President Donald Trump‘s quest to shrink the size of government is colliding with the strong-arm tactics of his second term as the White House seeks to bring states into compliance with his policy agenda.
Since his election in November, Trump has been laying the groundwork for scaling back the federal government, including job-slashing plans to shutter the Education Department and place states in charge of disaster relief.
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But Trump has simultaneously attached new strings to the dollars doled out by his administration, threatening to penalize states over immigration enforcement, transgender rights, and more.
Taken together, the steps suggest Trump is pursuing a leaner but more muscular executive branch, one that blends small government conservatism with his desire to assert federal control. He has also moved to reshape how blue states run elections and nullify their climate laws, setting up drawn-out court battles with Democratic governors who say his actions are illegal.
The White House’s emphasis on using federal funding to influence state policy is not new. Federal conditions are central to the grant-making process and have been utilized by every modern president.
Trump has nonetheless supercharged that practice at the outset of his administration with loud and public warnings to blue states that fall outside of the ordinary rulemaking and appropriations processes.
In order to force “sanctuary” states to cooperate on immigration enforcement, Trump has instructed agencies to review and possibly withhold billions in federal dollars from Democratic jurisdictions. He has taken a similar approach to get states to eliminate their diversity initiatives and bar transgender athletes from participating in high school sports.
Trump is content to leave certain issues, in particular the post-Roe regulation of abortion, to the states, suggesting he is guided by political pragmatism as much as his own interest in federal control.
Other priorities he has pursued through legislative means include language in Republicans’ signature tax law that prevents illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid benefits.
Clashing priorities
Trump’s blue-state feuding has taken place alongside a systematic effort to shrink or close federal agencies.
So far, the Department of Government Efficiency has only culled a fraction of the more than 2 million employees who work for the federal government, largely through a hiring freeze and regular attrition.
But the Supreme Court has begun to clear the way for mass layoffs that have been held up in litigation. This month, the justices lifted a court order blocking firings at nearly two dozen agencies and, in a separate ruling, allowed Trump to lay off hundreds of Education Department employees who have been on paid leave since March.
Trump has flagged the Education Department in particular as an agency he wants to eliminate, celebrating the decision as a green light to return its functions to the states. He cannot entirely abolish the agency, established by congressional statute, but plans to strip down its workforce and spread its responsibilities to other departments.
The overhaul reflects the competing, and at times contradictory, priorities of the administration. On the campaign trail, Trump promised the agency’s closure as a way to prevent the “indoctrination” of students. In the last administration, President Joe Biden awarded hundreds of millions to GOP-opposed programs advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars,” he added.
Yet Trump also sees federal involvement as a way to reshape the initiatives of blue states when Republicans are in power. Trump, through the Education Department’s civil rights division, has threatened to withdraw funding from any state that pursues “illegal DEI practices.”
The civil rights division has lost around half of its staff and reportedly seen its casework slow due to the layoffs. The Education Department denies the slowdown.
Trump reshapes federal power
Trump’s rollback is not limited to his domestic agenda. He has moved to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development, with congressional Republicans approving his request to rescind billions in foreign aid.
But the practical impact of culling the federal workforce and programs he labels “waste, fraud, and abuse” could be one of the most significant renegotiations of state-federal power-sharing in decades.
Trump has separately signaled he will overhaul or close the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the goal of diminishing federal responsibility for disaster relief.
He has begun the process of firing hundreds of FEMA workers, and the agency has suffered an exodus of senior staff amid agency turmoil, but a formal reorganization would not take place until the 2025 hurricane season concludes at the earliest.
A FEMA review council that Trump established at the beginning of his second term is expected to release recommendations on the federal government’s disaster response in November.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level — a little bit like education, we’re moving it back to the states,” Trump said during a June briefing in the Oval Office.
“A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor,” he added.
Trump’s blue-state feuding
The downsizing runs counter to a bevy of executive orders that seek to consolidate, not decentralize, government power.
In March, Trump sought to change how states administer their elections with an executive order requiring proof of citizenship as part of voter registration and barring the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, as some states permit.
A federal judge blocked that executive order in June after a coalition of Democratic-run states sued.
Trump is also preparing to challenge any state climate laws that run counter to his directives on domestic energy production, taking explicit aim at California’s cap-and-trade system in an April executive order that framed the laws as examples of “state overreach.”
In terms of federal grants, Trump has, according to lawsuits, used disaster relief as a bargaining chip to get sanctuary jurisdictions to comply with his mass deportation campaign. He has jeopardized transportation funding and other forms of assistance to gain leverage over blue states as well.
The executive orders, undertaken at the same time Trump moves to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, suggest he still wants veto power over a litany of blue-state policies that run counter to his own and is willing to use the levers of the federal government to achieve it.
His actions could nonetheless shift more responsibilities onto governors before the end of his presidency, in effect shrinking the administrative state while maintaining ultimate control over how money is spent.
On the global stage, Trump has similarly sought to offload responsibility for defending Europe to NATO, reasoning that the burden of containing Russia should be felt most heavily by the countries directly threatened by its expansion.
But in that arena, too, Trump has shown an interest in flexing American military might and has taken a series of aggressive steps to confront U.S. adversaries. Most recently, Trump authorized the bombing of Iran in a bid to degrade its nuclear program.
Domestically, Trump has taken an uncharacteristically careful approach when it comes to abortion access, an issue that roiled the Republican Party electorally in the years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
He promised to leave a patchwork of state regulations alone if elected president, and now that he is in office is taking a largely hands-off approach. He rescinded Biden-era policies that indirectly paid for abortions using federal dollars but has frustrated anti-abortion activists on other fronts.
Most notably, his Justice Department asked a judge in May to dismiss a red state lawsuit that sought to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
Muted GOP criticism
Republicans have given Trump a wide berth when it comes to his feuding with blue states and defend his actions by insisting that Democratic states, not the administration, are the ones running afoul of the Constitution.
“Trump is actually following the law, and pulling back the unlawful activity,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), the former attorney general of Missouri.
“You can’t have racially discriminatory policies and receive grant funding,” he added, citing the rollback of Biden’s diversity initiatives. “They’re well within their right to do it.”
Republicans also say sanctuary states are violating federal immigration law by refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Democrats, for their part, argue that Trump is not only trampling on states’ rights but also violating the federal separation of powers by withholding money Congress had already appropriated.
Not all Republicans are comfortable with Trump’s efforts to withhold federal dollars. Money has also been delayed over the administration’s cost-cutting agenda, prompting congressional calls to “faithfully” disburse the funds.
Most recently, 10 GOP senators, almost all of them appropriators, sent a letter to White House budget chief Russ Vought arguing that $6.8 billion in withheld education funding runs “contrary to President Trump’s goal of returning K-12 education to the states.”
“I personally really do believe that when it comes to education, the states should be respected. And if we are providing federal funds, unless there is a clear problem, those should be delivered on a timely basis,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), one of the letter’s signatories.
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Those GOP complaints are muted, however, relative to the loud denunciations of Democrats who paint Trump’s tactics as a sign of “creeping authoritarianism,” and Trump’s actions have not spawned the same sort of resistance in red states.
Twenty-four attorneys general or governors, none of them Republican, sued the administration this month over the same $6.8 billion in withheld education funding.