While Trump’s protectionism means a very misguided tax increase on American consumers and businesses, some of his other fiscal policies are praiseworthy.
The spending reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill are small, but laudable. The changes to Medicaid, for instance, save money and limit costly gimmicks by state governments.
The rescission bill only saves about $9 billion (out of about $7 trillion!), but I’m delighted that Big Bird and the rest of the moochers at NPR and CPB have been defunded.
I also have to give Trump credit for cutting the bureaucracy. Here’s a chart that shows how some bureaucracies will be pared between 2024 and 2026.
The above visuals come from an article in the Washington Post by Jeremy B. Merrill, Kati Perry, and Jacob Bogage.
Here are some of the relevant excerpts.
President Donald Trump and his advisers have called for dramatically shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, dispatching officials to agency after agency to block funding and slash staffing. …As part of Trump’s 2026 budget request, the White House laid out in detail how many employees the executive branch hopes to cut. It envisions a government with 5 percent fewer employees compared to the final year of the Biden administration.
That would cut more than 114,000 jobs, while adding several thousand for immigration enforcement and border security. The government would go from having about 2,142,000 employees in 2024 to about 2,028,000 in 2026. That figure reflects full-time employment, even if one job is done by two part-timers. …The Agriculture Department, where the White House is calling for the most cuts, would shed more than 31,000 employees — about 35 percent of its 91,000 employees as of last year. …
The departments of Education, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, all longtime targets of some conservative policymakers, would also see thousands fewer employees. …The departments of Commerce and Homeland Security would gain thousands of new jobs, including at the Patent and Trademark Office, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard.
Speaking of bureaucracies that are gaining workers, here are the depressing visuals from the story.
Since some these departments (such as Transportation and Commerce) shouldn’t exist, I obviously prefer the red boxes from above to these green boxes.
I’ll close by noting that Trump’s plan to shed 100,000-plus bureaucrats is not radical.
As you can see from this FedWeek data, the overall size of the bureaucracy has been growing steadily.
Assuming Trump is successful, America will still have far more bureaucrats in 2026 than it did under Bush or Clinton.
Moreover, firing bureaucrats may not necessarily save money if the law says an agency has to spend a certain amount of money. So it will be interesting to see whether Trump demands (and Congressional Republicans deliver) smaller budgets.
Based on Trump’s profligacy in his first term, I’m not optimistic. But maybe some of his appointees learned from those mistakes and will be more aggressive now.
P.S. The number of bureaucrats is not the only problem. Another problem is that they tend to be overpaid compared to their counterparts in the productive sector of the economy.
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