This article is adapted from Karl Zinsmeister’s new book MY WEST WING: A very personal account of work in the White House…and how to solve Washington’s perpetual resistance to reform.
If you try to pick at the governmental knots that tie down our nation, you will hear certain mantras over and over.
“It has always been like this.”
“You can’t possibly change that.”
“We don’t work that way here.”
“That’s not how it’s done.”
For three years I served in the White House as chief domestic policy adviser to the President, and I heard these kinds of responses constantly. From agency managers. From staff in Congress and the West Wing. From lobbyists and jaded journalists. Prevailing orthodoxies and power alignments quickly smother all sparks of deviation.
The forces blocking improvements are rarely big immutable factors like lack of resources, or missing technology, or some hard physical limitation. Rather it is inertia, special interests, bureaucratic lethargy, and political pettifogging that keeps everything locked in place. The biggest enemy of change is the demand for business-as-usual among the managerial class that controls our existing government systems. Agency elites and rank-and-file unite in dead-set opposition to innovations that might slenderize government or allow it to be redirected by people other than the cadres currently in control.
The biggest enemy of change is the demand for business-as-usual among the managerial class that controls our existing government systems.
Administrative resistance to reform has left Washington littered with dysfunctional tar pits. For literally 20 years the FAA has been “rolling out” NextGen, its desperately needed tech modernization of air traffic control, and still nothing is properly automated. The Pentagon has failed its annual audit for the last seven years running, yet no heads have rolled. The federal retirement system is administered, in the year 2025, on paper forms hand marked in ink and stapled together. The VA has more than doubled its staff and quintupled its costs (the budget soaring from $67 billion to $370 billion in the last two decades), yet backlogs, service lapses, and administrative scandals abound.
In My West Wing, a new book drawing lessons from my years in the White House, I describe many encounters with governmental dead zones like these. Take, for instance, air traffic control. In the first 60 days of this year, there were 100 dangerous aviation incidents in the U.S., including one that killed 67 people when an American Airlines flight smashed into a helicopter at Reagan National Airport in D.C. Those 100 incidents and close calls were actually less than we experience over two months of a typical year. Last-minute interventions by our skilled pilots and ground controllers prevent most such emergencies from taking lives, but the longstanding reality is that we are enduring more peril in the air than we ought. This all stems from the failure of our federal government to maintain a modern air traffic control system.
And safety is not our only problem. In 2024, fully 37% of all U.S. scheduled airline flights were delayed or cancelled. That translates into millions of ruined business meetings, missed weddings, wasted time, squandered jet fuel, and needless inefficiency.
My staff and I worked hard to push the Federal Aviation Administration beyond their antique green screens, vacuum tubes, and floppy disks that belong in museums. At a time when normal cars use sophisticated GPS systems, it’s shocking that our planes are navigated by fuzzy radio, radar, and binoculars. It’s unconscionable that the FAA is allowed to operate the vast network controlling air travel while also serving as the regulator that arbitrates all issues of air safety, congestion, and modernization. That conflict of interest is exacerbated by the usual bureaucratic follies—footdragging by unions, selfish lobbying by private plane owners, airlines demanding the feds pay for putting navigational gear into their planes, elected officials who block closures of outdated FAA facilities, and more.
I’m sure some readers right now must be thinking: Operational failure is what happens when the federal government starves an agency for funding. If we’d just give the poor FAA the money they deserve, things would be fine. But that’s utterly mistaken. Fifteen years ago, when I was working in the White House, the FAA budget was $14 billion. By 2025, they were receiving $27 billion. A lack of money is not their problem. Our air traffic control system is just a mismanaged dinosaur.
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Fifteen years ago, when I was working in the White House, the FAA budget was $14 billion. By 2025, they were receiving $27 billion. A lack of money is not their problem. Our air traffic control system is just a mismanaged dinosaur.
