When ‘burning it all down’ becomes reality: The toxic mix of personal rule and zealous ideologues threatens to dismantle federal power.
What happens when the new Trump administration’s transition to power includes explicit plans for its own demolition?
As former President Donald Trump’s return looms, the machinery of American democracy faces an existential threat in which the quest for personal power, personal vendettas, and radical ideology merge to create a perfect storm of institutional destruction.
In this urgent follow-up to our recent conversation, Harvard professor emerita Nancy Rosenblum goes deeper into how Trump’s drive for unchecked personal rule, combined with ideological extremists in his orbit, creates a uniquely dangerous form of “ungoverning” — where decisions about everything from antitrust cases to public health are based on personal grievances rather than public good.
And meanwhile, zealous appointees systematically dismantle the administrative state around him.
Rosenblum explains how the blueprints are already drawn: Schedule F, Project 2025, and plans to gut federal agencies will make previous administrative changes after an election look like mere tinkering.
She reminds us that early targets like the Justice Department and immigration enforcement are just the beginning, as professional expertise and legal procedures give way to loyalty tests and personal whim.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We talk a great deal about transitions of power in American democracy. But what happens when that tradition includes a deliberate effort to dismantle the machinery of government itself? What are the real-world implications when campaign promises to burn it all down move from rhetoric to reality? Several months ago, I spoke with Harvard Professor Emerita, Nancy Rosenbaum, about the concept of ungoverning, a concentrated attack on our political institutions that goes far beyond typical opposition or reform.
Now, as we face the very real possibility of these theories being put into practice, the stakes couldn’t be higher. From Schedule F to Project 2025, from gutting federal agencies to dismantling civil service protections, the blueprints for this transformation are already drawn. But could this disruption despite its risks, create opportunities to reimagine government for the digital age, or will it simply destroy decades of institutional knowledge and capability at precisely the moment we face new, modern, and unprecedented challenges?
Joining me once again to examine these questions is Nancy Rosenblum, professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University and co-author of Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and The Politics of Chaos. Nancy Rosenblum, thanks so much for joining us once again here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Nancy Rosenblum: My pleasure.
Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that we didn’t have a chance to talk about when we talked about ungoverning last time was the addition into the mix that we’ve seen over the past several months of Elon Musk and all this talk about changing government and efficiency in government and taking apart the agencies of government. Talk a little bit about your thoughts about that and how it adds fuel to this larger framework.
Nancy Rosenblum: That’s a good question. And behind it is the other question of how seriously to take this, that is the addition of Musk to Trump’s own loyalists and MAGA people and so on. This is a new story. This is a man who has built things and done things. And are we to think that Trump really will give over to him or to people like him the remaking of a “more efficient government,” which would mean of course the disabling of many agencies and departments and the undoing of regulations, more efficient for Musk and people like him is anti-governmentalism and doing away with the strength and capacity of the state to govern.
Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that we talked about is the fundamental difference between the rhetoric that we have heard for so long about limiting the scope of government and what the rhetoric has been from Trump, and in 2025, which is basically eliminating government.
Nancy Rosenblum: Right. And I think that what lies behind that difference is the difference between conservatism and political conservatism, the typical position of the Republican party over many years until Trump, which was to limit and scale down government, and especially regulation. And ungoverning is quite different. Ungoverning is an attempt to emasculate government to undo the agencies and departments, and more particularly to do away with the elements that give the state capacity.
That is to do away with specialized knowledge of professionals in government, to do away with the procedures that make these decisions fair, like consultation and data and factual knowledge, and so on and so forth. To undo the two things that legitimate a state with lots of capacity, and that is specialized knowledge and legal procedures. So ungoverning wants to do away with all that. And it doesn’t want to do away with all that just to limit government to go back to less regulation, although I’m sure that Musk and some of these people have this principally in mind.
Ungoverning has a much more insidious purpose, which we saw in Trump’s first term, and which I think we’re going to see in spades again. And that insidious purpose is to replace governing, that is governing according to office, using agencies and departments and legal procedures to replace governing with personal rule. That is, every office, even the imperial office of the presidency is limited by certain things. And Trump’s ungoverning is designed to do away with all constraints so that he can rule personally.
And that’s why so many have tried to append the label fascist or authoritarian to Trump because what he’s looking for is unconstrained personal rule, and that requires undoing the machinery of government that operates as a constraint.
