The Spoils System Strikes Back— The Rise Of Autocracy
According the the new Economist poll by YouGov 43% of registered voters approve of Elon Musk and 53% disapprove. Among some of the other Trump world characters, approvals are already very weak as well:
JD Vance 44%
RFK Jr 44%
Marco Rubio 40%
Tulsi Gabbard 35%
Netanyahu 33%
MAGA Mike 32%
Kash Patel 31%
Pam Bondi 30%
And Trump’s own approval rating has started sinking as well— down to 46% among registered voters (53% disapproval). Perhaps, people see what he’s doing to the economy. The very conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is certainly getting antsy. Yesterday, they asked if Señor Trumpanzee understands money— “Not money as in cash, but the supply of money, the price of money as measured by interest rates, and their impact on inflation? The answer would appear to be no after Trump called for lower interest rates on Wednesday— the same day the Labor Department reported an increase in inflation for the third straight month. ‘Interest Rates should be lowered, something which would go hand in hand with upcoming Tariffs!!!’ Trump posted on his social-media site. The layers of intellectual confusion here are hard to parse, especially since higher tariffs will mean higher prices on the affected goods. But perhaps the President wants the public to look elsewhere when assigning blame for rising prices. Yet if he’s trying to blame the Federal Reserve, which controls short-term interest rates, he has the analysis backward. Rising inflation means the Fed must be more cautious in cutting rates. This is how financial markets read the news that the consumer-price index (CPI) rose 0.5% in January. Long bond rates rose sharply, with the 10-year Treasury note popping to 4.63% from 4.53%. This reflects market worry over inflation… The Powell Fed is likely to ignore Trump, and well it should. But the President’s demand illustrates another risk of Trumponomics. As a real-estate investor, Trump has long been an easy-money guy. He likes low rates and a weak dollar, which could lead to higher prices, all other things being equal. As a political matter, an inflation revival may be the biggest threat to the Trump Presidency. Trump was elected as voters reacted to inflation and falling real incomes under Joe Biden. Real average earnings are flat over the last three months as inflation has bounced up. If this persists, Trump won’t have a 53% job approval rating for long.” He didn’t. It’s now down by around 7 points.
You wouldn’t expect The Journal editorial board to recognize it, but there’s a lot that threatens America more from trump that his bickering with Jay Powell over short term interest rates. Yesterday, Anne Applebaum spelled it out very clearly for Atlantic readers, explaining how regime change can happen here. Musk and DOGE, she noted have “focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change… In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismounted labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025— the original regime-change blueprint— are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing. This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose.”
Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.
The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people— somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack— to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.
Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality— evidence of pollution, for example— and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone— Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.
What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.
The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”
…The true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders…[T]he actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest of collaborate?
How, after all have Members of Congress responded to those moral dilemmas? Mitch McConnell— who isn’t running for reelection— was the only Republican to oppose uniquely unqualified Trump's dangerous nominees Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. The rest opted for collaboration, just as so many Europeans did during the Nazi occupation of their countries. Or, as Dan Pfeiffer put it yesterday, “While no one ever made money betting on the courage of Republican Senators, if there was one place where Senate Republicans would exert their will, it would be over Gabbard’s nomination. As a group, Senate Republicans traditionally oppose Trump and the MAGA movement on foreign policy— more NeoCon than isolationist. Yet, she glided through to confirmation and is now in charge of America’s intelligence apparatus. If you gave the Senate Republicans truth serum, they would undoubtedly admit that Tulsi Gabbard serving as DNI is an insane and irresponsible thing to do, but they did it anyway. Why and what does it tell us about the state of the Republican Party? Gabbard’s confirmation is more proof that Congress will not impose checks or balances on Trump. He can do whatever he wants, and the Republicans will go along with it. We have always expected that from the House, but we hoped that enough Senators would push back against Trump’s most dangerous impulses. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell are known Trump-skeptics who have periodically broken with him. All it would take is one more semi-brave soul to abide by their constitutional authority.”
There isn’t one— certainly not Thom Tillis (R-NC), not John Cornyn (R-TX) and not even Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who Trump is working to defeat next year. As a sociology major in college, I studied Economy and Society by Max Weber, who warned that modern bureaucracy, for all its inefficiencies, was essential to maintaining a rational, rule-bound state. Unlike the arbitrary rule of kings or strongmen, bureaucratic institutions operate through impersonal procedures, expertise, and legal authority rather than personal loyalty or ideology. That is precisely what Trump and Musk seek to dismantle. Their shared twisted vision, rooted in kleptocracy, demands a return to the patronage system that Weber saw as a hallmark of premodern despotism.
Weber also famously described the “iron cage” of bureaucracy—an unyielding system that can stifle individual freedom. Yet, in the face of Trump's regime-change efforts, it is clear that this “cage” was also a safeguard, preventing the whims of autocrats from overrunning the state. Strip away the professional civil service, and what replaces it is not freedom, but subjugation to the personal interests of those in power. Congress won’t but will Americans fight to preserve the institutions that, flawed as they are, stand between democracy and rule by a single man.