DEMOCRACY WATCHFiring Civil Servants and Dismantling Government Departments Is How Aspiring Strongmen Consolidate Personal Power – Lessons from Around the Globe
A well-functioning bureaucracy is an organization of highly qualified civil servants who follow established rules to prevent abuses of power. Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior. For this reason, aspiring strongmen are especially likely to go after them.
With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues.
Soon after coming to office for a second term, Trump aggressively sought to overhaul Washington and bring the federal government in line with his political agenda. He is spearheading an effort to purge the government’s ranks of people he perceived as his opponents and slash the size of long-standing bureaucratic agencies – in some instances dismantling them entirely.
At the helm of much of this is businessman Elon Musk, who is not only the world’s richest man but also the largest donor of the 2024 election and the owner of multiple businesses that benefit from lucrative government contracts.
Musk – and a small cohort of young engineers loyal to him but with little experience in government – descended on Washington, announced their control over multiple government agencies, fired career civil servants, and even strong-armed access to government payment systems at the Treasury Department, where the inspector general had just been sacked.
This unprecedented sequence of events in the U.S. has left many observers in a daze, struggling to make sense of the dramatic reshaping of the bureaucracy under way.
Yet, as researchers on authoritarian politics, we understand it is no surprise that a leader bent on expanding his own power, such as Trump, would see the bureaucracy as a key target. Here’s why.
Dismantle Democracy from Within
A well-functioning bureaucracy is an organization of highly qualified civil servants who follow established rules to prevent abuses of power. Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior.
For this reason, aspiring strongmen are especially likely to go after them. Whether by shuffling the personnel of agencies, creating new ones, or limiting their capacity for oversight, a common tactic among power-hungry leaders is establishing control over the government’s bureaucracy. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, for example, Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdoğan fired or detained as many as 100,000 government workers.
