Donald Trump’s promise to tear down the federal bureaucracy could deliver major consequences for public health organizations across the United States, but his efforts will simultaneously expose how “resilient the deep state really is,” which a columnist argued Monday is “actually much more benign” than the president-elect believes.
While there “really is a deep state” operating within the federal health agencies, the reality is it is a much more rational one than how Trump has portrayed it, Nicholas Florko wrote Monday in The Atlantic.
“And he might not be able to easily tear it down,” according to Florko, who added that the deep state was on full display in blocking Trump’s decisions in the early days of the pandemic.
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“Public-health officials didn’t buck Trump to sabotage him. They did so because both measures were scientifically unsolid,” he wrote. “Many scientists, lawyers, and doctors are involved in each and every decision that federal-health agencies make, because the decisions must be evidence-based. Arbitrary decisions based on conspiracy theories or political whims can, and will, be challenged in court.”
Florko continued his piece by writing that threats of mass firings at the FDA by Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – “presumably to install loyalists” – should be taken seriously. He added that Trump’s next term “will be one of the biggest challenges facing our federal health system.”
“No president in modern history has been so intent on bending health agencies to his will, and he seems even more emboldened to do so now than in his first go-around,” Florko concluded. “Trump will likely have some successes — some people may be fired, and some important policies may be scrapped. America is about to find out just how resilient the deep state really is.”