Jeff Schechtman: Thinking about this, not from a broad 30,000-foot authoritarianism point of view, but thinking about it from a practical perspective, if one was engaged or to engage in the process of taking the government apart piece by piece, where does that process start, do you think?
Nancy Rosenblum: We’ve been told where it will start. And I should just say before I answer that this isn’t to say that Trump or the party now in charge will attack every agency and department or do away with everything. They’ll attack the ones that are interfering with their notion of personal rule. So I would think it would start with two things. One is the Justice Department.
And we’ve been told this already that Trump wants to have an Attorney General who can bend to his will, who will prosecute his political enemies, who will drop special prosecutors, who will end all federal prosecutions against him and his people, who will agree to– Well, he will have to pardon the insurrectionists of January 6th. So I would think that it would start with the Justice Department. He has also claimed that amongst his first acts would be mass deportation.
And here it’s really an interesting and important question. They tried this version of this before. You may remember the policy of zero tolerance, separating families at the border and taking away children and deporting the adults, and so on. This was a mini version of what they intend to do, not only at the border but in immigrant communities all over the nation. And the question is whether they really can do this, and I’m quite suspect because I certainly think that they will make an effort.
I certainly think that there will be peril for immigrants in some communities around the country. But I don’t think the enforcing of laws and mass deportation is possible for precisely the reason we’ve been talking about it. There isn’t the capacity of the state to do that. In a strong state– the state that we have now can’t do it. That is in terms of the money and the logistics and the time and the planning. And Trump’s people don’t have time and they don’t plan.
So there may be demonstrative efforts, which are cruel and awful enough. I don’t want to minimize them, but I would be very surprised if they could marshal the capacity for anything like mass deportation. And let me just say, this has been typical of Trump’s governing in the past. He makes enormous promises and then doesn’t have the capacity to carry them out because he has purged people who have knowledge and who know how to do these things.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the money, because it really goes to the issue of what power, if any, that Congress has to try and provide some guardrails to this.
Nancy Rosenblum: Yes. I think that as things stand, the remaining guardrail within the federal government probably is going to be Congress, even though it looks as if the Democrats are going to be in the minority. And that’s for two reasons. One, as you suggest, because Congress’s job is to make appropriations and to work on budgets, but also because we know from, again, the first term that the Republicans don’t have the unity or leadership within Congress to do these things on their own.
So they have had to turn to some sort of compromise with Democrats to do that. And so I think that’s the case. I think that it will be hard for them to pass the most draconian tax increases, the most draconian budget cuts, and so on. That’s not to say that we won’t be in deep economic water because we know from experience that Trump and his people, and he’s likely to have fewer and fewer good economists working for him, that Trump and his people seem to be either ignorant or oblivious to the basic math of taxation and spending.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the people within government, the people within agencies, the people that could be affected by something like Schedule F civil service. Talk about that. The influence that they might have early on and what will happen later on.
Nancy Rosenblum: That’s a great question. Again, we have grandiose threats, and they’re real. That is to remove the Civil Service protection of the Tens of thousands of workers who do the work of operating government. Congress passes a law and the president passes an edict but it’s these people within who have to shape it and implement it and enforce it and so on and so forth. And these people are all theoretically at risk because, as I’ve said, if you want personal rule, you want to get rid of anybody who won’t obey you, and the civil service is not in the business of obeying personal rule.
The Civil Service is in the business of making knowledgeable decisions about costs and benefits and so on for executing a policy. So some of them will be in immediate danger, and many of them may decide to leave. I have a son-in-law who works in the CHIPS program, and they’re now considering, do they stay. Do they look for other work? Will the CHIPS program– which ought to be something that Trump and his administration protect? It’s a national security high technology program, but they’re not sure.
So everybody is wary and how deep these cuts will go, we don’t know, and how many will choose to remain, even under secretaries and undersecretaries of the agencies who are true Trumpists.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the impact that the Chevron decision has on all this and the ability of Trump and the ability of the administration to really completely neutralize these agencies, even as people may stay there.
Nancy Rosenblum: Well, that’s a good question, and it adds to the difficulty of predicting what’s going to happen here. The Chevron decision refers to the fact that it used to be that the courts were quite deferential to the decisions of agencies and departments in their specialized areas. Unless there was some very obvious overstepping of bounds, they would defer to judgments of these agencies and assume that Congress meant them to defer to these agencies because Congress hadn’t acted otherwise.
