The Forest and the Trees

A massive White House buyout of government workers is the sort of thing that would have thrilled 2015 me.

Really, what’s not to like? If you’re skeptical of big government, the thought of trimming some fat from our obese federal bureaucracy is delightful. It will save gobs of money too, depending on how many employees accept the offer, maybe as much as $100 billion per year. And buyouts are easier on the conscience than pink slips are, as tossing federal employees out on their ears without a financial cushion would risk leaving their families to go hungry in the short term.

The new initiative even bears the fingerprints of the greatest entrepreneur of our age. Smaller, more efficient government—that’s what conservatives want, that’s what Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deliver. Yay!

The same goes for his impoundment scheme. 2015 me understood that federal spending was unsustainable and would have felt grateful to a Republican president for trying to hold onto money that our prodigal legislature kept shoving out the door. Granted, I would have had questions about whether he had the constitutional power to do so, but it’s not like Trump is the first executive to assert the power to block certain congressional appropriations.

Far from it. The whole reason the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 exists is because Richard Nixon (and various predecessors) claimed the same authority. There remains a defensible legal argument to this day that the president should have some say over how money earmarked by Congress is disbursed.

And if you disagree, believing that his duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed is absolute, tell me: Did you complain when Barack Obama decided not to enforce federal marijuana laws? How about when Joe Biden eased off enforcing federal immigration laws?

Presidents have routinely asserted “prosecutorial discretion” to justify refusing to carry out the law as written. Trump wants to do the same thing with spending and suddenly it’s a national crisis?

2015 me would not have understood the uproar. Nor would I have understood liberals’ disquiet over portraits of disfavored former government officials being removed from federal office buildings. Of all the people to complain about un-person-ing enemies for thoughtcrimes, the statute-demolishing, cancellation-mobbing left believes it has standing to lecture? Please.

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

A postliberal forest.

“What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution inside the U.S. government,” Politico announced on Tuesday in response to Trump’s latest personnel purges. That’s the right word.

Only two presidents in my lifetime have been truly visionary, I wrote a few weeks before the election. One is Ronald Reagan, the other is Trump. But while both treated the federal government as a beast to be broken, their goals in subduing it were all but directly opposed. Reagan believed that a weaker government would mean greater individual liberty for Americans. Trump believes that a weaker government will be less able to prevent him from consolidating power and dominating American life.

Policy by policy, he’s trying to bring about a postliberal revolution in which all meaningful federal authority ultimately rests with him. If you’re judging his daily executive actions in isolation, without regard to that fact, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

So whereas 2015 me would have regarded his proposed buyout for federal workers as a conservative gambit to shrink the bureaucracy, 2025 me views it as another piece in his strategy to purge the government of anyone who might resist his dubiously legal postliberal gambits. The employees most likely to accept the buyout, one would assume, are those who have misgivings about working for him in the first place. He’s bribing people in lieu of firing them to prune the “disloyal” and remove an obstacle to consolidating power.

Whether that’s legal or not is barely a footnote in the coverage, evidence that we’re already lost in a postliberal forest. The fact that the buyout isn’t likely to make government more efficient, as there appears to be no attempt to distinguish time-serving, redundant employees from effective, necessary ones, also seems not to matter. But why would it? Efficiency isn’t the point; control is. Any worker who rejects the offer and stays on will know that by doing so they’ve agreed, if only implicitly, not to make trouble for Trump going forward.

What about impoundment? 2015 me would have seen that as a creative, if aggressive, ploy to constrain runaway spending. But 2025 me recognizes it as Trump’s attempt to get his hooks into federal appropriations, knowing that co-opting the power of the purse would give him immense influence over the millions of entities who do business with Uncle Sam. This too is a bribery scheme: As I said yesterday, he covets the ability to impound funds for the same reason that he relishes the power to impose tariffs, because him having control over huge sums of money incentivizes recalcitrant opponents to bow to his wishes.

Even the disappearance of portraits of former public officials hits differently in 2025 than it would have in the past. Had, say, George W. Bush’s administration removed portraits of Bill Clinton’s deputies from federal agencies, I would have found it tacky, amusing, but within generally normal parameters of petty partisan politics. When Trump’s revolutionary vanguard starts removing portraits, however, there’s a distinct “Year Zero” undertone to it, a sense that the entire institutional order, rather than just the opposing party, is being wiped away. The fact that Mark Milley will have his image removed from the Pentagon and his security detail revoked in tandem amounts to designating him formally as an enemy of the regime, no longer under its protection and subject to the same treatment as disfavored commissars in old photos with Stalin.

All of this is different from anything you or I have seen before. How different? This different (emphasis mine):

President Donald Trump has long said he believes the biggest mistake he made during his first term was hiring what he considered to be the wrong kinds of people. Now, aides are working aggressively to ensure the government is filled only with loyalists.

Negative social media posts have been enough to derail applications. Those seeking jobs have been told they will have to prove their “enthusiasm” to enact Trump’s agenda and have been asked when their moment of “MAGA revelation” occurred. One federal employee said they briefly considered buying Trump’s crypto meme coin in case the president’s team asked about their voting record.

I was young when Reagan was president but I don’t remember hearing about him vetting deputies to make sure that they’d experienced a quasi-religious awakening to his divine truth.

