February 18, 2025

Firing Civil Servants and Dismantling Government Departments Is How Aspiring Strongmen Consolidate Personal Power – Lessons from Around the Globe

By: Andrea Kendall-Taylor

With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues.

Soon after coming to office for a second term, Trump aggressively sought to overhaul Washington and bring the federal government in line with his political agenda. He is spearheading an effort to purge the government’s ranks of people he perceived as his opponents and slash the size of long-standing bureaucratic agencies – in some instances dismantling them entirely.

Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior.

At the helm of much of this is businessman Elon Musk, who is not only the world’s richest man but also the largest donor of the 2024 election and the owner of multiple businesses that benefit from lucrative government contracts.

Musk – and a small cohort of young engineers loyal to him but with little experience in government – descended on Washington, announced their control over multiple government agencies, fired career civil servants, and even strong-armed access to government payment systems at the Treasury Department, where the inspector general had just been sacked.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

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