For years, Republican lawmakers cast broad swaths of bureaucrats as agents of the so-called “deep state” bent on tanking President Donald Trump’s agenda. Now, with full government control, Trump’s allies say he’s making progress in their war against agency ranks.
“His eyes are wide open this time,” Rep. Andy Biggs told NOTUS of Trump. “They terminated a bunch of careerists early on already.”
The Trump administration has made it clear to more than 2 million federal employees that they should fall in line or get out, offering buyouts to those who don’t want to be a part of Trump’s “reformed” workforce. The agency that sent out those offers, the Office of Personnel Management, is facing massive cuts — reportedly up to 70% — to its staff and programs.
Elon Musk, unelected and unconfirmed by the Senate, has tasked himself with trimming agencies around the clock — he and his DOGE aides reportedly set up sofa beds at the OPM. His team is currently helping Trump in trying to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, where the administration has fired dozens of senior aid officials, indefinitely shuttered its headquarters and shut down its website.
In conversations with NOTUS during Trump’s first week in office, 18 Republican House members broadly agreed on what they call “the deep state”: unelected career bureaucrats who are set on maintaining and expanding their power. And, before Trump started sending government workers to pack their desks, several said they already thought he was doing a better job of chipping away at the deep state than in his first term.
Rep. Harriet Hageman said that Trump was “in some ways naive” during his first term about just how “embedded” career bureaucrats were. But now, she said, “he’s much more knowledgeable about how the deep state works.”
“I think that he really thought that if he had good policies that benefited the people of the United States, he would be able to implement those, not recognizing that the deep state here in Washington, D.C., would fight him at every single turn,” Hageman said.
Trump is now at the helm of 15 different departments, which combine to more than 400 agencies, subagencies and offices that employ more than 2.4 million people, making the federal government the nation’s largest employer. He has already signaled that up to 220,000 recently hired federal employees might be among the first to go because they have weaker civil service protections.
Trump posted his intentions to destroy the deep state at least 50 times while campaigning for his second term, and his administration has already shown its willingness to fight back in legal challenges that have come up, arguing that he’s overstepping his authority on federal spending and personnel. He is also pushing to make some workers easier to fire and replace with political loyalists.
Trump’s promises and early actions to upend the federal workforce have prompted outcries from Democrats, like those representing Virginia, where many government workers reside. Their concerns revolve in large part around agencies losing staff with institutional knowledge, who are carried over throughout administration changes and often work on programs with bipartisan support. While Trump’s abrupt firing of 17 inspectors general prompted questions from some Republican senators, their public opposition to Trump’s sackings has yet to rise above strongly worded letters.
One Republican said he wished Trump’s political appointees had even more power to reshape the federal workforce.
“The tricky part will be, how deep can we go? Because, we can put people in leadership positions, but can the leadership go down and clean the organization?” Rep. Morgan Luttrell told NOTUS. “Congress has, for decades and decades, put people in positions that shouldn’t be there.”
Republican ire with the deep state was not unique to specific agencies or departments, lawmakers told NOTUS. But among the vast federal workforce, they said some employees can’t be trusted to faithfully carry out directives from Trump’s political appointees — or from Congress, for that matter.
Trump faced a “giant amount of resistance from” bureaucrats in his first term, Rep. Doug LaMalfa said. “The career folks, many of them, they’re aligned against the type of stuff that we’re trying to do.”
But like other Republicans, he’s hopeful Trump will have more success this time.
“It looks like everything is a lot more organized than the start-up of his first term. He’s got a lot more lined up. So potentially, it could go better. It’s just hard to tell,” LaMalfa said, before adding of career public servants: “Those guys don’t give up, either.”
Republican lawmakers largely shared Trump’s distrust of the officials staffing his own branch — meaning Trump’s immediate and broad personnel actions aren’t likely to irk a GOP-controlled Congress.
Plenty of Republicans have already pledged their full support for Trump’s warpath against career federal personnel. Rep. Michael Cloud told NOTUS that Congress’ job “is to take the power from these entrenched positions and return it to the American people.”
Of the lawmakers who spoke with NOTUS about the deep state, only one Republican lawmaker made sure to clarify that at least some public servants aren’t malicious swamp creatures.
“The reality is there are clearly federal employees who are looking to undermine and block the lawfully given orders and initiatives of the president,” Rep. Dusty Johnson said. “There are also some federal employees who are tremendous public servants, who love serving their country and understand that they work for elected leaders.”
“Reasonable people can disagree on what the proportion is,” Johnson said. “People have a tendency to look at these things without sufficient nuance,” adding he didn’t have “a good feel” yet for how Trump was handling resistance from agency personnel his second time in office.
But Johnson was the exception.
“He’s going to weed out the deep state. That’s why he has removed people already from federal agencies who are gonna be an impediment to his agenda,” Rep. Mark Alford told NOTUS.
“He did not do that in his first term because he was not able to surround himself with the people that were going to have his mission and his agenda first and foremost in their hearts,” Alford said. “And he’s not making that mistake again.”
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Samuel Larreal contributed reporting.