February 18, 2025
Firing Civil Servants and Dismantling Government Departments Is How Aspiring Strongmen Consolidate Personal Power – Lessons from Around the Globe
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.
More from CNAS
-
A U.S. Strategy for Advancing EU Enlargement
Commentary
In 2014, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker famously declared a pause in the European Union’s enlargement. This pause is now over, after Russia’s 2022 invasion ...
By Nicholas Lokker
-
The U.S. Is No Longer the Leader of the West
Video
Trump’s second term has dismantled the idea of the U.S. as the leader of the West and instead it’s almost “every nation for itself”, says Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center f...
By Jim Townsend
-
Germany's New Defense Agenda
Podcast
On April 9th, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, secured a coalition agreement with the Social Democrats following his party’s vi...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
Trump ‘Humiliated’ as Putin Sends Clear Message That He Doesn’t Care About US
Video
"Putin is not playing ball." Putin's Palm Sunday attack on Sumy is "embarrassing for the White House" as it comes just days after Steve Witkoff met with the Kremlin, says adju...
By Jim Townsend
