By Christopher F. Rufo
The second election of Donald Trump, along with Republican victories in both houses of Congress, sets the stage in the United States for a confrontation between democracy, which depends on representative institutions to form a government, and the rule of unelected elites, which relies on claims of expertise to control the state. Already, internal opposition to Trump is organizing within the federal agencies. CNN reports that Pentagon officials are discussing disobeying official policy. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has declared that he would refuse if Trump asked for his resignation. Some would like to see a reprise of the orchestrated counteractions against Trump, from the Russia collusion hoax to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship to the political prosecutions that led to his arrest and felony convictions. The coming political confrontation is unusual because the specific antagonist is hard to identify. Trump is not contending against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or even the Democratic minority in Congress. Instead, the president-elect’s post-electoral opposition comes from inside the executive branch itself, in defiance of Article II of the Constitution, which opens with the unqualified statement: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In recent years, phrases like “the deep state” have arisen in American political discourse to describe this phenomenon, in which administrators, bureaucrats, and unelected officials seem to wield a kind of power that we still lack appropriate language to describe. Part of the motivation is self-interest—bureaucrats want to protect their positions—but another is ideological: the federal government is steeped in left-wing race and gender ideology, and its adherents see Trump as an existential threat. By rights, he should be. The incoming president has, under the Constitution, every right to bend the administration to his vision, which is contrary to the tenets of left-wing racialism. But those ideologies, which the Biden administration has entrenched through its “whole-of-government” diversity agenda, have long ruled the agencies that control the details of federal policymaking. Hence, the conflict: the president, who has formal authority, versus the ideological bureaucracy, which has real power. At the end of his first term, Trump attempted to correct this problem through actions such as an executive order banning critical race theory in the federal government. The second Trump administration must go further and dedicate itself to a process Vice President-elect J. D. Vance has described as “dewokeification.” This is the most urgent policy problem facing the administration, because without representative institutions and a restoration of constitutional authority, it is not possible to govern America. The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to take decisive action on Day One, through executive orders that can serve as the opening salvo in a counterrevolution. The basic premise: the U.S. should strip left-wing racialism from the federal government and recommit the country to the principle of colorblind equality. Through an aggressive campaign, Trump and his Cabinet can put an end to forms of discrimination disguised under the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and make government work again. The process of ideological capture has taken decades. But the counterrevolution can, and must, quickly retake those institutions in the name of the people and reorient them toward the enduring principles of liberty and equality. Bureaucrats abusing the public trust to advance their own ideologies should be put on notice: they will be shut down, their departments abolished, and their employment terminated. The administration will work to rid America of this ideological corruption before it further rots our institutions, demoralizes our citizens, and renders the government totally incompetent. The counterrevolution begins now. First, a map of the territory. Left-wing thinking is pervasive in the federal bureaucracy, shaping the behavior of federal agencies and operating unaffected by electoral politics. Most employees of the administrative state, especially those concerned with justice, education, arts, and health, are overwhelmingly left-wing, and partisans of fashionable ideologies. The data are striking. During the 2020 presidential cycle, Department of Justice employees directed 86 percent of their political contributions to Democrats; at Labor, it was 88 percent; Health and Human Services, 92 percent; and Education, 97 percent. Overall, 84 percent of donations from non-defense federal employees went to presidential candidate Biden, according to Bloomberg. These numbers mirror trends in tech companies and universities, often seen as bastions of left-wing thought. When institutions skew so heavily toward one ideology, they become prone to ideological capture. The federal government now underwrites progressive ideologies, such as critical race theory, through vast financial subsidies. Public universities, bolstered by federal funding and government-backed student loans, house numerous departments promoting these views. Additionally, federal grants and diversity training contracts, largely managed by bureaucrats without legislative oversight, channel taxpayer money toward ideological initiatives. Data from the General Services Administration reveal a consistent left-wing bias in such expenditures, persisting under both Democratic and Republican administrations. At the Treasury Department, for example, administrators under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden funded many critical theory-based programs, often under euphemisms related to “diversity.” Under Obama, the Treasury created the Office for Minority and Women Inclusion and other race and identity-based initiatives. Under Trump, Treasury pushed critical race theory as an operating ideology, hiring consultants to conduct training programs teaching employees that America was a nation of “systemic racism” with a 400-year history of “racial terrorism” that continues “to this very day.” Their proposed solution: for federal employees—especially “white folk” with an obligation to do serious “inner work”—to become “activists” and advance the agenda of “racial equity.” These programs multiplied and intensified under Biden. As I recently reported, the Biden administration used executive authority to create a permanent racialist bureaucracy, including an Equity Hub, an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, and a Counselor for Racial Equity. