Photo by James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
What should we think about President Trump’s relentless attacks on the government institutions responsible for keeping us safe and telling us the truth?
The FBI, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve. These are each bedrock institutions of the national government. Their purview lies outside the typical partisan battles over domestic politics concerning the social safety net, tax policy, and emotional hot-button issues such as abortion and guns. They are led by experts in the field and staffed by career government officials who are model civil servants working for the American people.
In recent weeks, the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi have purged the senior levels of the Department of Justice and FBI and weakened the FBI’s counter terrorism units focused on preventing another 9/11. The president and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. have attacked the scientific integrity of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), causing a mass resignation of senior leaders.
On the economic front, the president fired the labor economist in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the June jobs numbers proved disappointing and, last week, he escalated his campaign to bring the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, under his control. The president wants Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell and the other governors to manipulate monetary policy to provide him rosy economic numbers. The problem: “experts have long warned that interfering with the Fed could bring about catastrophic economic and financial consequences.”
By firing, or making moves to fire, their leaders the president has put “the independence of each of these American institutions in question.” In doing so, Trump “is risking the credibility of agencies [that] play a vital role in providing information needed to guide major decisions about the nation’s course.”
Today, the U.S. government is being destroyed agency by agency. Without a seasoned counterterrorism group at the FBI, the nation leaves the door open to terrorist attacks on the home front. Without the medical experts at the CDC, it is much more likely that the Ebola virus arrives on our shores when we could have helped stop it in Africa or Asia. Without vaccines, diseases that were once declared dead in the United States, such as measles, are staging a comeback, killing children and putting adults in the hospital. Without a central bank overseeing the economy and ignoring political winds, the danger of an economic meltdown or astronomical inflation increases, radically.
The nation’s public health nightmare was spotlighted by a Washington Post headline: “As RFK Jr. Upends America’s Public Health System, Trump Cheers Him On: Trump pledged he’d empower Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ‘go wild’ on health care. The president has kept his promise.” The previous nine C.D.C. directors who served in Democratic and Republican administrations going back to 1977 wrote a joint New York Times opinion article (Sept. 1, 2025) with the headline: “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy is Endangering Every American’s Health.”
The radical nature of the Trump/Kennedy attack on the nation’s health was captured in this quote from Allan M. Brandt, a public health historian at Harvard. “I never have seen an instance of an advanced, affluent country with among the finest scientific resources and leaders in the world be under assault, not from small pockets of the public or people with unusual beliefs, but from the government itself.” (Italics added) Brandt could have been talking about the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health, the climate scientists formerly at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, FEMA, etc. whose job was to protect and serve the American public.
Flat-Earth Insanity Rooted in Fascism
What we are witnessing in Washington, D.C. in the second Trump administration is more than motivated conservatives slashing the size of government. That’s the cover story. Instead, the assault goes deeper. President Trump’s nihilistic attack on truth-telling, scientific facts, history, and reasoned debates about policy is a rejection of the Enlightenment principles upon which the American republic stands. Its anti-intellectual qualities echo the ruling philosophy of Vladimir Putin, as detailed by historian Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
The only person joyous with President Trump’s job performance is Mr. Putin. The Russian dictator’s number one goal is to undermine and destroy the United States as a global superpower. Only in his first year of his second term, an unburdened, id-driven Donald Trump has earned an “A” on his progress report card from his mentor, coach, and one-time KGB-handler, Mr. Putin.
True, President Putin snubbed his pupil at their recent Alaska summit. Putin got what he wanted – red-carpet treatment as an equal superpower with the United States. Then Putin showed his pupil who is boss. He refused to make the concessions necessary for a Ukraine-Russian peace deal and a Nobel Peace Prize for Mr. Trump – a peacetime president who wants to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Is Donald Trump a real-life Manchurian candidate, an asset trained and controlled, knowingly or unknowingly, by Moscow? We don’t know. What we see is that a wholesale, systematic, step-by-step destruction of the U.S. government is taking place at President Trump’s direction. It was President Trump who brought Elon Musk to Washington and unleashed Musk and his fictitious Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle the federal agencies and fire legions of senior government workers with decades of experience.
As CEO of the nation, President Trump believes he should be in control of everything and that everyone answers to him. Who else but an egomaniac would take over the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, tell the Intel chairman to step down, and demand that the nation’s universities change their curriculums to fit his ideological whims?
Why is Trump attacking the federal agencies that protect our health and safety? Because strongmen of the present, like the kings of the past, cannot allow independent centers of authority that challenge their wisdom, their desires, their omnipotence. As Snyder points out, in autocracy, “politics must follow the caprice of a single ruler.”
Invented by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, fascism celebrates a cult-like connection between the leader and his followers and substitutes force and violence over law and reason. Guided by the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, Vladimir Putin shows other authoritarian leaders how to move “away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.”
In Snyder’s telling, the concepts and practices of today’s reactionary politics have traveled east to west. As an example, the word “fake,” as in “fake news” was used in Russian and Ukraine long before it was employed by Trump in the United States.
It’s a long way from “The government is the problem” to “Let’s destroy the government,” but that is the road traveled by the modern Republican Party. Now that reckless, intellectually irresponsible trip endangers both the nation and each of us as individuals and families. In Madison’s Sorrow: Today’s War on the Founders and America’s Liberal ideal, I highlight both the Enlightenment roots of the American experiment and the dark forces that have pushed the GOP to the far-right.
When President Ronald Reagan famously said, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” he was not saying we should destroy the government. He was making the argument that entrepreneurs and business can do many things better than policy wonks and regulators in Washington, D.C. He was saying let the market be innovative and make money. Reagan wanted to prune the size of government, not hack it to death.
In the tradition of both Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, many Republicans want lower taxes and less regulation. In the abstract that recipe can sound enticing. But the argument for robust taxes on the wealthy and intelligent regulation is a strong one. California is the mega-economic engine it is today, in large part, because of Governor Pat Brown’s visionary investments in the early 1960s.
A New Deal Democrat, Edmund G. Brown was California governor from 1959 to 1967. Using taxes, he built the nine-campus University of California system, teaming it with dozens of Cal State university campuses. He constructed the California aqueduct that brought water to Southern California and he built the world-famous freeway system that crisscrosses California and allows comedians on Saturday Night Live to do skits about taking the 405 to 101 and back to the 10 and down the 5. Governor Reagan did not take a knife to any of these accomplishments. The taxes paid to build Governor Brown’s vision paid off exponentially. Having recently passed Germany, California is today the fourth largest economy in the world. Take that, Texas!
Across the nation and in D.C., the dedicated MAGA cohort that drives the Republican Party appears to believe that the federal government is unnecessary. Why have the Federal Emergency Management Agency when you can look to underfunded state emergency efforts to duplicate each other and be inadequate to the task when a major disaster of Katrina proportion strikes? We can list endless examples of the brain-dead idiocy taking place under President Trump’s leadership.
True conservatives do not hate government. Instead, as Edmund Burke, one of their philosophical heroes stressed, what is important is having people with skills and knowledge running the government. Burke hated both amateurs and revolutionaries. In the far-right MAGA crowd running the nation from the White House we have both.
Scathing words that Burke wrote about the French revolutionaries in 1790 apply to the Trump White House today:
As they have inverted the order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body … They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy; but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 161)