No one who believes in limited government can do anything other than endorse the Trump Administration’s willingness to question and winnow the profusion of federal agencies. Carving out unnecessary and divisive programs focused on race or unachievable climate goals makes sense.
For now, the federal judiciary looks to be the administration’s biggest obstacle, as evidenced by this week’s decision by US District Court Judge John Bates to force two agencies — the CDC and FDA — to restore websites taken down because they might violate the president’s executive order on biological males participating in women’s sports and other gender-related language.
It was the latest in a series of court cases the White House has lost that should concern those hoping DOGE will lead to government reform.
But those of us rooting for the president and Elon Musk should also be concerned about a risk the Department of Government Efficiency may pose — not just for unproductive civil servants and the Deep State but for the success of the Trump Administration.
Call it the risk of the “Hollow State” — a government stripped not just of waste, fraud, and abuse but of its capacity to respond to crisis, and perform the core jobs the American people actually want the government to do and assumes it can do so capably.
Think of air traffic control, food safety, timely distribution of social security checks, public health, and, above all, law enforcement.
A recent, pre-Trump series of concerning public crises — including halting disaster response, Trump’s near-assassination, contamination at a meat processing plant, and the cybersecurity failure that allowed a breach of federal personnel records — may superficially seem unrelated.
But a closer look reveals unifying, underlying causes: persistent shortages of key employees.
For the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on which Americans rely in the wake of disasters such as last fall’s floods in Florida and North Carolina, the Government Accountability Office has found “an overall staffing gap of approximately 6,200 staff (35%) across different positions and cadres.”
At the Secret Service, “at least 1,400 of its 7,800 employees left in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, the largest outflow from the agency in at least two decades,” federal data show.
In the wake of major breaches of government databases, “the number of qualified cybersecurity personnel has lagged far behind what’s needed to fill positions across all sectors, and the gap is only growing,” according to a 2023 report.
Such shortages included those for positions essential to the safety of food supply and transportation. Prior to an outbreak of deadly listeria linked to a Virginia processed meat plant last year, a federal inspector general’s report found that “historically, the federal Food Safety and Inspection Service has had difficulty maintaining sufficient inspection staff to accomplish its mission.”
Similarly, a report for the federal Department of Transportation found that “while the United States has one of the safest air traffic systems in the world, the lack of fully certified [air traffic] controllers, operational supervisors, and traffic management coordinators pose a potential risk to air traffic operations.”
It seems long ago, as the administration seeks thousands of federal employees to resign, but recent years have seen an organized concern that the government is failing to attract sufficient talent — not for DEI initiatives but for its core functions.
These include specialized positions such as cybersecurity experts, for which Washington must compete with the lucrative private sector.
That’s been the mission of the nonpartisan Volcker Alliance, the nonprofit founded by the former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, aimed at nurturing a pipeline of talented public officials.
As the Alliance has argued, the government faces an “increasing need for knowledge-based skills in the rapidly changing, complex, globalized environment in which government operates.”
Yet, as per Volcker, “only 6 percent of federal employees are in their 20s, compared with 21 percent of employees in the private sector, and that already low number is dropping.”
What’s more, federal “agencies took an average of 106 days to hire employees.”
It seems likely, however, that younger employees with the increasingly sophisticated skills the government needs will jump at Trump’s early February offer to resign with pay until September — while they shop their skills. Nor are talented replacements likely to come forward.
One longtime federal human resource officer, with experience across government, including at the CIA, puts it this way, “if I were coming out of college now, federal civil service would be my very last resort.”
The opposite of the Trump/Musk enunciated vision in the Jan. 20 executive order: “We will ensure that the Federal workforce is prepared to help achieve American greatness, and attracts the talent necessary to serve our citizens effectively.”
Across-the-board resignations may not help toward that goal, nor might a universal back-to-the-office rule.
The risk for Trump is obvious. The first time a terrorist sneaks through a depleted TSA checkpoint, or the collapse of an uninspected coal mine —it’s not hard to imagine disasters for which a hollow government would (rightly) get the blame.
As it casts aside decades of waste, the White House should consider identifying — and even exempting — agencies and functions integral to government and which Americans agree must be capably staffed.
A lean government should be the goal for Trump — because a hollow government is in no American’s best interest, not even Elon Musk.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
