As Trump slashes federal waste, he must also address crucial gaps in air safety, social security and more
No one who believes in limited government can do anything other than endorse the Trump Administration’s willingness to question and winnow the profusion of federal agencies.Carving out unnecessary and divisive programs focused on race or unachievable climate goals makes sense. For now, the federal judiciary looks to be the administration’s biggest obstacle, as evidenced by this week’s decision by US District Court Judge John Bates to force two agencies — the CDC and FDA — to restore websites taken down because they might violate the president’s executive order on biological males participating in women’s sports and other gender-related language. It was the latest in a series of court cases the White House has lost that should concern those hoping DOGE will lead to government reform. But those of us rooting for the president and Elon Musk should also be concerned about a risk the Department of Government Efficiency may pose — not just for unproductive civil servants and the Deep State but for the success of the Trump Administration.
Call it the risk of the “Hollow State” — a government stripped not just of waste, fraud, and abuse but of its capacity to respond to crisis, and perform the core jobs the American people actually want the government to do and assumes it can do so capably. Think of air traffic control, food safety, timely distribution of social security checks, public health, and, above all, law enforcement. A recent, pre-Trump series of concerning public crises — including halting disaster response, Trump’s near-assassination, contamination at a meat processing plant, and the cybersecurity failure that allowed a breach of federal personnel records — may superficially seem unrelated.But a closer look reveals unifying, underlying causes: persistent shortages of key employees. For the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on which Americans rely in the wake of disasters such as last fall’s floods in Florida and No...