Polls say Trump has a strong chance of winning again in 2024.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a zealous convert to Donald Trump’s cause, once offered an expansive vision of how Trump should rule in a second term: “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Polls a year out from the 2024 election suggest Trump has a good chance of winning it. If he does, he and his allies want to be ready to run the country in ways they were not in 2016.

For more than a year, groups supporting Trump have been publicising plans to fill government roles with proven Trump loyalists if he wins a second term.

Trump believes his first term was undermined by “deep state” bureaucrats, “weak” lawyers and even “woke generals”. Some of his opponents argue that government officials indeed acted as “guardrails” during Trump’s administration, saving the country from his worst instincts.

There seems to be a near consensus among Trump’s friends and foes that his authoritarian second term plans would require more cooperative government officials than he had last time around.

But how much could Trump genuinely reshape the United States government?

Theory of bureaucratic politics

In 1971, political scientist Graham Allison wrote Essence of Decision, an analysis of the Kennedy administration’s actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Allison argued that foreign policy decisions of the United States government could not be understood simply as rational responses to external situations. Decisions are political outcomes resulting from complicated “games” played between different actors within the government.

Even in foreign policy, a domain where the US president has a lot of power compared to other areas of policy, the president needs help making decisions. Those decisions reflect bargaining between cabinet secretaries, military figures, diplomats and advisers, all of whom have their own interests and viewpoints.

One of the book’s earliest reviewers, the realist international relations scholar Stephen Krasner, was unimpressed by this analysis. He believed it would be popular with high-level policy-makers because it obscured their responsibility for the decisions they made. In the end, Krasner argued, there is a single decision-maker in US foreign policy, and that is the president. Games may be played among the president’s staff and bureaucrats, but they are games whose rules are written by the president and whose players are chosen by the president.

Allison’s theory would resonate with those who imagine a “deep state” establishment thwarting the president’s agenda. Trump is not the first president to rail against entrenched opposition in his own administration, especially in foreign policy. Barack Obama’s staff complained of “The Blob”, a militaristic establishment that included Obama’s secretary of defense. Other Democratic presidents also used blob-like metaphors. Allison noted that John F. Kennedy described the State Department as “a bowl of jelly”, while Franklin D. Roosevelt said that trying to change anything in the Navy was “like punching a feather bed”.

Smashing the administrative state

Trump’s allies have ambitions beyond enforcing loyalty to Trump, who can only serve one more term. His former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called early in Trump’s first term for the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. This may sound new and radical, but it broadly aligns with the aims of conservative policy ever since Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Congress delegates many of the powers of government to dozens of independent regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. These bodies are given the power to do things like setting and enforcing clean air standards, investigating and publishing consumer complaints over financial services, and conducting elections on union representation.

The legitimacy of these agencies has long been attacked by conservatives, who believe they bypass legislatures to advance liberal policy goals. Lawyers in the Reagan and Bush administrations developed the theory of the “unitary executive”, which asserted the right of the President to fire uncooperative civil servants and questioned the constitutionality of independent government agencies.

Towards the end of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to create Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as political appointees, stripping them of their employment protection. Biden rescinded the order a few days into his presidency, but Trump’s allies now see it as the key to finally taking control of the administrative state.