And the FAA is only one place among hundreds where the federal establishment’s truculent resistance to reform hit me in the face as I worked in the White House. Consider the land claims overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The government completely lost control of the process of recording and updating the land claims to which Native Americans are entitled by their tribal memberships. Millions of acres of land, mostly in the West, ended up in limbo as a result—unable to be farmed, built on, mined, sold, or otherwise made use of. Simply because the ownership documents became an impenetrable snarl under federal oversight.
Another needless mess was electronic health records. My staff and I struggled to get the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to let go of their outdated protocols and proprietary systems and create a modern system of uniform electronic health records so that servicemembers and veterans could have access to accurate documentation of their medical histories as they moved through different bases, out into civilian care, through VA clinics, under the umbrella of the TriCare system, and so forth. That was a significant software-building task, but far from a moonshot—the kind of thing that administrators in a competent organization should be able to complete in, at most, a few years. Not in the federal government, though. Turf wars, timidity about making commitments, lack of vision, and other factors turned this into a messy, expensive, decades-long struggle.
As with electronic health records, there are many corners of government where almost everyone agrees that a certain reform would be desirable, yet nothing changes. Like prison jobs. Research shows that one of the best ways to prevent incarcerated men and women from repeating their crimes (and being restive while they are still behind bars) is to set them up in real jobs, where they will learn to show up, absorb instructions, pick up skills, collaborate with others, labor steadily, get paid, save earnings, and develop economic competence. Ideally, every major lockup would have busy workshops where inmates can put their energy into productive activity instead of fighting, weightlifting, and neck tattooing. These workshops could supply goods or services we current import from low-wage foreign countries, and their output would reduce the taxpayer costs of incarceration. Yet only a minority of state and federal inmates have access to serious jobs in prison industries today—thanks to blockages by unions, corporations, left-wing activists, and politicians with various objections.
Business-like competence is entirely missing from vast swaths of state activity. The government I worked within 15 years ago was, believe me, hardly a lean and clean operation. So it’s shocking to note that in just the last decade and a half, Washington expenditures have skyrocketed far above what I knew:
Total Federal Outlays
2008: $3 trillion
2024: $7 trillion
That’s a spike upward of 250%, over a period when inflation rose just 50%. You are looking at the definition of runaway spending.
That’s a spike upward of 250%, over a period when inflation rose just 50%. You are looking at the definition of runaway spending.
It would be nice to report that we got our money’s worth. But there are few places where the feds produced any clear improvement in outcomes. Indeed there are lots of places where, somehow, we got worse results despite the spending explosion. Education. National defense. Crime. National unity.
And an even more concerning development correlates with this massive bloat: rising application of government power to manipulate, coerce, corral, control, or intimidate citizens. When the FBI starts investigating parents who register complaints at school-board meetings, and surveilling Catholics who attend the Traditional Latin Mass, when social-media and tech companies are forced by White House aides to pull down certain kinds of posts, when IRS records are selectively leaked, when a new federal office to prosecute “disinformation” is proposed, when turning down a vaccination or sex-identity demand gets a pilot or businesswoman or police officer sacked, we have moved beyond government incompetence into government malfeasance.
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With this sorry record in view, many of us who have spent our lives as “conservatives”—citizens who are skeptical of radical change, preferring careful, incremental, gradual improvements of society—suddenly find ourselves in unexpected territory. When our government is practicing a depressing mix of failure and illiberalism, when it seems incapable of doing good things, but dangerously interested in crimping freedoms, our instinct to preserve and refine shrivels. Conserving dysfunctional institutions has no appeal. Suddenly, shutting down broken entities and building anew has appeal to even the most cautious patriots. This is what produced the icon-breaking impulse that swept our federal government in 2025.
In my book, I describe the basic “do no harm” philosophy I brought into the White House two decades ago. I hated the idea of levers of power being pulled in ways that disrupt ordinary citizens and innocent bystanders. Today, I still strongly prefer governance that is as unobtrusive on daily life as possible. But like many other Americans, I was mortified by the emergence in Washington, over the last decade and a half, of practices that were more controlling, more crusading, more coercive than anything ever seen in the U.S. Undoing these encroachments requires more pugnacious forms of statecraft.