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, together with Vice President Kamala Harris, announced $8.7 billion in lending to “minority-owned businesses,” an openly discriminatory effort. The Treasury also compelled federal contractors to implement DEI. At the same time, Treasury policy concerning Earned Income Tax Credit audits changed to “examining audit fairness by other demographic categories”—a euphemism for racial favoritism. Such rhetoric has increasingly become the rule within federal agencies and federally funded academic, educational, and activist groups. Racial preferences and discrimination are becoming an ever-more entrenched part of government policy. The administration changes, but the ideology remains: subsidized by taxpayers, administered by the “expert class,” and imposed on the American people. What can be done about the problem of ideological capture? Three American presidents—Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump—tried to address the problem directly. None solved it, but all offer starting points for a solution. In his 1971 State of the Union Address, Nixon proposed a “New American Revolution” that would decentralize power, returning it to states, localities, and citizens. Nixon argued that the federal government had become too domineering and threatened to supplant core social functions. He also saw that the permanent federal bureaucracy and its class of experts, bureaucrats, and intellectuals were hostile to his administration and his constituents. “The further away government is from people, the stronger government becomes and the weaker people become. And a nation with a strong government and a weak people is an empty shell,” he said. “The idea that a bureaucratic elite in Washington knows best what is best for people everywhere and that you cannot trust local governments is really a contention that you cannot trust people to govern themselves.” Nixon proposed a New Federalism that would reduce the number of Cabinet departments, reorganize the executive branch, and send billions in funding to states and municipalities. “What this Congress can be remembered for is opening the way to a new American revolution—a peaceful revolution in which power was turned back to the people—in which government at all levels was refreshed and renewed and made truly responsive,” Nixon concluded in his State of the Union. “This can be a revolution as profound, as far-reaching, as exciting as that first revolution almost two-hundred years ago.” By the end of his first term, Nixon saw himself as a champion of the “general interest,” caught in a battle with an inimical bureaucratic system. The media noticed. After his landslide reelection, the New York Times published its “Nixon Counterrevolution” editorial, warning that the 37th president sought to “advance an ideological grand design” that would reverse the New Deal and the Great Society, abolishing federal programs that worked to impose elite views on local communities. “Mr. Nixon seeks to accomplish a retrogressive counterrevolution in the guise of an administrative reorganization,” the editorial cautioned. Nixon acted decisively, releasing budgets and plans to enact his counterrevolution. He reorganized the federal apparatus to make it more responsive to presidential authority, abolished programs promoting leftwing ideologies, suspended federal housing initiatives pending review, and narrowed the ideological scope of federally funded social services. Central to his approach was “revenue sharing,” a bold system channeling federal funds directly to states and localities. Nixon saw decentralization and White House control of the executive branch as vital to preventing bureaucratic tyranny and ensuring that government operated closer to the people. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he, too, sought to curb leftwing ideological influence within the federal government. Reviving Nixon’s vision of a New Federalism, Reagan called his effort a “quiet revolution” to devolve power back to citizens. His primary strategy, described by some analysts as an effort to “defund the Left,” focused on reducing federal spending, cutting programs in areas like community development, education, social services, and employment training, and targeting ideological opponents within the government. In a more limited, but perhaps more pragmatic way, Donald Trump also sought to rollback leftwing ideological domination of federal agencies—this time, targeting critical race theory. Inspired by my reporting for City Journal and developed in part on my policy recommendations, in the closing months of 2020, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” intended to ban divisive, critical race theory-based training programs within the federal government. The executive order denounced critical ideologies “grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual” and “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.” It prohibited all training programs that promoted the “divisive concepts” that:
