TO GET a sense of what Donald Trump’s first week did to the federal government, talk to people who work in it. “I’ve been with the government for over 10 years, I lived through the first Trump administration, and nothing compares to this,” says one Treasury employee. Some workers are busy scrubbing their personal social media for items that could be interpreted as disloyal. Others are scrubbing up their resumes, anticipating that they will soon be looking for new work. Those who plan to stay expect their jobs to get worse, as colleagues flee or are not replaced. Everyone is “in absolute panic mode”, says another senior civil servant.

As a candidate, Mr Trump promised that he would “shatter the deep state”. Since taking office, it has become more clear what he meant. In a barrage of executive orders, Mr Trump has asserted that he can do just about whatever he likes to the federal government. He has, he claims, “sole and exclusive authority” over the executive branch, to include hiring, firing and all spending decisions. In effect, Mr Trump is claiming he is not merely a president, putting into action laws enacted by the legislature. He is claiming to be something closer to a king, able to withhold or redirect expenditure as he sees fit.

On January 27th Mr Trump revealed quite how far he intends to push. He decreed that all grants and loans that the federal government makes—excepting disbursements for Social Security, Medicare, and some other vaguely defined categories—would be suspended the following day, even though Congress had approved them. This apparent usurpation of Congress’s role under Article I of the constitution was “sweeping and vast” and “really, really illegal”, says Eloise Pasachoff of Georgetown University law school. The memo laid out no legal justification for the freeze and on the evening of January 28th, a federal judge stopped it temporarily. The next day, the administration rescinded its memo; what happens next is unclear. A parallel freeze of all foreign aid created similar chaos.

In the meantime Mr Trump has launched an extralegal power grab almost as ambitious against the federal bureaucracy—the over 2m civil servants who actually implement federal policy. He has directly fired dozens of senior staff, including senior immigration officials, Department of Justice prosecutors and others he and his appointees have identified as being hostile to his goals. These included more than a dozen inspectors general (watchdogs who investigate departmental efficiency and wrongdoing). In the case of the inspectors general, the president is required by law to give 30 days notice and an explicit reason to justify firing. He did neither.

These decisions came on top of a complete hiring freeze across most departments (the military, immigration authorities, as well as jobs related to social security and veterans healthcare are exempt). He also reinstated an unimplemented order from his last term allowing his administration to redesignate any career civil service job as a political job, and thereby remove the usual job protections and sack whomever he wants. He has also pledged to shut down all “diversity, equity and inclusion” jobs, known as “deiA”, in government. To top it off, he banned all work from home.

The aim is transparently to get federal workers who do not like Mr Trump to leave. On January 28th, an email went out from the Office of Personnel Management (opm) offering every single federal employee “deferred resignation”. Essentially, the terms were: agree to leave this financial year and you can work from home until then. The touches—including instructions to reply with the word “RESIGN” by February 6th—implied the influence of Elon Musk, the billionaire head of Mr Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, or “doge”. Since the opm is not actually a corporate hr department, the offer is unlikely to withstand scrutiny. Federal tech employees report that outsiders, many seemingly junior employees of Mr Musk’s companies, have come into offices to take over government it systems and do “code reviews”.

Were Mr Trump to make these changes stick—a questionable prospect—it would amount to “probably the most fundamental alteration of the civil service system since 1883” says Don Moynihan, of the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan (a verdict many in the White House would love). The president appears to have little interest in the idea that most government officials should be non-partisan specialists whose expertise is deployed to keep the public safe, among other benefits. Under Mr Trump’s plan, decisions about hiring and firing would be made by his political appointees.

According to Max Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, a charity which works to improve government, Mr Trump is “tearing apart the civil service” so as to recreate “the spoils system” of government that persisted until the end of the 19th century. That was a model whereby new presidents came in and immediately distributed jobs to their pals as a reward for supporting their election campaigns.

Will he succeed? This seems unlikely, says Larry Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota. “Mr Trump’s orders, he says, are “impressively sweeping and breathtaking in their institutional arrogance” but he argues that much of what Mr Trump is trying to do will probably be undone by the courts or Congress. He points out that even after Mr Trump appointed sympathetic new members in his last term, the Supreme Court often overruled him. Congress has ceded much power to the presidency, but controlling the federal purse is a prerogative it is unlikely to yield readily.

Yet it could take years for challenges to work their way through the courts. The damage done in the meantime could be considerable. Employees who find other jobs after being pushed out will not necessarily return just because a court says their dismissal was wrong. Talented new hires will not join. And with government lawyers cowed by fears of firing, all manner of illegality could reign. Mr Stier worries about things like the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice being used to punish Mr Trump’s enemies, without civil service lawyers able to say no.

