The Loyalty Machine

In April, Donald Trump fired his own Attorney General. Pam Bondi had been a loyalist by any reasonable measure — a Trump ally who took the job understanding what was expected. She was removed anyway, reportedly for failing to prosecute the president's political enemies aggressively enough ^[1]. Weeks later, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and asked reporters whether his own FBI Director, Kash Patel, got "enough publicity" — a public mockery of a man he had handpicked to lead the bureau ^[2].

Does he get enough publicity? — Donald Trump

This is not a story about personnel drama. It is the logical endpoint of a method visible only when you line up the actions across the federal government. The attorney for one of the 115 immigration judges fired without cause put the operating principle as plainly as anyone has:

If you don’t support the President politically, you’re going to lose your job and they’re going to give it to someone else. — Kevin Owens

What that attorney described is not rhetoric. It is a three-step pattern that has played out, in varying degrees of completion, across at least eight agencies since January 2025. Step one: purge. The administration has removed more than 352,000 federal workers through firings, resignations, and unreplaced retirements — the smallest federal workforce since 1966 ^[3]. But the raw number understates the precision. The cuts have been surgical where it matters most: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's election security specialists were gutted. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section was cut from 36 prosecutors to 2. The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded entirely ^[4]. One hundred and fifteen immigration judges were fired or denied permanent positions ^[5]. Nearly 30 generals and admirals were sidelined by the Defense Secretary ^[6]. On July 9, Trump dismissed all remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the agency without a quorum and unable to certify voting systems or distribute federal funds ahead of the midterms ^[7]. The White House explained the EAC firings with a standard that could apply to any of these removals: the president "reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned" with his mission.

The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted. — Donald Trump

Step two: reclassify. Removing people is only half the architecture. The structural hinge is making sure those who remain can be removed just as easily. On June 3, Trump signed an executive order creating "Schedule Policy/Career," reclassifying roughly 8,000 senior federal employees — GS-15 and above — as at-will workers stripped of civil service protections ^[8]. The Office of Personnel Management estimates up to 50,000 could eventually be reclassified. OPM Director Kupor framed it as ensuring senior officials "carry out lawful orders and policy directives."

It's also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process. — Scott Kupor

The legal architecture for this step arrived in May, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter that the president may fire officials at independent federal agencies at will — overruling 90 years of precedent ^[9]. Trump called it "the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years."

90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed! — Donald Trump

The ruling did not create the reclassification power. It removed the argument that reclassification was unconstitutional. The executive order had been waiting for the legal ground to hold it. Step three: rebuild. The vacancies are not left empty. They are filled — by political loyalists, by private contractors, by people whose primary qualification is demonstrated allegiance rather than professional competence. Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense attorney, is now Acting Attorney General. He has publicly defended the president's direct involvement in DOJ prosecutions ^[10].

It means that there's an executive, a chief executive, that is making sure every one of his Cabinet members are working as hard as they should. — Todd Blanche

Blanche also granted Trump and his family comprehensive immunity from IRS audits through a DOJ settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against his own government ^[11]. The Justice Department, in this configuration, functions as a personal legal shield. At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Trump installed Bill Pulte — a former housing official with no intelligence experience and reportedly no security clearance — as acting director ^[12]. Pulte was given blanket authority to declassify any intelligence records he chooses, including those related to the 2020 election ^[13]. He immediately began cutting ODNI staff, removing 51 employees on top of a prior 40 percent workforce reduction ^[14]. At the FBI, Director Patel assembled what the bureau itself has called a "payback squad" to investigate critics of the president, producing more than 100 subpoenas and targeting former CIA Director John Brennan ^[2]. The administration's 2027 budget proposes privatizing TSA screening at smaller airports and cutting 9,400 federal security positions — replacing government screeners with private contractors ^[15]. Each replacement is a data point in the same argument. The criterion is not whether someone can do the job. It is whether they can be counted on to do what the president wants. The three steps describe a method. But the method has a property no one may have anticipated: it eats its own. A loyalty standard with no fixed ceiling cannot be satisfied, because the bar keeps moving. Bondi was not loyal enough — she was fired. Patel, who assembled the payback squad and has been as aggressive a loyalist as any, is now being publicly undermined by the president who appointed him ^[2]. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was removed. The immigration judge's attorney captured the dynamic precisely: if you support the president politically, you get a job and keep it — until the moment you don't. And the moment you don't is defined by a standard no one can see, because it exists only in the president's judgment of whether you have been sufficiently useful today. This is not instability as a side effect. It is instability as a feature of the operating principle. A system built on personal loyalty rather than professional competence cannot produce institutional stability, because loyalty is a relationship between two people, not a relationship between a person and a rule. Relationships can be re-evaluated at any moment. Rules cannot. Courts have blocked individual applications of this method. The Fourth Circuit halted the firing of 19 career intelligence officers on due process grounds ^[16]. A federal judge allowed Maurene Comey's wrongful termination lawsuit to proceed ^[17]. Multiple courts have rebuked the administration's election-control orders, with one judge noting that "the administration's efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them" ^[18].

The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections. — Indira Talwani

But these are case-by-case corrections. The structural argument is lost. The Supreme Court has licensed the underlying removal power. The executive order reclassifying thousands of employees as at-will stands. The vacancies have been filled. The courts can slow the method's application. They cannot reverse its architecture. And the loyalty standard that built it is, by its own logic, still hungry.