Is the bureaucracy of the Executive Branch of the government of the United States lean, agile, innovative, and filled with able idealists?  Or is it bloated, hide-bound, unwieldy, and ill-suited to the needs of the new century?  It’s a fair question to ask. 

President Donald Trump and Court Wizard Elon Musk appear to believe that it is the latter, rather than the former.  For Trump, there seems to be the added flaw in the bureaucracy’s hostility to him during his first term.  He may well want “revenge” both for their past hostility and to prevent anticipated resistance in his second term.  For his part, Musk portrayed himself as battling an “unelected bureaucracy” in order to “restore the will of the people.” 

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken on the task of reducing the federal workforce.[1]  In mid-February 2025, DOGE began firing people in big chunks and very rapidly.  In addition to the thousands of US AID workers on the chopping block, the Department of Agriculture took a heavy hit: 4,000 at the Department and a further 3,400 at its subordinate National Forest Service.  Health and Human Services lost 5,200; the Energy Department lost 2,000; and the Department of Veterans Affairs lost 1,000.[2]  Within these departments, some areas were hit particularly hard: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Nuclear Security Administration.  More lay-offs took place at the Federal Aviation Agency and the National Park Service.[3]  All this is alarming to terrifying. 

At the same time, and with murky intent, DOGE went after the vast troves of data on ordinary Americans held by the federal government in the data centers of the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury, and other agencies.[4] 

In his first term, Trump caught a lot of criticism for treating China as a real danger by plastering it with tariffs, trying to build a wall at the southern border to resist massive illegal immigration, and denigrating our NATO allies.  Then Joe Biden kept the tariffs, Russia’s attack on Ukraine revealed that the European allies have been pacifists for decades, and the failure to resist illegal immigration helped cost the Democrats the 2024 election.  Now, some Democrats are admitting that a problem exists, even while they drag on Trump’s coat-tails.  One journalist at the Washington Post accepted that problems did exist with the federal bureaucracy, but objected to indiscriminate mass firing.  On the other hand, others stuck to their last, claiming that the firings were part of “a coup.”  Competent civil servants would be driven out to make space for incompetent Trump loyalists.  That argument is hard to refute when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel, and Peter Hegseth can be offered as evidence. 

Two questions arise.  One, is Trump just trying to scare the bureaucracy into compliance?  Two, how can a log-jammed legislature reform and reduce a behemoth? 

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[1] “Trump makes mass layoffs across government,” The Week, 28 February 2025, p. 4. 

[2] Currently, the federal government employs about 2.1 million civilians and about 600,000 military personnel. 

[3] For context, the Department of Agriculture which includes the National Forest Service, employed 93,000 people at the end of the Biden administration, so the cuts amount to about 7.5 percent of the workforce; Health and Human Services employed about 83,000 people, so the cuts amount to about 6 percent of the workforce; The Department of Energy employed 14,000 civilians and 93,000 contractors, so the cuts amounted to 14 percent of the civilian workforce; and the Department of Veteran Affairs employed over 400,000 people, so the cuts are microscopic. 

[4] Why do they need such information?  They aren’t saying.  Why not?  They’re up to something.