The stakes have been ratcheted up by radical new threats. The Great Awokening. The COVID lies and mandates. The hypocritical exemptions to the COVID mandates granted for the BLM riots. Disturbing new racial and sexual ideologies. Vast expansions of federal spending and power. Urban disorder self-inflicted by foolish crime policies. Political weaponization of our system of justice.
These developments pushed public opinion into dramatically new places. A decade ago, there was no broad public support for shutting down the U.S. Department of Education. Then the Biden Administration used the Department to force esoteric sexual identity politics into public schools and to shift billions of student loans from the shoulders of recipients to taxpayers. Suddenly, the impossible became inevitable.
In the past, the small squad of auditors doing today’s DOGE work could never have redirected entire bureaucracies. But the explosion of federal spending and the apparent unreformability of federal agencies exasperated the public, and convinced them the D.C. stables needed to be washed out with a powerful firehose. Enter the men in helmets.
But the explosion of federal spending and the apparent unreformability of federal agencies exasperated the public, and convinced them the D.C. stables needed to be washed out with a powerful firehose. Enter the men in helmets.
Few observers anticipated the cultural warfare that would produce this urgent backlash. Even fewer realized how willing the public would be to accept a certain amount of chaos in the process of rolling back these government intrusions. And hardly anyone imagined that an elected president could be as dogged as Donald Trump has been in pursuing a government makeover.
Former management consultant Aaron Renn has documented the ways people typically respond to national failures. Conservative and moderate Americans have traditionally favored two courses of action: Reform or Withdrawal.
Reform of failing institutions involves altering policies, changing leadership, agitating in the public square for new procedures. Worried that shrinking defense spending exposes Americans to danger? Lead a military renaissance and buildup of forces.
Withdrawal means that you step away from defective entities and find another option. Endlessly disappointed with urban education? Launch charter schools to give families an alternative to conventional government-run schooling.
Americans on the Left have generally taken more aggressive tacks to changing governance. One of their favorite tactics has been institutional Capture. Patiently feed your activists into the operating ranks of an organization, gradually take it over from within, and then turn it into whatever you want. Over the last few generations, progressives captured universities, labor unions, the media, and more in just this fashion.
An even more confrontational approach is to delegitimize and Destroy a disfavored institution. The traditional family, confidence in the police, vocational education in high schools, classical core curricula in colleges, religion in the public square—these have faded in the face of withering assaults from the left.
For decades, conservatives acted almost solely as defenders and refiners of society. Progressives were active in attacking and grabbing the controls.
By 2025, many conservatives had come to feel like patsies when it came to strategies for improving government. Their prudence, protecting, and conserving had merely kept failed procedures and rotten agencies in place. Progressives, meanwhile, had taken over much of our government from within. In an era where so much of our culture was veering into dangerous places, it suddenly felt stifling and stupid to be a conserver.
Their prudence, protecting, and conserving had merely kept failed procedures and rotten agencies in place. Progressives, meanwhile, had taken over much of our government from within. In an era where so much of our culture was veering into dangerous places, it suddenly felt stifling and stupid to be a conserver.
President Trump stepped briskly into this picture. He roared up and “ruthlessly stripped away the pretenses,” as Ross Douthat put it, replacing polite shams with painful truths. Tear down the mess, said Trump, and rebuild from scratch. He flashed into action on the Attack side of the social-change matrix, where only politicians of the Left had previously operated.
The unfolding of the second Trump Administration made rude shocks and wholesale changes the norm. “Hulk-smashing” is what commentator Rod Dreher (a sympathizer) called it. Rougher, more frantic, more ad hoc than ideal—but better than letting the arch-villain Abomination take over the world.
Donald Trump has many of the qualities that our mothers warned us to guard against—self-absorption, braggadocio, a lack of humility, a taste for sycophancy. As historian David Starkey puts it, Trump “is crude, he’s brutal, he’s in many ways preposterous…but he’s confronting people with the truth that there are brutal facts. The world is real. You can’t magic it.”
