Over the last two weeks, president-elect Donald Trump has rolled out the names of those who he hopes will staff top federal agencies in his incoming administration. While Trump’s first administration was led by a blend of longtime Washington insiders and less traditional picks for Cabinet spots, this term Trump appears ready to buck conventional wisdom entirely. The slate of nominees for his second administration includes people from different spheres of public life, but his picks all share two main qualities in common: they have professed complete loyalty to Trump, and they share Trump’s aim of completely undermining the regulatory and oversight functions of the federal government.
Nowhere is this philosophy better embodied than in Trump’s proposal to create a new federal agency, the Department of Government Efficient (DOGE), headed by billionaire Elon Musk and near-billionaire (and former Republican presidential candidate) Vivek Ramaswamy. Beneath the agency’s cringey name, a nod to Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, lurks a scorched-earth philosophy concerned with cutting vast swaths of the federal government to the bone.
Trump has promised that the department will “restructure federal agencies,” an ominous sentiment from an incoming president who has also long expressed his desire to reschedule huge numbers of civil servants, making them easier to fire. Taken together, these moves make it clear that Trump, with the help of Musk and Ramaswamy, intends to make profound changes to the size and ambit of the federal bureaucracy.
In practice, this could herald massive cuts to the regulatory apparatus of the federal government, making it easier for people like Musk and Ramaswamy (who was a pharmaceuticals entrepreneur before getting involved in politics) to run their business ventures without worrying about pesky government oversight. If that is indeed the thrust of DOGE policymaking, it would continue a trend from the first Trump administration of favoring policy friendly to big business while paying lip service to working class concerns. It would also closely align with the road map laid out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s sweeping playbook for right-wing policy making, whose architects Trump is closely allied with, but which Trump strategically sought to distance himself from during the campaign.
Arguably, as head-turning as Trump’s DOGE salvo is his decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the third-party presidential candidate who dropped out of the race to endorse him, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Early in his career, Kennedy built a reputation as a progressive lawyer focused on environmental causes, but he has more recently become well known for his vociferous vaccine skepticism. Kennedy’s anti-vax crusade has already had horrendous consequences, including in Samoa, where Kennedy had helped spread vaccine misinformation. A measles outbreak there in 2019 killed 83 people, many of them children. If Kennedy is allowed to scale his vaccine misinformation output to a national level, it could have horrific consequences for huge parts of the country.
Kennedy, who has no background in medicine or public health, has already made a series of promises that have alarmed the medical community. HHS, via the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), oversees approval of new drugs and vaccines, a function of the agency that Kennedy has specifically targeted. A conspiracy theory-peddling group he founded, Children’s Health Defense, attempted to stop the FDA’s approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Kennedy has also accused the FDA of suppressing evidence of the efficacy of pseudoscientific health treatments like raw milk and stem cells. Kennedy’s obvious disdain for FDA regulations could result in a complete tear-down of that department if he takes the reins at HHS as planned.
Kennedy’s assaults on pharmaceutical companies, though, have put him at odds with one of the largest industries in the U.S. While many of Trump’s policy aims, if realized, are sure to facilitate record profits for the corporate class, Kennedy’s anti-pharma attitude has already impacted that sector. If Trump is unable to tolerate the tension between one of his appointees and the corporate world, Kennedy, despite his public displays of loyalty to Trump, may be headed for an early exit from Trump’s second administration.
Another political figure reaping the rewards of her longstanding support for Trump is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Noem, once widely considered to be a top candidate for Trump’s running mate this year, has been nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security. As the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Noem, if confirmed, would play a central role in carrying out Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented people living in the U.S. She’ll work closely with Trump senior aides Stephen Miller and Tom Homan — both extreme immigration hawks, one of whom was responsible for the controversial and cruel practice of family separation that came to define Trump’s immigration policy in his first term.
Noem, who established her right-wing bona fides by flagrantly ignoring COVID-19 regulations as governor of South Dakota, does not have a background in border security, nor does she have any notable experience working with immigrants. In fact, just 4 percent of South Dakota’s population are immigrants — the state ranks near the bottom of all U.S. states in terms of both the percentage and real number of immigrants who live there. Noem’s appointment, then, appears to turn primarily on a quality that the incoming president has rewarded time and again: fealty to Trump.
