The State Is Not Shrinking. It Is Changing Shape.

In early June, the Trump administration proposed eliminating the Chemical Safety Board, the small federal agency that investigates industrial disasters, and cutting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by 7.5 percent. A chemical explosion in West Virginia had just killed two workers. ^[1] The same week, the president signed an executive order reclassifying roughly 8,000 senior federal employees as at-will workers, stripping them of civil-service protections that had insulated career staff from political removal for more than a century. The order opened the door to reclassifying as many as 50,000. ^[2] By mid-June, the administration had transferred the Education Department's civil-rights enforcement arm to the Department of Justice and its special-education oversight to Health and Human Services, leaving what officials described as a nominal presence at the department itself — enough to avoid a congressional vote on abolition, not enough to do the work. ^[3] In July, the Office of Management and Budget proposed replacing peer-reviewed merit selection for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal research grants with discretion vested in political appointees. The same month, the administration proposed eliminating 702 more federal regulations, on top of 752 already rolled back since the previous October, while simultaneously requiring all agencies to coordinate remaining rulemaking through the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. ^[4][5] That is one side of the ledger. The other side, unfolding across the same three months, looks nothing like retreat. The Department of Justice has sued more than 30 states across at least six policy domains: gun restrictions in California and Virginia; sanctuary immigration policies in Maryland; in-state tuition for undocumented students in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont; vaccine-exemption requirements in California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York; federal-agent mask bans in New York, Virginia, and Philadelphia; and voter-registration databases from 29 states, with DOJ monitors deployed to 15 jurisdictions across six states. ^{[6][7][8][9][10][11]} These are not isolated cases. In June, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche directed the DOJ's Civil Division to proactively identify state and local policies across the country that interfere with federal work.

New York’s anti-law enforcement policies regulate the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents. These laws cannot stand. — Todd Blanche

The directive converted what might have looked like a scattershot docket into a systematic campaign — the DOJ as an instrument not merely of law enforcement but of presidential will, hunting for state laws to overturn. Beyond the courtroom, the administration has expanded its reach through instruments that did not exist in any prior presidency. On August 12, Trump signed a memorandum authorizing vetted private firms to conduct offensive cyber operations — including the disruption and destruction of foreign information systems — under DHS and DOJ oversight, with firms posting million-dollar bonds and proposing operations packages for federal approval. ^[12] A day earlier, the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel issued a 21-page opinion extending executive privilege to private, outside advisers who are not federal employees, erasing the legal boundary between government officials and private actors in presidential decision-making. The opinion was issued to shield Boris Epshteyn, a private Trump adviser, from an American Bar Association subpoena. ^[13] And where the administration has grown institutional capacity, it has done so in the domains of enforcement. Border Patrol staffing hit 21,471 agents in June — the highest in the agency's 102-year history — with a target of 25,000. ^[14] The judicial foundation for all of this was laid on May 6, when the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter, overruling 90 years of precedent to hold that the president may fire officials at independent federal agencies at will. Trump called it the greatest increase in presidential power in a century.

It is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. — Donald Trump

The administration is now testing the ruling's limits: on August 11, Trump moved to dismiss Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, even though the Court had carved out a specific exception for the Fed. ^[15][16] The pattern that emerges across these three months is not one of government simply growing or shrinking. It is a redistribution of the state's shape. The institutions being dismantled — regulatory agencies, civil-service protections, peer-reviewed grantmaking, the Education Department's civil-rights enforcement — share a common feature: each constrained executive discretion. The Chemical Safety Board could investigate industrial disasters regardless of the White House's preferences. Career civil servants could not be fired for political reasons. Peer review meant grant money flowed to scientists, not loyalists. The Education Department's civil-rights office could pursue discrimination cases the administration might prefer to ignore. The instruments being expanded share the opposite feature: each projects presidential power directly. DOJ lawsuits override state laws without congressional action. Private cyber operators extend federal reach beyond what government employees can legally do. Executive privilege for outside advisers shields presidential decision-making from scrutiny. A record Border Patrol enforces immigration policy with manpower no prior administration possessed. Whether all of these actions constitute one deliberate strategy or an emergent pattern from aligned actors is not established by any source. The pattern is real either way. What it reveals is that "smaller government" has never been a description of size. It has always been a description of shape — fewer constraints on the executive, not less power. The administration is building exactly that, one institution at a time.