Well, there have been attacks in the courts and in the high court against the Chevron decision, very serious ones that have said– And a majority of its conservatives have said that, no. Now they are going to take substantive looks at the decisions that agencies make that come before them, and they’re going to make their own judgments about whether the administrators have overstepped their bounds. And this decision that you talk about was crushing.
It goes to the very backbone of administrative law and is likely going to create a great deal of chaos. So here’s what it could mean. I’ll just give one example, although we don’t yet know how much the court is going to exercise this power that it’s claimed for itself. So, for example, the Food and Drug Administration. Do you obey? Obey is the wrong word. Does the court accede to the decisions of the Food and Drug Administration that a certain pharmaceutical is either safe or unsafe?
Well, they don’t really have the means to make that judgment for themselves but there’s now a real question whether, nonetheless, for what most people think are political reasons, they are going to decide on the side of the pharmaceutical companies themselves and not on the judgments of the Food and Drug Administration. So all of this is in peril, and all of this, as I keep saying to you, and it’s unsatisfying, I know, that there’s a great deal of uncertainty, not about what will be declared or what will be tried or what will be put into effect in some areas but how effectively the dismantling and the ungoverning will go.
It’s easy to draw a very dramatic and frightening picture. Trump has drawn it himself, and he’s begun to sketch it in his first term. But I think we have to say at this point that we don’t know how draconian it will be.
Jeff Schechtman: The follow-up to all of this is what happens on the state level, and the way some state governments, and I know there are plenty of them that are thinking about this, including here where I am in California, how will state governments step in to try and either negate some of this or to fulfill the holes that are left by virtue of ungoverning in Washington?
Nancy Rosenblum: Well, that’s a key political question because the states can provide guardrails that may be weakened within the federal government. And let me say that this is a double-edged sword. We have a federal system, that is, authority is shared between the states and the national government, and in the past, there’s been a lot of suspicion of the state governments. Many of the southern states and the red states still today were resisting. They carried out policies that were untypical to civil rights, and so on and so forth. So federalism and states’ rights don’t have a good history or a good name.
Nonetheless, I think, as you were suggesting, that at this point in our history, federalism may serve us very well. That there are blue states that will refuse to enforce and take state action against, where they can, the mandates of the federal government. So abortion is the most obvious. Right now, the states were left to decide on whether abortion was going to be legal and in what form, and we’ve seen that– I’m lagging on the number of states, but I think it’s 26 states, have pretty draconian anti-abortion laws.
But there are states that have been protecting this right and even facilitating women coming to their safe havens to have medical treatment. It’s a trickle, of course, not a lot, but we see here the progressiveness and the possible resistance that comes from federalism. What areas that will occur in and how– And of course, that could be negated by a national abortion ban but I think that the States will continue to do all kinds of things.
The blue states will try to do all kinds of things that negate the most destructive things that will come out of the federal government, from aid to individuals to housing to healthcare to environmental measures that we think that the federal government will drop or even work against.
Jeff Schechtman: And that will be an interesting framework, particularly in things that are regulatory. Things like the FDA or the EPA where there are a number of regulatory frameworks where state policy is often counter to or in direct conflict with what the federal government is asking.
Nancy Rosenblum: Exactly. So how far states can go, especially states that aren’t big, big states, practically countries in themselves like California, there are state compacts. There are agreements between states in New England and in other places that make them stronger in resisting the orders of the federal government where they don’t legally extend and so on. So I think that there are a few places where we can see hopeful guards against everything the federal government might try to do, and federalism is one.
And it’s unusual, as I say, that we look to federalism for that but we have had for recent years, probably 15 or so years, partisan federalism when the states, very few of them are mixed. They are red or blue and the blue ones, the ones who have maintained state legislatures and governors that can do this, may be protective.
Jeff Schechtman: It is interesting, though, to think about it and this gets a little bit beyond the whole ungoverning issue but what you talk about in terms of state compacts, if you see things, and there have been some compacts in this regard, the West Coast, for example, between California, Oregon and Washington, that if there is resistance within these state compacts, that it further profoundly adds to the division within the country.
Nancy Rosenblum: That’s right. New England used to be reliably blue. Now, New Hampshire has turned red. Now, it’s not Trump red. It’s less virulently red than that but we’re going to see how far the New Hampshire governor and legislature will go in enacting the kinds of measures that trump intends to. But I think that what I’m saying overall is that the aim behind Trump’s ungoverning is personal rule. Now, he’s going to bring people into his government, and I think Vance, for example, is one, who are much more ideological than he is. They’re less interested in personal rule than really in altering the character and policy of American law and society. They have long-term aims. They are not about themselves.
