This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It is excerpted from Remaking The State: A New Blueprint for American Democracy by K. Sabeel Rahman, published by Columbia Global Reports.
After last week’s watershed election results, a new Congress will be sweeping into Washington on the heels of a powerful public rebuke of the Trump administration’s policies. There are a dizzying array of policy challenges to be solved, from affordability to corruption. But underneath these policy fights is a deeper challenge. The administration and its allies in Congress and on the Supreme Court have over the last few years done more than issue far-right policies; they have fundamentally transformed the structure and nature of the federal government itself. The challenge, then, for a next Congress — and a next presidential administration — is both a policy one, and an institutional one. We will need new public policy to address the public’s concerns, but we will also need to remake the underlying institutions of government to make those new policies achievable.
Institutional reinvention at this dramatic scale is not unprecedented. In the second half of the 19th century, the country was mired for decades in economic upheaval and deep social conflict stemming from the transformations created by industrialization. These disruptions were made even more galling by the increasingly visible and brazen concentrations of wealth and power among the oligarchs and dominant firms of the era — from the financial interests of JP Morgan to the railroad empire of the Vanderbilts and the telegraph monopoly — and by the deep corruption through which this wealth coopted the political system to serve its narrow interests. These pressures drove an extraordinary era of bottom-up civic activism across the country, and state and local policymakers pioneered new models of regulatory bodies, direct democracy, and a flurry of constitutional amendments to address the combined problems of a rigged economy and a captured democracy. That ferment made possible the New Deal and its vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society.
A similar story can be told about other major democratizing moments. The decades of struggle against Jim Crow, for example, similarly depended on bottom-up movement organizing around a more egalitarian vision of society, and ultimately broke through in the 1960s to drive a revolution in civil and voting rights. Crucially, that democratizing effort involved the creation of new administrative agencies to implement on a day-to-day level the aspirations for equality and inclusion.
As a new Congress comes to Washington and 2028 hopefuls announce their candidacies, the lesson is clear. In a moment of deep hurt and disruption, and widespread corruption and political failure, the public is rightly demanding a radically different future. To make good on those demands, policymakers will have to innovate a new governing system altogether. In my book, Remaking the State, I outline what such an affirmative vision and institutional system might look like. But building a better, more inclusive and responsive government requires that we first understand how far-right ideologues have themselves transformed government to try to preclude that more egalitarian and democratic alternative.
The Reactionary Administration
In some obvious ways, the MAGA movement and Trump era is a break from the conservatism of the Reagan and Bush years, particularly on tariffs, trade, and immigration. But in terms of the vision of the administrative state, the continuities are more revealing than the differences.
Within the Trump coalition, appeals to racial resentment and social conservatism have become more explicit, often framed in response to perceived threats from immigration and from movements for racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ equality.
The result is a distinct form of statecraft that is simultaneously dismantling some aspects of the state, while weaponizing others, and personalizing decision-making in the president himself. Taken together, these three shifts are producing a very different kind of American state — not the New Deal state or the neo-liberal state, but what we might call a “reactionary administration.”
Dismantling Capacities
Though it was relatively short-lived, Elon Musk’s DOGE was indicative of a central objective of the second Trump administration: the mass dismantling of large swathes of the modern administrative state.
This dismantling is not just about a shift in policy, from stricter to more lenient regulation, though that is also occurring. Rather, it is an effort to weaken the state’s underlying capacities so agencies are less able to act at all, through staffing cuts or by shutting down programs altogether, affecting everything from food stamps to disaster relief to veterans’ mental health support services. The EPA has ceased to collect emissions data, and the Department of Labor has essentially shuttered investigative and enforcement activities.
This effort is not purely executive-driven. The Supreme Court’s so-called “Major Questions Doctrine” has issued rulings that canceled student debt relief, ended regulation of fossil fuel emissions, and stopped attempts to protect workers from the COVID-19 pandemic.
While couched in legal technicalities and high-minded rhetoric about restraining overreaching executive power, this battery of decisions amounted to a major “destabilizing” transformation of administrative law, creating uncertainty for agencies and empowering individual judges to toss out agency actions they may disfavor for whatever reason. These decisions have been consistently cited in subsequent executive orders, providing legal legitimacy and permission for the structural dismantling efforts. More recently, the Supreme Court has permitted many of these efforts to proceed despite legal challenges — for example, by blocking lower court injunctions against mass firings of civil servants. Congress, too, has been largely supportive as Republicans baked major budget cuts into their summer 2025 spending bill.