In more normal times, many Americans would never have countenanced Trump’s raucous knock-it-down-and-start-over method. But destructive cultural radicalism, strangled freedoms, economic decline, and overseas dangers left even many conservative citizens ready for a dramatic break with the past. Anything to shake off societal sickness and give our body politic a chance to start over in fresh and fit ways.
Stopping a runaway train is not something you do gently in stages. You slam on the emergency brake and grab a tight hold. Afterward, you put out fires and splint limbs. It’s not an ideal course, but sometimes it’s the only way. The American public decided President Trump is the emergency brake our country needs right now. No other contemporary politician exhibited the energy and fearlessness needed to slow our descent into cultural insanity, economic delusion, and international weakness.
For the crazy moment in which we found ourselves, Trump’s pugnacious strategy felt necessary, even refreshing. He is a highly unlikely savior, a sharp break from all prior Presidents. But he seemed to be the only contemporary figure capable of clearing blockages, cutting out tumors, and resetting our national health.
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There is still more demolition and starting-over to come in Washington. Many Americans, however, hope that some time fairly soon we can return to the more conservative approaches to governance of bolstering and refining. Once common-sense policies and more responsive institutions are in place, lots of us will say a prayer of gratitude. And then we’ll earnestly hope that our nation’s capital can become a quieter and more boring place.
Because burn-it-down approaches are not a sustainable way to run the country. At some point authority needs to be exercised in ways that are less jarring and disruptive, more temperate, more deferential to precedent and continuous rule of law. Finding consensus, building alliances, and getting away from a wartime footing will be essential.
Because burn-it-down approaches are not a sustainable way to run the country. At some point authority needs to be exercised in ways that are less jarring and disruptive, more temperate, more deferential to precedent and continuous rule of law.
“Government…is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master,” our early leaders warned. That’s why Jefferson urged that federal rule should be what he called mild—not high-handed, never arrogant or imperious, modest in scope, and light in its press upon people. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson concluded.
Do we want our governmental and social institutions to doggedly defend essential values of freedom? Of course. But attracting people to the good is better than pushing them there. Someone once said our vital national institutions should be the opposite of the way we like our eggs: firm in the center (to protect crucial principles), but soft and porous at the outer edges (so it’s easy for new arrivals to enter in).
A cleansed and restored America will need leaders who respect consensus. People averse to radical change, utopias, or living in armed camps. People who want the state to avoid encroaching on the organic community life of citizens and families. Then we can stop focusing on events in our capital and pour energy instead into our traditional projects of building enterprises, raising worthy offspring, tending our social institutions, and interacting with our neighbors with restraint, forgiveness, and generosity.
There are scads of cautionary examples from history warning that even the most noble and necessary crusades can swing too far into purity campaigns, personality cults, vengefulness, self-indulgence, and tyrannizing. Think of the excesses of Oliver Cromwell at the end of the English Civil War. The bloodiness that followed the French Revolution. Andrew Jackson turning his egalitarian movement into an ugly system of personal spoils. FDR bullying opponents to swing the country toward collectivism.
Even the most welcome reformer can inadvertently create a terrible mirror image of the wrongs he arrived to overturn. The guillotines in Paris sliced many innocent necks. The Bolsheviks became far more abusive than the Czars.
We must hope that today’s Disruptor-in-Chief will gradually evolve into a more disciplined and restrained leader. If there isn’t eventually a transition of this sort, the Trump era could end in flaming hubris and overreach. From Odysseus to Napoleon, that’s the way bold chargers always fall down—pride and overconfidence causing fatal mistakes.
We must hope that today’s Disruptor-in-Chief will gradually evolve into a more disciplined and restrained leader.
Niccolo Machiavelli was a jaded political strategist in Renaissance Italy who prescribed manipulation, ruthlessness, and deceit to win political battles. He dismissed Christian ethics. His win-at-all-costs, might-makes-right philosophy was attractive to strongmen like Henry VIII and Joseph Stalin.
