Trump Should Reduce Regulations, Not the Number of Civil Servants

If Donald Trump or Elon Musk rail on about bureaucracy and announce the dismissal of civil servants, many citizens would sympathize. But administration is often inefficient because of having too few people, not too many. This poses an even great danger.

Donald Trump is also celebrated in some circles here because he wants to clean up government bureaucracy. His vice president, JD Vance, has already spoken about the advice he would give to Trump about firing people: “If I was giving him advice, fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who, along with Elon Musk will lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, is more moderate: He wants to cut federal employees by only 75%.

For people who don’t work in public service, which is the majority of the population, announcements such as this have a certain charm. Authorities and their officials don’t have a good reputation anywhere.

Of course, the inefficiency of the civil service doesn’t necessarily have to be because of too many staff. There are no more people working for the federal government in the U.S. today than there were in the late 1960s, even though Washington has taken on many more responsibilities. By any definition of efficiency, civil servants are working more effectively than before. If there is still some legitimate dissatisfaction with authorities, it could be because they are understaffed, not overstaffed.

An example from Germany: When I installed a geothermal heat pump in Berlin, I had to get permission to drill. It was about protecting groundwater, and the state government had just one person to deal with it, regardless of whether it was a large-scale project such as a subway tunnel or a tiny project like my heat pump.

When that person went on vacation, the applications were left pending because there wasn’t anyone else qualified to deal with it. When she came back from vacation, she told me that there were new regulations on her desk that had to be taken into account for approvals. Conclusion: If you reduce regulations, efficiency can be increased without firing civil servants.

However, Trump isn’t concerned with effectiveness, but rather with loyalty. His “Schedule F,” which he wants to reinstate on the first day of his presidency, allows the president to fire any federal employee who is not unconditionally loyal to the president.

Laws that enabled the dismissal of career civil servants in the Weimar Republic had a similar effect: In the end, it was the party membership card that decided the outcome. With the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” the Nazis made this bad practice the rule. Jews were fired first and then, all politically unreliable elements.

Trump isn’t a Nazi. But the attack on civil service is dangerous. What Trump calls the “Deep State” is the existence of dutiful officials who show politicians, regardless of background, the limits of their arbitrariness.

Of course there are incompetent armchair politicians, and naturally the idea of performance must be given more room. The firing of incompetent civil servants must be allowed. But the politicization of public service and the intimidation of employees through demands for loyalty and threats of dismissal lead not to greater effectiveness but to corruption, sycophancy and chaos.