The Trumpist remaking draws on long-standing business opposition to economic regulation and social conservative hostility to civil rights enforcement. But Trumpism embraces a kind of reactionary right-wing populism that echoes earlier figures such as George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, blending populist language with policies that continue to favor deregulation.
The impacts are clear. The goal is not just to shift policy, but to permanently unwind the parts of the administrative state tasked with addressing inequality—whether through safety net programs, labor protections, civil rights enforcement, or market regulation.
Weaponizing Capacities
Even as it dismantled key aspects of the administrative state, the second Trump administration has simultaneously weaponized other capacities. The most visible example of the supercharging of state power is in immigration. Congress has directed billions of dollars toward enforcement, particularly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it one of the most well-resourced — and most militarized — law enforcement bodies in the country. But this same logic extends beyond immigration. The administration has used the Department of Education’s investigatory powers to pressure universities and colleges on issues ranging from speech to hiring to curricula. Similar dynamics are evident in threats directed at philanthropies and non-profit organizations, drawing on the investigatory authority of the Internal Revenue Service and the enforcement capacities of the Department of Justice.
These developments are not driven by the presidency alone. Congress has reinforced them, expanding funding for immigration enforcement even as it cuts other programs, and signaling further scrutiny of universities and nonprofits through hearings and investigations. The courts, too, have played a role.
Through emergency rulings, the Supreme Court has allowed key elements of this enforcement regime to proceed, including limits on lower court efforts to restrict immigration enforcement practices and challenges to detention and deportation policies, even if those stops are purely on the basis of ethnic or racial identity. Other emergency rulings have temporarily paused due process critiques of the aggressive immigration detention and deportation regime. Earlier decisions have also shaped the legal landscape, with the president himself praising the Trump v. United States decision immunizing the president from criminal liability, and the Court’s deference to executive authority in cases like the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban.”
This turn toward more aggressive uses of state power builds on longer-standing trends. Presidential authority over national security, immigration, and enforcement has expanded over time, while these domains have often been insulated from the procedural safeguards and judicial oversight that apply more fully in domestic economic regulation. As many legal scholars have noted, the familiar contrast between “big government” liberals and “small government” conservatives obscures a deeper pattern: Both have, at different moments, contributed to the growth of state power in its more coercive forms — particularly in areas such as policing, incarceration, immigration, and national security.
Personalizing Administration
The third transformation of the administrative state has been a shift to personalize direct control in dangerous ways. Trump’s radical assertion of personal control over the executive branch staff has made headlines and violated existing legal rules by firing heads of independent agencies at the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, as well as mass-firing career civil servants nominally shielded by both collective bargaining agreements and legal protections for what is conventionally a nonpartisan, career civil service. At the same time, the administration has imposed troubling new loyalty tests during the hiring process, while churning through political appointees at a rapid clip, punishing internal opposition or dissent.
This increased control over staff is accompanied by a shift toward transactional “dealmaking” that contrasts sharply with the standard models of bureaucratic policymaking. The administration emphasizes voluntary “agreements” arrived at with organizations. We see this in the pressure on law firms and universities to adopt administration values and priorities, and in the way the administration uses discretionary exemptions from tariffs to strike bargains with companies. The very ethos of policy-making here is one that is personalized, prone to corruption, and antithetical to the idea of regularized, transparent, rule-based administration.
Personalization of administrative policymaking is also very much enabled by a parallel judicial effort to centralize more and more power in the presidency. Judges, particularly on the right, have gradually pioneered the “unitary executive theory,” which leans heavily on the notion of deep, discretionary, and essentially unreviewable executive powers vested in the president by the Constitution itself. This executive power, for these thinkers and jurists, requires unfettered control by the president over subordinates within the executive branch — and therefore requires the elimination of constraints on the president’s ability to remove officials, and to make discretionary policy judgments as the president sees fit. Where lower courts have consistently upheld existing legal limitations on the president’s ability to fire career staff and agency heads, the Supreme Court has gone out of its way to override those efforts and effectively ratify — in some cases without formal briefing or ruling — the firing of those officials.
From Remaking The State: A New Blueprint for American Democracy by K. Sabeel Rahman, published by Columbia Global Reports. Copyright © 2026 by K. Sabeel Rahman