None of these approaches was sufficient. Nixon was hemmed in by the bureaucracy and a Democratic Congress; then Watergate forced him out. Reagan scaled back some funding but did not fundamentally change the entrenched ideology or behavior of the federal bureaucracy. And Trump’s “critical race theory ban” was rescinded by Joe Biden’s order on the first day of his presidency in 2021. Though these policies failed to solve the critical problem, they illuminate its nature and provide a starting point for a solution. The task for policymakers now is to build on the efforts of Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, and to design policies that will tame the bureaucracy and thereby advance the public interest. Failing that, as Nixon warned, the American experiment will come to an end: bureaucratic rule will devour the constitutional order. As the second Trump administration takes shape, the president should remember a key lesson: though he must accept the current reality that Washington, D.C., is the greatest benefactor of critical theories and leftwing ideologies in America, he is far from powerless to change it. He has policy options that can begin the process of restoring presidential authority, realigning the bureaucracy toward the president’s vision, and reversing the process of ideological capture. To catalyze this process, I propose an ambitious counterrevolution blueprint that can begin on Day One. Immediately on assuming office, the president should issue a suite of executive orders to “surround and smother” left-wing ideologies across six domains: bureaucracy, content, policy, funding, behavior, and personnel. The first objective is to shift the structures of the bureaucracy and align them more directly with the administration’s principles. The president should order the agencies to abolish all DEI departments, plans, and programs and terminate the employees associated with them. Many of these programs were created not at the direction of Congress but of previous presidents, most notably President Obama’s Executive Order 13583, President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 and Executive Order 14035, and by agency leaders on their own initiative. Trump can end these programs under his executive authority and replace DEI with a policy of strict colorblind equality. This action would deliver an immediate shock to the bureaucracy. Critical ideologies took hold largely because conservative administrations have either overlooked the issue or hesitated to confront it. Lacking clear arguments and vocabulary on race and gender, many conservative leaders have avoided these topics, allowing agencies to build entrenched “diversity” infrastructures that operate beyond congressional oversight. An executive order dismantling these programs would destabilize internal partisans who have used them to advance leftwing ideologies. These employees would be tasked with dismantling their own systems and implementing a new framework based on colorblind equality. The order would disrupt the structures enabling ideological capture and reassert the president’s constitutional authority. While resistance from the most partisan employees is likely, strong directives would neutralize even the most committed ideologues. The second objective is to identify and eliminate all programs, policies, grants, proposals, trainings, and budget items that promote left-wing racialism. This requires a system to identify where such ideology appears in federal documents. The most effective approach is to develop an artificial intelligence program that can scan the flow of paperwork for keywords and flag relevant instances for review by the Office of Management and Budget, which operates under direct presidential oversight. This system would channel information from across the federal government to the White House, enabling politically appointed officials to monitor the ideological content of federal programs, defund them as necessary, and enforce the directives of this order effectively. This “locate-and-terminate” system could be deployed across the government and provide a ranked scale for prioritizing manual review. Though leftwing bureaucrats within the agencies might try to develop euphemisms and neologisms to evade enforcement, the key concepts and principles of critical theories have been relatively stable over the past half-century; the language is unlikely to change fast enough or significantly enough to evade restriction. The third objective of the executive order is to restrict federal agencies, federal contractors, and recipients of federal funds from promoting racial and sexual bigotry in all programs, policies, trainings, and management. Building on the framework of President Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, the order should add to it the text below, and mandate that the federal government not promote, advance, or inculcate the following “divisive concepts,” that:
The fourth objective: cut off funding for leftwing ideologies in federal grantmaking and contracting. The order should require that all existing, pending, proposed, and considered federal contracts that contain the flagged items pass through the OMB for manual review and approval. Existing contracts that violate the “divisive concepts” restrictions should be immediately terminated through the budget impoundment process and litigated as necessary; future grant applications, considerations, and nominations that advance the “divisive concepts” should be denied by OMB staff. This policy offers a twofold benefit: it would systematically “defund the Left” within the federal government and disrupt the broader ecosystem supporting leftwing ideologies. By banning “diversity and inclusion” contractors and extending “divisive concepts” restrictions to all federal grants and contractors—including major corporations and research universities—the order would curb the spread and influence of