Matt Gaetz Is Already Destroying the Government

Franklin Foer: “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.”