At first, it seemed like merely another Donald Trump tantrum.
Last week, while traveling to disaster zones in North Carolina and California, the president said he was considering maybe “getting rid of FEMA,” the $33 billion federal agency that provides life-saving emergency responses to wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other major calamities. People love to complain about FEMA, and some of its programs have significant flaws. But surely Trump, wound up by a first-person encounter with “Governor Gavin Newscum,” was just lashing out as usual.
Instead, Trump’s musing about possibly dismantling FEMA turned out to be foreshadowing. This week the new administration unleashed a damaging and thoroughly real assault on multiple branches of government, from halting cancer research to freezing foreign aid to offering buyouts to more than two million federal employees to (temporarily) unplugging the Medicaid payment system.
Just eight days before a commercial jet and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River, leaving no survivors, Trump turned the Aviation Security Advisory Committee into a ghost town as part of his anti-DEI purge and fired the heads of the TSA and Coast Guard. Trump, of course, blamed the disaster on the DEI policies of his predecessor. “Despicable,” former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg shot back, adding: “President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.”
None of these cuts should have been surprising. Not simply because Trump, during the 2024 campaign, promised to dramatically overhaul Washington, or because Project 2025—which he attempted, unconvincingly, to disavow—spelled out the specifics of the agenda for 922 pages. But because the right-wing has been fixated on dismantling government for a very long time. Sure, some of the immediate particulars are stunning and unique: Paul Weyrich, a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation in 1973, couldn’t have envisioned Elon Musk. Yet what’s unfolding now is perfectly predictable in the larger context. Trump and company are the apotheosis of a methodical, relentless five-decade conservative anti-government program.
Describing this, I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I tell Vermont Democratic senator Peter Welch, who has proposed a sensible revamping of FEMA. He assures me that I don’t. “This is not a conspiracy. This is an out-and-out effort, well-defined, well-researched, well-funded,” Welch says. “It’s not a commitment to reforming government. It’s about eviscerating it and essentially getting out of the way for a private market unfettered by regulations or restraint. Of course, that’s great for the billionaires who had pride of place at the inauguration.”
Julian Zelizer teaches political history at Princeton University, and he sees Trump as fitting snugly inside a bigger picture. “There’s a continuity to 1981, and to 2001. This has been a conservative project—gutting the tax base of the federal government, staffing agencies with people who are not eager to run them, proposing ways to limit Medicaid,” Zelizer says. “The FEMA example is perfect. A lot of what Trump is planning is undercutting the ability of the federal government to do what it does, other than in a few areas, like immigration. Trump is accelerating some of what Ronald Reagan called for on day one. In that sense, Trump is very much a product of the ’80s.”