Trump’s Indiscriminate Destruction of State Capacity Will Lead to a Dysfunctional, Not Cheaper, Government
Americans may rue the unplanned experiment this administration is running on the country
People like me—small-government types who were once considered on “the right” but have never reconciled ourselves to supporting Donald Trump—are often asked by our old conservative friends, “What happened to you? Why did you change?” The question invites a grim chuckle, because of course we did not really change; the questioners did. They’re the ones who flipped on free trade, on the separation of powers, on Russia, for crying out loud, and a great deal else. When everyone else is shifting their convictions, it’s amazing how fast you can move just by standing still.
Yet it would be strange if the big and unexpected events of the day did not cause us to rethink at least a few things. One way I have changed is that despite always believing in a small and limited government, I have become much more sympathetic to the need for building “state capacity.” At a time when the current administration is busy tearing down the state, pulling its parts out of the walls at random, I have gained a new appreciation for why we need an effectively functioning government.
State Capacity Libertarians and Supply-Side Progressives
Economist Tyler Cowen first talked about “state capacity libertarianism” in an early 2020 blog post—fittingly enough, just before the pandemic gave a demonstration of the need for state capacity. But Cowen’s description could use some clarification and elaboration.
“State capacity” is a term used by political scientists to describe the ability of a government to accomplish its policy goals. It’s not about the size of government but about its effectiveness. After all, a giant government that is bloated and overly bureaucratic can spend billions on high-speed rail and not get beyond Bakersfield.
You can think of “state capacity libertarianism” as the mirror image of “supply-side progressivism,” which advocates diminishing some regulatory barriers to achieve “progressive” goals like making housing and health care more affordable for the poor. (Economics blogger
once tried to combine the two ideas.) In both cases, there is a group of people embracing something that seems counter to the general tendency or mood of their ideology, but which is logically required for their proclaimed goals. For progressives, it’s the fact that they want us to have all sorts of important goods and services, which logically requires making it easier to produce those things. For free marketers, it starts from the other end. We want a system in which people are free to work and prosper, and this requires that our government actually be able to function.
We have all encountered the issue of state capacity in the form of the Department of Motor Vehicles. In the scheme of things, having to get a driver’s license is a trivial burden. The problem comes when you show up to renew your license, and there are a hundred people waiting and only two windows for processing paperwork—so there goes your day.
The same thing applies, on a larger scale, to other regulations. The delay caused by regulatory requirements is not just the result of the need to file paperwork. It’s what happens when bureaucrats don’t or can’t speedily process that paperwork.
In short, there are conditions in which an ineffective government can be more damaging and intrusive than a big one. Did I mention the pandemic? The intrusive lockdowns were adopted after the CDC botched its approach to Covid tests early in the pandemic—and they were ended after a huge government effort to fund vaccines and streamline the approval process.
In the populist imagination, simply firing bureaucrats means that everyone will become freer because the laws can no longer be enforced. But it also means that no one can get anything positively approved because there aren’t enough people to do it. When that happens, people become risk-averse and don’t build projects whose legal status is in a state of perpetual doubt. It’s possible we’re headed into a recession because nobody knows what tariffs will be imposed tomorrow or a year from now, or which businesses currently have the favor of the White House, or what government programs will be shut down without notice. As one CEO put it, “The chaos that is reigning right now is causing everyone to sit on their hands.”
Our Unplanned Experiment
One interesting objection to “state capacity libertarianism” is that state capacity is the product of a free society, not the other way around. The state is able to act effectively because a free economy produces the wealth, technology, and skilled professional class necessary to run it, it goes. But this is still not an argument against the need for state capacity, and it doesn’t change the fact that if we fire those skilled professionals randomly, on the presumption that firing bureaucrats is always good, we will destroy things we can’t do without.
That is precisely the unplanned experiment the U.S. is currently running, because we have an administration that is obsessed with tearing down state capacity, everywhere all at once. Yet there are legitimate functions of government that we need it to perform: national defense, the enforcement of contracts, protection from crime, the monitoring of infectious diseases.
When the president throws a tantrum in the Oval Office that shatters a network of alliances and repudiates 80 years of American global leadership, or when he threatens our closest allies and biggest trading partners, he makes our government less able to perform these basic functions.
Consider one of the first targets of Elon Musk’s DOGE squad: USAID. They slashed most of its funding and prevented much of it from being restored, on the premise that this is simply welfare for the rest of the world. But they did so based on internet conspiracy theories, without knowing or trying to find out what USAID actually does and how it serves as an important instrument for U.S. safety and security.