Even the best-case outcome is not good. In the last Trump administration, hiring freezes caused parts of government to shrink and jam up (see chart). Some of this may have been intended: the issuing of green cards and citizenship applications ground to a halt thanks in part to cuts at the State Department. But queues also lengthened for basic government services like getting passports, or tax refunds.

The “swamp”, as Mr Trump might call it, may feel like a lot of busybodies in Washington dc pushing around bits of paper. It is certainly true that it can often be slow, rule-bound and unaccountable. But a system based more on political loyalty than on merit is one primed for failure. Bureaucrats make sure that foods are not poisonous; that cars do not explode when they crash; and that toxic waste is not dumped into the wilderness. “The federal government is very vulnerable,” says Paul Light, a political scientist at New York University. Mr Trump, he says, risks becoming “the president of ‘I didn’t give a shit and a lot of people got killed.’” Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. ■

Kash Patel likes conspiracy theories. Luckily for everyone else, conspiracists are normally kept far away from America’s federal law-enforcement and intelligence machinery, with all its powers of surveillance, investigation and arrest. Typically, though, Donald Trump has tested this premise in his choice of Mr Patel to lead the FBI. The 44-year-old lawyer—whose Senate confirmation hearing is on January 30th—has called that organisation “one of the most cunning and powerful forces of the Deep State”. If Mr Trump keeps his promise to retaliate against his enemies, the task will fall to his nominee.

Like Pete Hegseth, who won confirmation as defence secretary by a whisker, in pre-Trump times Mr Patel would have had little chance of running a government agency, let alone one this size. The FBI has 38,000 employees, 55 field offices and an $11bn budget. He lacks management experience, scorns the organisation, and his partisanship flouts a post-Watergate norm that law enforcement and intelligence gathering must be insulated from politics.

Mr Patel’s animus towards the national-security establishment started with the Trump-Russia probe. As a congressional aide, Mr Patel seized on real faults in the investigation, then exaggerated them. An FBI lawyer had doctored an email to support an application to wiretap a Trump campaign adviser; this was illegal, and Mr Patel helped expose it. In his telling, however, he discredited the whole inquiry as a nefarious plot to undermine Mr Trump, orchestrated by the justice department (DoJ) and the intelligence agencies. Mr Patel has called former top brass at the DoJ and the FBI corrupt “crooks” and “gangsters” and asked: “Who’s arresting these guys?”

Perhaps he will. An appendix to Mr Patel’s book names 60 deep-state baddies. Democrats call it the Trump administration’s “enemies list”. Steve Bannon, a MAGA troublemaker, recently conceded that the book “might not be a literary thing”—“more typing than writing”—but said that the list is a good preview of future targets. The president offered a more ambiguous preview on inauguration day when he ordered the attorney-general to scour the DoJ for past instances of lawfare and seek “remedial actions”. By lawfare he meant the two (now dismissed) federal indictments against him and the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate. Already more than a dozen DoJ lawyers who brought those cases have been fired.

Actual prosecutions against the president’s enemies would be hard. They would contend with judges, juries, defence lawyers and evidentiary rules. Investigations of the type Mr Patel would oversee involve fewer constraints. This is especially true when the FBI can cobble together a national-security justification. Then judicial review for, say, a wiretap becomes less burdensome. Everything is classified to boot.

At the FBI, a culture of complying with the law will militate against baseless expeditions, says Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former adviser at the bureau under James Comey, the director whom Mr Trump fired in 2017. But line agents and prosecutors will find it hard to object to an inquiry where there is a coherent basis for one, even if the motives behind it are political. Meanwhile, probes exact punishing costs from their targets.

Mr Patel is especially keen on pursuing leakers and their friends in the media. “When you have an underlying illegality committed by a government agent, anyone that participates in that illegality can and should be charged,” Mr Patel has said. He has also suggested “clawback mechanisms” for the money that news outlets make “by printing lies”.

Equally significant is what Mr Patel might deprioritise at the FBI: namely, investigations of far-right activity. This may pick up as groups that went quiet after January 6th re-form thanks to Mr Trump’s pardons. Mr Patel has insinuated that the FBI had a hand in the insurrection. That is a MAGA conspiracy theory, built on the fact that 26 FBI informants were there that day, including four who entered the Capitol. In truth the riot was among the largest intelligence failures in FBI history.

The fact that Mr Patel is even in contention for the FBI job underscores how much has changed between the two Trump administrations. In the first term, the president moved to install him as deputy director of the cia. Gina Haspel, then its boss, threatened to quit and Mr Trump backed down. He tried the same gambit at the FBI before Bill Barr intervened. Both Ms Haspel and Mr Barr had stature accrued over long, distinguished careers; with that came the wherewithal to say no. Mr Patel, by contrast, owes his ascendancy to Mr Trump. On a podcast last year, he intimated how he would handle a lawful but awful order from the president. “If the guy gives me a lawful chain-of-command authority, you want me to not execute it?”■