The Gate

During President Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, a hallmark of his rhetoric was his commitment to dismantling the “deep state,” with his first step being to “remove rogue bureaucrats.” Throughout 2025, that’s exactly what his administration has done, with the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) firing over 300,000 federal employees in the past year. Despite Trump’s claims, DOGE’s actions failed to reform the federal bureaucracy, instead only serving to oust top experts necessary for the functioning of various government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health. Karlyn Gorski, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, warns that this change is a massive break from precedent, concentrating power in the “person of the president” instead of in the “office of the president,” emboldening Donald Trump as an “authoritarian who’s able to sort of impose his will anywhere in the government that he wants.” This large-scale disruption of the federal bureaucracy has widespread implications for the future of the United States, including the breakdown of everyday systems like air traffic control, food safety, and Medicaid.

In an interview with The Gate, Gorski described how crucial even seemingly mundane governmental processes — such as passport renewals or getting a driver’s license at the DMV— are to the functioning of the state. The agencies that make up the U.S. regulatory state may be inefficient at times, but they have played a key role in preventing immense human suffering. For example, the creation of the Food and Drug Administration eliminated the use of alcohol, opiates or narcotics in drugs, prioritizing pharmaceutical testing and patient safety. After the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was created in 1970, its mandated crash tests and new safety features cut fatality rates from car accidents by more than 70%. The creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971 saw workplace fatalities fall by nearly 70%. The regulatory state worked, and still works, behind-the-scenes to make the lives of all Americans easier, more efficient and more livable.

Today, the president is working to completely break down what made these bureaucracies successful in the first place — a set process of operation. By portraying the so-called “deep state” as something controlled by “rogue bureaucrats,” Trump is painting the picture that bureaucracies are a hostile force to every American — doing far more harm than good. Instead of relying on the unmatched expertise and institutional knowledge provided by traditional bureaucratic leadership to pioneer people-serving technologies, Trump has instead politicized the entire bureaucratic process to serve his benefit. Last summer, he changed the federal job application process to include questions about some of his policies, which critics have described as a loyalty test. Questions included asking “ideal candidates” to explain in 200 words which of the president’s executive orders or policies are most relevant to them and why. Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that works to promote best practices in the federal government, remarks that this question seems to have no other purpose than to evaluate applicants’ stance on the president’s actions instead of focusing on the jobs that candidates are applying for and the broader laws that they would be required to follow. In addition to these new questions, Trump has also established hiring committees to make decisions about who works for the federal government and to screen candidates for partisanship. 

Gorski also warns that DOGE’s removal of federal employees is creating “wholly ineffective agencies” that can “no longer do anything useful.” An example of this is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an organization formed in 2010 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. As Gorski describes, the CFPB’s goal was to consolidate dispersed consumer protection tasks under one roof by doing things such as “putting caps on credit card fees and penalties.” Government officials claim that the CFPB has obtained nearly $20 billion in financial relief for U.S. consumers since its founding. In April of 2025, Trump ordered nearly 90% of its staff to be cut. After the cuts in April, an internal CFPB memo detailed how the Bureau was dramatically scaling back its supervisory and enforcement activities, specifically deprioritizing working on issues involving medical debt, peer-to-peer platforms and lending, student loans, remittances, consumer data and digital payments. As a result, the Consumer Federation of America reported in December that a reduced staff has caused delays in intake and decreased the CFPB’s ability to engage in investigation and enforcement. Now, over 830,000 consumer complaints are currently unresolved, while in 2024 over 99% of complaints received a timely response. 

In a political climate that’s dominated by the actions of the executive branch and Trump’s claims about the corruption and ineffectiveness of the “deep state,” the hope for change lies in the continued public scrutiny and calls for action from the American populace.

The image featured in this article is licensed for reuse under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic deed, and accordingly is in the public domain. No changes were made and the original photo can be found here.