Trump is different.

If you insist on judging the federal buyout, impoundment, the Justice Department purge, the gangster-ization of law enforcement, the recess-appointment ploy, and half a dozen other hair-raising Trump proposals through a traditionally conservative classical-liberal frame, you’re deliberately refusing to see the forest for the trees.

These policies are not being offered in isolation, with an eye in each case to maximizing the public welfare, and therefore to be “called” as balls and strikes on their individual merits. They’re part of a cohesive, aggressive authoritarian program to accrue power in the executive branch and to wield it to advance the president’s interests, whether or not that’s lawful or to the country’s general benefit.

We all watched the news on January 6. There’s no reason after that to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt about his good intentions unless you’re so wedded to remaining on Team Red that you’re obliged to go on pretending that the forest in which we find ourselves doesn’t exist.

Nor can we whatabout our way out of this by comparing Trump’s dubious assertions of executive “discretion” to those made by Obama, Biden, the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan. The courts have been too lenient in the past about indulging presidents when they’ve declined to enforce certain laws, but one can understand why they weren’t overly alarmed: Obama et al. weren’t leading a revolution to overturn the constitutional order, no matter what Glenn Beck might have told you at the time. Judges were comfortable—too comfortable—letting certain executive policy “trees” stand because they saw no forest around them.

Trump is different. What Trumpism is, wrote Philip Klein at National Review, is a fusion of elements from across the political spectrum united by a common goal of blowing up the prevailing order. Its adherents “share an overriding belief that so-called experts and elite institutions have royally messed things up roughly since the end of the Cold War,” he argued. “As a corollary, they believe that those people need to be driven away from all levers of influence and power. And a good number of them believe that Trump is the vehicle by which to make this happen.”

Blowing things up is not a common aspiration of presidents or their supporters, especially those who are nominally conservative and ostensibly believe in the wisdom of Chesterton’s Fence. “Change” is a common aspiration, of course, but since I was born the closest any previous victorious movement has come to expressing a destructive impulse is Reaganites hoping to shrink government until it could be drowned in a bathtub.

And even that wasn’t destructive the way Trumpism is destructive. Reagan’s hostility to government wasn’t driven by hostility to classical liberalism but by admiration of it. Reagan conservatives have always framed their designs on taming the federal beast in terms of restoring the Framers’ constitutional vision, not usurping it.

Trump is different. When his interests conflict with the Constitution’s, his take precedence. Unlike his predecessors, he faces no real restraints from his own party on his most abusive impulses, having cowed all but a handful of Republicans in Congress into fealty with threats of primaries or worse. Because of that, he’s assembled a Cabinet that features some of the most embarrassingly unqualified nominees in American history, reasonably expecting that they’ll be confirmed by a compliant GOP Senate anyway. As I write this, a guy with a dead worm in his brain is testifying before senators in hopes of leading the Department of Health and Human Services—and that worm is one of the more normal things rattling around in his head.

There’s no party check on the president. There’s no congressional check (for the moment). There’s no check from the criminal justice system either, at least with respect to his “core” powers. And that’s just the way Trump wants it. His goal in blowing up the prevailing order isn’t to replace the old elites with new, more competent elites, hopefully needless to say. It’s to replace them with him. He wants a patronage system in which, ultimately, he’s the only patron.

We are in a forest. If we’re going to get out of it, it would be helpful if everyone acknowledged it and stopped pretending like it’s 2015 and a massive buyout for federal workers is just some innocent ploy to make government run better.

Courting disaster.

It would be especially helpful if the Supreme Court did so.

Yesterday I noted that law professor Jack Goldsmith has wondered whether Trump’s early flurry of power grabs might not cause a judicial rethink about the limits of presidential authority. It’s fine for judges to navel-gaze about executive “discretion” when it’s a Bush or Obama on the other side. But when it’s the guy who James Madison warned us about?

Whatabout Obama refusing to enforce marijuana laws? might not cut it for the court as a justification to greenlight out-and-out authoritarianism.

Republicans will squeal if the judiciary begins cracking down on executive power after many years of looking the other way for Trump’s predecessors, but so what? The court is within its rights to do so. Many times in its history it’s reconsidered its own jurisprudence, sometimes blatantly in response to social or political developments.

It happened a few years ago with abortion, as I recall. It happened when the Rehnquist Court cracked down on the commerce clause after Congress spent decades using it to justify all manner of federal legislation. It happened when the Warren Court desegregated public schools, concluding that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal. And it happened when the Hughes Court decided that New Deal-era business regulations were constitutional after all, following many years of insisting that such things violated workers’ “freedom of contract.”

The court reverses itself all the time. The most significant ruling it issued last year flushed its foremost precedent on administrative authority down the toilet, for cripes sake. The most esteemed conservative among the current nine routinely flags precedents in his opinions that he believes are overdue to be tossed.

So if, having cut prior presidents a break in exercising discretion to enforce or not enforce the law, the Supremes suddenly have a change of heart in Trump’s case, they should do so with a clear conscience. There’s no time like the present, when the wolf is finally at the door, to decide that American law’s love affair with Article II has become a fatal attraction.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Longstanding facts about whether the executive branch can be trusted to act in the public interest changed on November 5. We’re in a forest. The few remaining people in the United States with the power to do something about it should lead us out.