With his Cabinet picks, Donald Trump is causing a civil-service exodus that may hobble federal infrastructure for generations.
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And just like that, Donald Trump broke the federal government.
The U.S. government is more than an array of marble buildings. It’s an aggregation of expertise, a collection of individuals who have inherited an ethos and a set of practices handed down through the decades. Ever since Trump’s second victory last week, these long-standing denizens of the bureaucracy, a tier of career employees who occupy their job regardless of the partisan affiliation of the president, have mulled leaving the government. How could they not? Some of them are on purge lists drawn up by right-wing think tanks, named as enemies marked for retribution. They all know of Trump’s plans to strip them of the tenured status that traditionally protects the civil service from the whims of political bosses. And they have read Project 2025, in which the theorists behind the incoming administration write plainly about the necessity of destroying agencies.
The outgoing Biden administration knew this assault might eventually come, and it spent four years preparing for it. At the Justice Department, to take one example, Merrick Garland had his own theory for how to build a bureaucracy capable of withstanding such a crisis. He spent his days bucking up the career lawyers who worked for him, and earnestly sought to model his own commitment to the rule of law by studiously resisting for more than two years the political pressure to indict Trump, hoping his example would instill the permanent employees of his department with the fortitude to stay true to their constitutional commitments.
In the end, Garland not only failed to bring Trump to justice, but he also erected a rather flimsy bulwark against his return, because he probably never imagined that Matt Gaetz would be his successor. A man obsessed with rectitude will be replaced by a man who revels in spiteful, often vulgar, exhibitionism. Where Garland spoke lyrically about the virtues of institutionalism, Gaetz wrote this about his own approach to public service: “All political lives end in failure, in a sense, but some are spectacular. Better to be a spectacle than to end up having never said anything worth cancelling because nobody was listening in the first place.”
In the history of Cabinet appointees, Gaetz would almost certainly be the worst. He is friendly with members of the Proud Boys, even though his department is supposed to serve as a defense against treasonous paramilitary groups. He invited a Holocaust denier to attend the State of the Union as his guest, even though his department is charged with hunting Nazis. The organization he stands poised to lead once investigated him for sex trafficking, before apparently concluding that it didn’t have a sufficiently strong case. In his quest to destroy institutions, Gaetz shamelessly manufactures controversy, invents conspiracy theories, and traffics in ridicule. As the ultimate Trump fanatic, he will gleefully execute the president’s orders, even if those orders destroy the foundations of the justice system.
To the civil servants mulling their future, Gaetz is a clarifying choice. Although some courageous bureaucrats will stay in their job, committed to preserving the institutions they revere, his nomination will also trigger a rush to the doors. Many will arrive at the quite reasonable conclusion that remaining in their job would be soul-sapping, morally corrosive, and futile.
This isn’t speculation. As a resident of Washington, D.C., I know these civil servants, because I talk to them every day, during dog walks and on the sidelines of high-school soccer games. Encountering them in the aftermath of the Gaetz appointment, I have seen the blood drained from their faces. I have heard them begin to ponder their next steps. The Trump administration will likely change the law so that it can more easily fire civil servants. But in practice, it might not need to orchestrate a purge; its Cabinet selections will have served that purpose.
The departures of civil servants, although entirely understandable, will wreck the government for the foreseeable future. Career civil servants will be replaced by loyalists. Lawyers who are enthusiastic about having Matt Gaetz’s photo on their office wall will flood the Justice Department. Intelligence agents worried about reporting to inexperienced spymasters with dangerous ideological proclivities will hand over their jobs to MAGA enthusiasts. Without so many experienced officials, the competence of the government will erode rapidly. And once the government struggles to perform basic tasks, its legitimacy will erode too.
This shift might prove irreversible. Organizational culture is a precarious thing. Once it breaks down, it might be impossible to repair. Squandered faith in institutions is exceedingly difficult to restore. The construction of the American government—with its aspirations to neutrality, and its capacity for executing enormously complex tasks—is one of the great American achievements. This infrastructure has transcended partisanship and stitched the nation together. It took centuries to erect, and the arrival of a clutch of conspiracists could destroy it all in a flash.