And I think that that’s going to be what we have to watch is the tension behind those people within government and outside government who have supported Trump and his really quite chaotic and personal attitude towards plans. Will he simply defer to them, or will he go on caring about at least some things himself and insisting on taking personal charge? Either way, we’re going to have, I think, a chaos.
But I think it’s useful to just keep in mind the erratic nature of Trump. There are a few things he cares about, but most, he doesn’t. And I think that what he’s most interested in is a kleptocracy, that is a financial oligarchy, he has some interest in the border, and he has some interest in peculiar ideas like tariffs. And perhaps you or your listeners won’t agree with me on this, but in all of these, the motivations are personal.
They’re not for the good of the country, and they’re not for the good of some ideology. They’re what he wants. And let me read to you something that happened just the other day. The Bloomberg editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, interviewed Trump and asked whether he thought the Justice Department should break up Google as a monopoly, and Trump could only respond in the personal. Here’s what he said. He said, “They’re very bad to me, very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint.”
And what Micklethwait couldn’t see is that Trump can’t speak from any other standpoint. He can’t speak from the standpoint of policy. He can’t evaluate whether Google is a monopoly, only whether it’s good or bad for him. And so I think that what’s going to happen with Google is not Trump’s personal attitude towards Google, although it may, but it’s just as likely to be handled by people who are radically and ideologically with special interests.
Jeff Schechtman: We see this already with CEOs bowing down, with CEOs being afraid. I mean, some of it is to protect their very businesses, and flattery as a way of accomplishing what they need to accomplish for their companies.
Nancy Rosenblum: Well, this is part of Trump’s dangerousness, that is, that he has this inflated ego, and he wants always to be flattered. And it’s the danger that Tim Snyder has been pointing out for eight years now, which is that people give in before they have to give in, and we saw that with The Washington Post, that as people will try to placate Trump or his allies in government in an attempt not to be attacked by him. And this kind of surrender in advance is a very dangerous thing.
Jeff Schechtman: The other danger and this comes back to ungoverning and the things that we were talking about, is that while he may be interested in personal rule and personal power, that many of the people around him have different agendas, different ideology, and they will simply run amok in this situation.
Nancy Rosenblum: I think that that’s certain to happen. The question is how broadly, in what areas, and how much the chaos that they produce, in a sense, hampers them. So, that’s just simply an open question. How many of these people, the ones that I call ideologues, not just Trump loyalists, are going to be successful in their spheres? If they are successful, we’re going to have the most radical deconstruction of the administrative state.
If they’re not successful, we’re still going to have chaos, but we’ll have at least some areas of governing preserved intact.
Jeff Schechtman: And finally, what will, in your view, impact people the most, impact people in their daily lives that they’re going to see first as a result of this chaos?
Nancy Rosenblum: Well, what people will see first? I don’t know the answer to that question. I really don’t. But I would like to say that some groups will be affected very clearly and without question. That’s true of immigrants who, whether or not there’s large-scale deportation, are going to have their lives turned upside down. That’s true of people who are dependent on certain government programs and services if the Trump administration is able to delimit them in some way.
There are people whose taxes will be raised because if you give all your tax breaks to billionaires, then you’re going to have to tax more of the middle class and even below. But I’d like to point to a couple of things we might not have thought of. Well, one thing in particular where everyone, ultimately, will be affected, because, in the short run, not everyone will be. The press will be.
So think about it this way. If you have a real attack on the Food and Drug Administration, for example, and if you have RFK Jr. in charge of health, whether he’s officially a secretary of a department or not, as it’s been claimed, what will happen to the future of vaccines? There will be another pandemic. We know that there’s enormous hostility that Trump’s likely to go along with, or his people, to vaccination of all kinds, and this could create health crises in America that none of us will be able to escape.
So I do think that there are some global impacts that we can, if not foresee, at least worry about, no matter what your social class or what you consider to be your protection otherwise.
Jeff Schechtman: Nancy Rosenblum. Her book is Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos. Nancy, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today.
Nancy Rosenblum: And thank you for having me. I’m sorry we had to have this conversation.
Jeff Schechtman: Indeed. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
