In his first year in office, President Donald Trump trimmed hundreds of thousands of civil servants from the federal workforce in a bid to degrade social services and oust seasoned bureaucrats whom he feared would interfere with his reactionary authoritarian agenda. Now he’s entering the second stage of “Trumpifying” the federal bureaucracy: hiring a new set of workers for the civil service, but with an eye to transform “the deep state” into what could be called “the MAGA state.”
A new Washington Post report is loaded with details that capture how the Trump administration is tryingto hire a wave of new federal employees who will unthinkingly obey the president’s political directives, rather than fulfill their traditional role of providing nonpartisan expertise. According to the Post, it’s doing this in part by centralizing hiring decisions and augmenting the role of political appointees in recruiting new hires.
A clear agenda to morph the civil service into a political instrument of Trump is coming into view.
The Post, citing two people familiar with the process, reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is “active in hiring decisions” and “has emphasized recruiting young staffers and ensuring that new hires are aligned with Trump’s agenda.” That’s a clear sign that the Trump administration has real ambition to change the way the federal bureaucracy works. Miller is one of the most Machiavellian figures in the Trump administration and one of its most vocal ideologues in favor of authoritarian and nativist governance. Miller surely approves of a new immigration services job posting titled “Homeland Defender,” which, according to the Post, asks applicants to be ready to “protect your homeland and defend your culture.”
Another data point that signals the rise of the MAGA state: the Trump administration is reportedly refusing to hire back some of the employees it fired en masse on the basis that they worked for the government before.
Due to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency layoffs, the Washington metropolitan area is currently teeming with unemployed highly qualified experts on policy areas for which Trump is looking to hire. But the administration is trying to avoid at least some of them in a systematic manner. The Post obtained an internal memo that explicitly prohibited contractors from hiring anyone who used to work in the U.S. Agency for International Development — who would be tasked with helping shutter aid programs that have lost funding — “to avoid the risk of impaired objectivity.”
Yet another red flag can be seen in how Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, said he’s focused on making the civil service younger. He told the Post that he intends to address the fact that only 7% of the federal workforce is under 30 years old. It appears that one way he wishes to do so is with his “Tech Force” program, which involves the federal government partnering with tech companies including OpenAI and Meta, who then “have streamlined pathways to private-sector roles after completing the program.”
In the hands of an administration that values competence and expertise, this would not necessarily be concerning — it’s important for the government to be technologically advanced, and young workers are energetic and filled with ideas. But in the hands of the Trump administration, it sure seems like another way to import brash young tech bros with the kind of “move fast and break things” ethos that DOGE used to take a wrecking ball to vital social services and mishandle citizens’ private data. And the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated it is not to be trusted when it comes to incorporating artificial intelligence into the operation of the government.
Put all these things together, and a clear agenda to morph the civil service into a political instrument of Trump comes into view. Historically, the federal workforce is a corps of nonpartisan employees who use their expertise to advise on and execute the policies of the federal government. Trump wants to turn it into an army of reactionary yes-men. Even after he leaves office, many of these MAGA state hires are likely to remain, and the government will be worse off because of it.
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