critical race and gender theories across the largest public and private bureaucracies. “Diversity and inclusion” has become a multibillion-dollar industry and a key mechanism for advancing leftwing ideologies in corporations, schools, and government agencies. The executive order would limit these initiatives’ scope and growth, while creating legal risks for firms engaging in discriminatory or extremist practices. The fifth objective is to reshape federal agencies’ culture and behavior. This effort should begin with an expansion of the principles of the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil service employees from engaging in partisan political activity, to include all social and political activism not directly related to an employee’s official duties. In principle, the restriction would apply equally to the political movements of the Left and Right; in practice, it would almost exclusively restrict leftwing activism, given the composition of the federal workforce and the existing culture of the federal bureaucracy. The executive order would not directly change the biases and political orientation of federal employees, but it would keep them from acting them out. Over time, the result would be a reduction in leftwing activism and messaging within the federal government, which, in the longer term, could restore ideological balance and accountability to the executive. The sixth objective is to eliminate affirmative action and disparate-impact doctrine from federal policymaking—core frameworks of critical race theory and leftwing “equity” initiatives in areas like criminal justice, public health, and redistribution programs. The executive order would rescind Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 and ban affirmative action and disparate-impact doctrine in hiring, policies, and decision-making across the federal government and federally funded entities. In their place, it would mandate strict colorblindness and equal treatment under the law, replacing “equity” with “equality.” This policy would have an immediate impact on governance. Affirmative action, in particular, though widespread in public and private institutions—such as university admissions, corporate hiring, and federal contracting—is deeply unpopular. Even liberal states like California and Washington have rejected it through ballot initiatives. An executive order that prohibits race-based decision-making would gain broad support and create momentum for permanent legislative changes. The final objective of the counterrevolution blueprint is to reinstate Trump’s Executive Order 13957, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” which removed certain civil service protections for federal employees involved in policymaking. This would give the president greater leverage over ideological factions in the government. The strength of the permanent bureaucracy lies in its leaders’ confidence that they will outlast any administration, enabling them to resist presidential agendas with minimal risk to their positions. Schedule F applies to all “Federal service employed in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” granting the president greater authority to manage agencies and dismiss higher-level civil servants who fail to meet expectations or to implement presidential policies. This reform would give the White House tighter control over the bureaucracy and provide Cabinet officials additional tools to ensure agency compliance. Taken together, this executive order’s provisions would seriously restrict leftwing ideologies in the federal government and reinstate political control over the bureaucracy. In the short term, the order would demoralize and constrain leftwing ideological culture; in the long term, it would realign the federal government with the vision of the president and reorient the state toward the principles of liberty and equality. The Trump administration has been assembling a stellar reform team. Key positive developments include Trump’s selection of Vance, who proposed the Dismantle DEI Act as senator, as his running mate, and his appointment of Russell Vought as the director of Office of Management and Budget. Vought, in particular, is a brilliant administrator who understands the threat of critical race ideologies and, more importantly, knows how to operate the machinery of the state. Our historical moment contains, in certain ways, more possibilities than Nixon’s or Reagan’s—presenting, for the first time in two generations, a real opportunity to unify constitutional government against bureaucratic ideological capture. Digital technology can now expose the extent of leftwing malfeasance and misfeasance in government, while also helping elected officials prevent or punish such activity. It is now possible to restore the representative character of our governing institutions and, in the process, rebuild trust in them, which, over the same period, has fallen to its lowest recorded levels. A president under attack from within his own executive branch can now reassert his authority by appealing directly to voters. What is the character of American democracy? Do the people want self-government, and are they capable of it? Or are they to be administered and dictated to by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, who claim a global and perhaps historical vision of “governance,” but no special allegiance to the American people? The major issues in the 2024 election—from immigration and the border, which bear on the constitutional question of citizenship, to crime and the economy, which bear on the Declaration of Independence’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—point to the desire for a restoration of popular rule. The time is ripe for decisive action under the Constitution to ensure the liberties of the people—the end to which all just government is directed. |
