And do I need to worry about that? Or even worse, if I’m in Florida and there’s a hurricane coming in, do I need to evacuate? And people tell me to evacuate, should I trust them? So I’m kind of interested in making sure that gas is not going to cost $8 a gallon. What can we do in terms of foreign policy to make sure the president has the right kind of options to consider? And so I think that… Am I worried? A lot. Why? Because they’re not done yet. And it’s not just the president, but the efforts of those around him and on the outside supporting him who have a very huge and fundamental and reshaping ideology, driving an effort to try to change government.
And so there’s that piece. It’s something that’s going to continue. Can be very, very hard to reverse, very hard for a new Republican or a Democratic president to run away from it. But on the other hand, I think if we say, no, wait, wait, wait a minute. Is this really what the founders had in mind and what kind of country do we want? And what do we need to try to make the government that we do have the government that we want actually work? And so if the new president called me, the one thing I would say is that, “What do you want to do? How is what you’re going to do going to affect Americans and what do you need to make it happen?” And focus like a laser on that. And that would, I think, help to begin shifting some of the stuff around because I said, I don’t want to have to open up a bag of lettuce and say, “I’m not so sure about that.”
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that would be nice. That’s a very relevant—
DON KETTL:
Yeah, that’s still sort of a good thing.
BILL KRISTOL:
…Relevant example. Don, this has really been just fascinating and you’ve opened a window that a lot of us hadn’t even thought we should be looking into. And I think it’ll stimulate a lot of people to read your work and that of others in this field. And there are other people who are following this, though, as you say, it’s not somehow been quite at the front burner because a lot of it is complicated and you have to look into the inner, so to speak, inner workings of government. But also some of it is purposely concealed, I think I would say. It’s not like everything. Some other things they love. Pete Hegseth loves publicizing his boasts about what he’s doing with the military, but this is a little different. In a way, the more clever ones I think don’t want people looking too closely at some of it.
DON KETTL:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
So it’s important to look. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Really a fascinating and very instructive conversation, Don.
DON KETTL:
That’s good. It’s been a great chance to be able to talk about all this, Bill. Hugely important.
BILL KRISTOL:
It is important. So, thank you for the work you’re doing and people should take a look at your… More than take a look. They should buy, purchase, full price, your new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory. And so thank you, Don, for joining me, and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
