He has dominated the first few weeks of his presidency like no other modern chief executive. But his effort to shrink the government will soon face further tests.
A s Ronald Reagan’s personnel agencies transition leader in 1980, his first director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and later author of Heritage Foundation personnel reports, including as lead author for Heritage’s Project 2025 personnel chapter, I am often asked what I think about President Donald Trump’s first days in office.
In short, it has been the most well prepared and best performing presidential transition in history. It had the earliest and largest number of cabinet nominees and staff, the most thoughtful and earliest announced executive orders and agency guidance, and a president ready to lead. Of course, this is a second term (there has only been one other nonconsecutive president), so President Trump knew what he faced. Trump has succeeded wildly, far beyond any of his predecessors by the comparable point. He has dominated the inauguration and the following days and weeks like no other modern chief executive.
Of course, not everyone agrees. A Washington Post associate editor and editorial page columnist labeled President Trump’s early days “the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history.” Based upon her own deep knowledge and family’s Federal Trade Commission experience, she considers the Trump administrative and personnel policies “efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government.”
How can these two assessments be so different? They are based upon fundamentally different understandings of proper governmental administration. Every president must choose which of the two major theories of American governmental management he shall follow, or have it imposed by those below him. The Post favors the expert progressive leadership model dominant in the professional public administration community since Woodrow Wilson. I espouse the conservative political management type from before Wilson. It was revived by President Jimmy Carter in his Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA), was implemented by Reagan in his first term, and is now apparently being brought back again in Trump’s second term.
Trump’s political management planning was based on significant early intellectual support. The America First Policy Institute was an openly pro-Trump and enormously effective transition institution led by many first-term Trump appointees. Former Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America added a sophisticated legislative operation. And while the Heritage Foundation was quiet near the end, a Post study found that half of Trump’s first policy directives had a Project 2025 theme.
But it was Trump’s effective political operation itself that provided and led the transition to produce its first days’ executive orders and agency directives, with its White House and agency transition staffs producing extremely well thought out material. One especially wise decision assigned agency transition personnel who would remain with the agency to ensure continuity.
For personnel policy, Trump’s directives actually restored Carter’s original CSRA. This means emphasizing career accountability, as taught to me by my graduate professor Alan Campbell, who became Carter’s OPM Director, and was a Democrat. The executive order titled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives” especially revives performance management principles by requiring actual plans from each top career senior executive, with executive resources and performance review boards all managed by non-career leaders. Failure to perform could lead to removal without any appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, much as was the case in the CSRA and in Reagan’s first regulations.
Trump’s formal orders, also following the Carter/Reagan ones, attempted to make second-level career supervisors more responsible. There has been much confusion about Trump’s first term Schedule F requirements, now labeled “policy career” managers. These are mid-level careerists who have a major influence on agency policy. President Joe Biden had eliminated Schedule F by portraying it in the media as overruling the merit system. In fact, there is no general merit exam, and there has not been one since my day. All Schedule F did, and policy career does now, is restore Carter’s special responsibilities and oversight for mid-level career managers, which had been repealed after union pressure post-Reagan in the 1990s.
Unlike in Trump’s first term, White House personnel responsibilities have been front and center from the beginning with a top level deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel, an Office of Presidential Personnel Assistant to the President, an assistant for policy, as well as Vought at OMB and Scott Kupor for OPM. A new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) inspired by Reagan’s Grace “Cost Control” Commission was created to emphasize reform of government, personnel efficiency, and cutting the size of government.
Wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk soon reoriented DOGE, moving it to a White House Office (with limited term appointments) focusing on general management efficiency and turning it toward the agency with the real personnel authority, OPM. But that office requires an executive level appointee with all its governmental restrictions. This itself requires a full-time status that Musk rejected. But he did visit OPM, and placed former X associates to lead it as interim executive officers.
“Fork in the Road” was Musk’s most dramatic early OPM order. It allowed government employees to continue working from home until September 30 on paid administrative leave if they would then resign and leave government employment. As journalist Megan McArdle noted, this was the same title and “very similar to what he did at X” to Twitter employees. When this early X version ended with 80 percent of the company’s top employees leaving, she had predicted this expulsion of experts would destroy X. Of course, it did just the opposite, as she now concedes.
But McArdle understands government is different, that it will resist Musk, and argues that he will fail. In fact, the unions and professional associations have gone full bore to convince employees that it is not absolutely clear such a program is legal, or even that Trump would honor it, and it is highly unlikely that any large number will accept it, with relatively few offering to retire so far.
In Bureaucracy, his classic study explaining the difference between government and private, Ludwig von Mises noted that private firms like X define success as profitable management, measured by profit and higher stock earnings, with employees a means to that end. Government has access to neither profit nor earnings evaluation and so success must be measured differently. For American government, that measure of success has been either through idealistic progressive Wilsonian expertise or pragmatic conservative political management.
The Wilsonian professional class, especially at the top, considers that its superior expert knowledge is an end in itself that promotes government success and the public good. Progressive expertise’s perceived obstacle to good government is the political power of the president and his appointees — which is precisely what political management seeks, as provided both by the Constitution and the Carter CSRA reforms. The voters elect the president, and he is to execute policy through Article II and his agency officials subject only to the law. Wilsonians disagree and so resist political leadership — believing that in doing so they are acting righteously and are generally supported by other progressives. Musk understands this difference and actually has already accomplished his true political mission, which is to have government employees understand that they and their expert career bosses are not wholly untouchable or fully in charge.
Two government employee sentiments forwarded to me show the results. One is aggressive: “I have been a Federal employee for almost 20 years” and now “the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals in just 5 days,” ordering us to become the “President’s henchmen.” The other is more the norm: “Everyone is upset, including management.” “My boss and bosses-boss are seriously thinking of leaving.” Today, for the first time since Reagan, Feds realize they do not have lifetime jobs. Government contractors — who vastly outnumber employees — received a similar message in another executive order.
Once the bureaucracy is listening, one can focus upon the formal orders and guidance procedures. The federal unions strongly opposed Carter’s CSRA even after modifying it. Reagan faced multiple “job actions” with empty buildings from day one and eventually had to fire union air controllers before the buildings refilled. Only after bureaucrats know who is in charge can political leaders focus upon serious political management, such as Reagan’s enforcing a senior executive performance management system and cutting 100,000 nondefense employee positions.
The Wilsonian expert professionals are ready. A former Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs professor and fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration agrees with the Post editor that the Trump proposals are dangerous and indeed are “asking for a fight.” And the unions and Democrats are ready to fight it through the courts and Congress.
Are Republicans, especially in Congress, ready? Some Carter-type Democrats understand that the bureaucracy does not work today and simply tries to do too much, but they are constrained by union donations and votes. Both Republicans and these Democrats agree the problem is that the bureaucracy needs to be led by the president as the only possible means, subject to the law. But the real test is cutting national government back in size and function. Big government simply does not work.
Ronald Reagan was able to block-grant 77 domestic federal programs to the states, which helped, but they all grew back. President Trump’s challenge, as he himself has stated, is to cut the federal bureaucracy back, beginning with the Department of Education. But power wanes quickly here in Washington, and pressure on President Trump to return to “normal” has already begun.