The cut in USAID funding, according to a report in the Washington Post, “threatened programs intended to counter al-Shabab bombmakers, contain the spread of al-Qaeda across West Africa, and secure Islamic State prisoners in the Middle East.” Similarly, USAID was crucial to a U.S.-backed peace agreement in Colombia that ended a decades-long insurgency fueled by the illicit drug trade. Here’s one example:
Dickinson explains that one major USAID-funded program focused on land titling for farmers who no longer grow coca, to support their transition to legal crops. That stopped last week. “Thousands of hours of bureaucratic work to process these titles now [risks] being wasted or taking much longer to finalize. The farmer who took a risk by giving up coca for a promised land title is left with nothing—and potentially a target on their back from armed groups that oppose crop substitution efforts,” she says.
One can imagine that private philanthropy could pick up the provision of malaria nets in Africa if the U.S. government stopped doing so. But private actors can’t hammer out, sign, and support mutually beneficial policy solutions with other countries.
The poster child for recklessly destroying state capacity is the random DOGE firing of 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for maintaining America’s nuclear warheads—and then the government couldn’t figure out how to rehire them because it had already canceled their government email accounts.
State Capacity and the Price of Eggs
In addition to its core functions, there are other functions the government arguably might not have to perform—but somebody has to do them. Does the government have to provide air traffic control for the nation’s airports? It could be done privately by a consortium of the nation’s airlines and airports. But to transition these functions from government to private actors would require years of planning and careful transition. We would have to build up civil society capacity to replace state capacity. If you just knock these programs down without any idea how they could be replaced by private institutions—for example, by firing a bunch of air traffic control staff—you are not striking a blow for small government. You’re striking a blow for air crashes, infectious diseases, and ignorance.
Consider that Donald Trump is widely believed to have won the presidency in part because consumers were upset about the price of eggs and other groceries. But eggs were not expensive because of general inflation. They were expensive because of a bird flu epidemic that has killed more than 150 million chickens in the U.S. over the past three years. In the first few months of Trump’s administration, the price of eggs went up even more—if you could even find them on the grocery store shelves. So, naturally, DOGE fired some of the workers managing the bird flu response.
Bird flu doesn’t affect humans—yet. But the administration has also cut a program to contain the spread of one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, Ebola. Elon Musk acknowledged this at the recent cabinet meeting he presided over, but added that he had restored the funding—except that he has not actually done so. No one can tell if he’s deliberately lying or just doesn’t know what his own people are doing.
Our Friend, the State?
The current administration is gutting state capacity instead of achieving smaller government, because it is not making considered decisions about “waste.” It’s just cutting things at random.
Or perhaps not entirely at random. As Tom Nichols observes, “Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery.” A professional bureaucracy follows rules and procedures and implements safeguards—which is a problem if you want to break down those safeguards.
The authoritarian mindset always places obedience above competence. They don’t want efficient and professional government services, because to the extent that they function well, they are not instruments of arbitrary power. Trump likes to rail against the “deep state.” What he is actually against is government workers following impersonal procedures that interfere with whatever desire he has at the moment.
As with the supply-side progressives, state capacity libertarianism is an issue that exposes a gap between pretension and reality. There are some progressives who say they want housing for everyone, but what they actually want is for nobody to change their neighborhood. Small-government firebrands have to ask ourselves a similar question: Do we want Americans to be free to build and prosper—or do we just hate bureaucrats?
If you just hate bureaucrats, then anything done to make federal employees suffer must be good, no matter the real-world consequences. So you will embrace a strongman and sign away everyone’s most basic freedoms so long as he promises to kick the bureaucrats in the teeth.
To be against “statism”—the stifling supremacy of the state—is not the same thing as being against the state. I want a government that performs its functions well without being unnecessarily intrusive, without setting up obstacles to ordinary human activity, and sure, with as little “waste, fraud, and abuse” as possible. If that means having more than two windows at the DMV actually open at once—or having a staff to ensure the safety of the nuclear arsenal, or track deadly pandemics, or keep peace agreements in deadly parts of the world—then let’s rehire some of the bureaucrats and oppose this wanton destruction of state capacity.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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While I saw many people I used to be aligned with abandon one principle after another in order to defend Trump, I also thought something must be fundamentally wrong in their judgment to make him into some kind of hero. If they are so obviously wrong about him - for example, claiming that he's motivated by deep and pure patriotism, or that he's exposing "corruption" - what else have they been wrong about?
That question prompted me to reexamine views I had shared with those people. If my own worldview doesn't align with that of someone who is so clearly psychopathic and devoid of conscience, how much do I have in common with those who will defend absolutely anything he does, and who regard his critics as evil?
One subject I started to rethink was the "administrative state," or more specifically, the conservative hostility to it. I noticed that some valid criticisms of bureaucracy - or the "deep state" - were being rather cynically wielded to delegitimize any restraints on the power of Dear Leader, or any impediments to the agendas of his allies. Then, the reckless, callous, often dishonest way that Trumpers are going about deconstructing the administrative state makes it difficult to believe that there's a thoughtful and moral program behind it - just as it's very difficult to believe that a thoughtful, moral purpose would ever choose Donald Trump as its champion.
Great essay, Robert.