Machiavelli has never been an American favorite. But even in idealistic nations like ours, it’s not wrong to study him for hints on how to get difficult things done against opposition. I’m neither surprised nor troubled that there is a spurt of interest in Machiavellian strategy today in Washington. For years, a powerful progressive establishment closed ranks and pointed spears at anyone questioning their governing orthodoxies, so we ended up with the inmates running the asylum. (“A trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.” “A person’s sex is assigned, not intrinsic.” “Locking up criminals is wrong.”)
With sensible Americans losing over and over in the culture wars, you can see why rummaging through Italian utilitarianism to find ways of leveling the playing field might have some attraction. But the men and women who govern in America should never do more than dip occasionally and tactically into Machiavelli’s toolbox. He can help us understand how political war gets waged and won. But we must avoid being swept into the cynical power-grabbing that he and many other autocrats have pursued through history.
Abraham Lincoln is a fine example for leaders who want to win battles without losing their souls. Lincoln had enough realism in his veins to recognize that there were points where he had to suspend habeas corpus, ram through a military draft, seize newspapers, defy the separation of powers to release an Emancipation Proclamation, and fire generals until he finally found a hellhound. He did all of those things, but he did them reluctantly, temporarily, carefully, and with provisos.
Even as Lincoln found his inner Machiavelli when essential, he drew much more often and devotedly on a paragon who offered maxims utterly inverse to those of the crafty Italian. Lincoln leaned on and learned from Christ’s truths far more than any other body of wisdom. He used God’s assurances to make sense of life, to cope with pressures, to inspire action, to comfort, to show citizens how to bear suffering, and ultimately triumph. In our humane republic, these softer Christian virtues are ultimately superpowers, not weaknesses.
Many of us who worked in the White House after Lincoln have tried to find his golden balance of hard heads and soft hearts, his mix of battling and reconciling. That’s an extremely difficult synthesis. As I perched in the West Wing, though, it was always clear to me that the political ethic of “the end justifies the means” is a grim double-edged sword. Useful in immediate close combat. But sure to lacerate the wielder and bloody many allies striving around him.
Administrators of our great representative government must mesh the practical imperatives of Princes of Power with the deep wisdoms of the Prince of Peace.
A political crusader who underestimates the subtler merits of self-control, endurance, and brotherhood, who scorns qualities like humility, decency, and neighborliness in principle (rather than just pausing them occasionally in emergencies), will find that his haughtiness eventually leads not to strength but to professional defeat and terrible personal unhappiness. Administrators of our great representative government must mesh the practical imperatives of Princes of Power with the deep wisdoms of the Prince of Peace.
That is excruciatingly hard. But freedom’s best leaders, like Lincoln, know that to keep a democracy healthy for generation after generation you must sometimes trade martial triumphs for the more enduring advantages of mutuality. That insight often baffles, or inspires derision in, aggressive brandishers of power. But the unremittingly bellicose have been humbled again and again by the opposing approach of the world’s most successful revolutionary creed: “Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you…. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Over the long run, that is the path to real success and authority in a self-governing nation.
It is a strange and beautiful reality that the best politicians who manage to approximate those biblical principles will not only be more beloved, they will also be more effective at managing free people. Because they acknowledge human nature, human frailties, and human needs. Power-eschewing, self-denying politicians will lose some day-to-day skirmishes, but their solutions built on respect and empathy will eventually be preferred by ordinary people—who recognize that society is ultimately a compact, not a cage fight.
President Trump has provided valuable instruction for future occupants of the White House. His foremost lesson is the need for bold action and unshakeable nerve when our nation is in peril. The limp, craven, go-with-the-conventional-wisdom timidity that so many pre-Trump leaders exhibited should be anathema henceforth.
Next, let’s hope President Trump can demonstrate to his successors what should happen after the emergency brake has been pulled and the runaway train has been slowed. If he can shift away from the domineering demands of crisis control and find the temperance, respect, caution, and civility that are necessary in fostering a healthy popular republic, his administration could become a lasting model.