Noem has stayed close to Trump’s orbit during his four years in exile from the presidency, primarily through her ties — rumored to be romantic as well as professional — to former Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski. Noem was a vocal backer of Trump during his second presidential primary run, and it seems that her steadfast loyalty is now paying off. Noem has been vocally supportive of Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, and, with other Republican governors, sent troops to Texas to assist in an effort to discourage migration at the southern border. In Noem, Trump has found a faithful acolyte for this role. With her, as well as Miller and Homan in place, Trump is unlikely to meet much resistance if he decides to push forward with his plan to mobilize a mass deportation effort on a scale hitherto unseen in the U.S.’s history.
Then, of course, there is Trump’s nomination of the volatile former congressman, Matt Gaetz, to serve as attorney general. Gaetz’s nomination has struck a profoundly dissonant chord, largely because he was recently under investigation over allegations that he had violated sex trafficking laws and over allegations that “Gaetz and onetime political ally Joel Greenberg paid underage girls and escorts or offered them gifts in exchange for sex,” as reported by The Associated Press.
Members of the House Ethics Committee, which was investigating Gaetz before he abruptly resigned from Congress, are currently at loggerheads over whether to release a report they had compiled. The report is said to contain damning details concerning Gaetz having sex with a minor.
Gaetz, a career politician from a political family, only passed the bar a few years before he first was elected to public office. Attorneys general are typically members of the legal profession with decades of experience; even Trump’s own appointees to the position in his first term fit that bill. This term, Trump has made no bones about his desire to gut the Justice Department, which he has accused of becoming politicized and partisan against him and his allies. Gaetz, an avowed Trump loyalist, appears to be the person who Trump believes is right for the slash-and-burn approach he desires at the Department of Justice.
In addition to nominating these big-name controversial and incongruous picks for domestic-facing posts in his administration, Trump has also nominated a comparatively sober group of institutionalists who are attracting less attention but are no less committed to disassembling the regulatory capacity of the federal government.
For example, Trump has nominated Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright is a fossil fuel hardliner who has denied the reality of climate change, and has been lauded by some Republicans for “[laying] the foundation for America’s fracking boom.” Liberty Energy itself focuses on fracking within the U.S. and North America and would certainly benefit from a rollback of some of the modest drilling regulations put in place under President Joe Biden. In a statement revealing his pick for energy secretary, Trump foreshadowed Wright’s role in “cutting red tape,” and this will almost certainly be the focus of his tenure at the Energy Department: stripping and gutting any regulations seen to be impeding unfettered production of fossil fuels on U.S. soil.
Meanwhile, Trump has named Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who once ran against him in the Republican presidential primary, to head the Department of Interior. In that role, Burgum will oversee management of public lands, a position from which he can play a complementary role in Wright’s quest to open public lands for oil and gas drilling. Burgum is another billionaire appointee to Trump’s cabinet who made his fortune as a tech entrepreneur before entering politics. He opposes Biden’s reduction of oil and gas drilling on public lands and has been an ardent promoter of fossil fuels, especially as governor of a state where oil drilling is a major industry.
Together, Wright and Burgum could unleash a domestic drilling bonanza, accelerating a trend that has already been picking up speed during Biden’s presidency. With Trump’s enthusiastic support, his administration could oversee a shift towards even more reliance on fossil fuels for domestic energy needs. The U.S. is already on track to miss its emissions reduction goal per the Paris climate agreement — an agreement that Trump will likely exit again, as he did in his first term — and a renewed emphasis on fossil fuel production would put the U.S. on a trajectory to grossly undershoot even the most conservative emissions reduction goals.
As always, Senate confirmation is required before anyone can officially become part of the administration. Some Republican senators have already voiced doubts about a number of these nominees, and it’s possible that not all will end up finding a place in the Trump White House. Gaetz in particular may face a steep path to appointment, with reported skepticism from within his own party. Regardless of who ultimately fills these positions, though, it is already clear what Trump intends to do in his second term: fundamentally shrink the federal government’s capacity to regulate corporations, while simultaneously expanding its control over the lives of working people.
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