A criminal case is not a chit. It’s not something you trade in exchange for political favors.

Perhaps the always-transactional President Donald Trump does not understand the importance of keeping the Department of Justice independent from partisan politics. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should.

Seven lawyers have now resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order to file a motion to dismiss the indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was charged in September in a public-corruption case. The Trump administration’s handpicked interim U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, quit rather than file the motion. According to a memo from Bove, Sassoon was directed to dismiss the case, not because of the merits of the case, but on the grounds that the charges were politically motivated and that they would interfere with Adams’s abilities to enforce violent-crime and immigration laws. A particularly galling detail of the directive was that the case be dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning that it could be filed again—a detail that created at least the impression that the Trump administration would be keeping Adams on a short leash to ensure his compliance with its wishes. Threatening prosecution for political gain is a violation of legal ethics.

[Quinta Jurecic: What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order?]

According to Sassoon’s own account, she appealed to the attorney general, to no avail, and resigned yesterday. In a letter to Bondi, Sassoon wrote that her duty to administer the law impartially included “prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, either for the defendant or those who appointed me.” Her firm stance triggered a cascade of resignations throughout the Department of Justice, from five lawyers at DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who similarly refused to file the motion to dismiss. Bove suspended the two assistant U.S. attorneys working on the case with Sassoon.

On Friday, one of those prosecutors, Hagan Scotten, resigned in a scathing letter to Bove. He called the accusation about political motivation for the indictment “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.” He said the other purported reason for the dismissal was even worse, blasting Bove’s use of criminal charges “to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” which he called “a violation of our laws and traditions.” He closed: “If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion, but it was never going to be me.”

Ultimately, a senior lawyer at the Public Integrity Section filed the motion, in an apparent effort to spare others from losing their jobs. It is easy to say all of the lawyers in the section should have resigned, but like many Americans, government lawyers have mortgages, child care, tuition, and other bills to pay. Moreover, if all 30 lawyers in the Public Integrity Section were to resign, they would in all likelihood be replaced with Trump loyalists, who would no doubt bear very little resemblance to the title of the section where they would work. One hopes that the judge assigned to the case will hold a hearing before granting the motion to dismiss, putting Bove under oath to explain his efforts, which so clearly seem to undermine the department’s integrity.

Lest anyone believe that Sassoon and Scotten are some sort of Democratic Party operatives, both have sterling conservative credentials. Sassoon is a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and an active member of the Federalist Society. Scotten is a military veteran, two-time Bronze Star recipient, and former law clerk to then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Supreme Court Chief Justice John R. Roberts Jr. This is not about party politics. It is about the Department of Justice’s responsibility to uphold the law.

I know from my 20 years as a federal prosecutor that DOJ lawyers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to carry out the president’s political agenda. While they may be expected to honor the president’s enforcement priorities, they are—or, at least, were—insulated from direct political control over any particular case in order to ensure the fair administration of justice and the public trust. The Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution specifically state that prosecutors may not consider “political association, activities, or beliefs” when making charging decisions. In addition, for the past 40 years, attorneys general have restricted communications between the White House and DOJ attorneys to protect their decisions from political influence.

[Read: Another edgelord comes to power]

Imagine a world where a president could use the threat of criminal charges or the promise to dismiss them as a way of coercing a public official to advance his policy agenda. Rather than serving the voters who elected that official in good faith, such a person would be beholden to the president, doing his bidding for fear of the criminal consequences. A governor or a mayor who agreed to such terms could even break laws with impunity so long as he went along with the president’s agenda. That kind of arrangement would violate the rule of law—the concept that the law applies equally to everyone. Moreover, it could have disastrous consequences for countless people living in that official’s jurisdiction.

DOJ lawyers pride themselves on working for an organization that is unique among federal agencies in its independence from politics. The heroes of the department are the attorneys general throughout history who stood up for the rule of law—Robert Jackson, who also worked as a Nuremberg prosecutor; Elliot Richardson, who resigned rather than fire the independent counsel during the Nixon administration; and Edward Levi, who implemented the post-Watergate norms and principles that guide federal prosecutors to this day. In more recent times, Sally Yates accepted termination in 2017 rather than implement the first iteration of Trump’s clearly unconstitutional travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. It had to be amended twice before it was upheld by the Supreme Court.

And now add the Valentine’s Day Seven to that pantheon of DOJ heroes.

* Source Images: John Lamparski / Getty; Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty; Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg / Getty; Mikroman6 / Getty.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency appear to have wide-reaching plans to remake the government with AI. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the head of the Technology Transformation Services, a federal IT division, invoked an “AI-first strategy” at a recent staff meeting.

There’s nothing wrong with using AI to streamline and improve federal services per se. The technology could be implemented democratically, with transparent guardrails and in service of constituents. But using AI to sweep away and replace swaths of civil servants, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders argued in a story for The Atlantic this week, is a very different matter. “If human workers are widely replaced with AI,” they wrote, “executives will have unilateral authority to instantaneously alter the behavior of the government, profoundly raising the stakes for transitions of power in democracy.”

The civil service, which translates federal policies into actions, consists of an enormous number of public servants and thus can be slow to change. That might be frustrating, but it also prevents executives from rapidly, unilaterally transforming the workings of the government. Unlike an army of human bureaucrats, an army of AI agents could, almost on a whim, be redirected to upend social-welfare programs, alter law-enforcement directives, and sidestep Congress. Donald Trump’s “unprecedented purge of the civil service might be the last time a president needs to replace the human beings in government in order to dictate its new functions,” Schneier and Sanders wrote. “Future leaders may do so at the press of a button.”

Illustration by The Atlantic: Sources: Getty.

It’s Time to Worry About DOGE’s AI Plans

By Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the Post, the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace “the human workforce with machines.” (Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.)

Using AI to make government more efficient is a worthy pursuit, and this is not a new idea. The Biden administration disclosed more than 2,000 AI applications in development across the federal government. For example, FEMA has started using AI to help perform damage assessment in disaster areas. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started using AI to look for fraudulent billing. The idea of replacing dedicated and principled civil servants with AI agents, however, is new—and complicated.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The Trump administration’s other major plan for AI is far less futuristic. The president and the oil-and-gas industry—which donated tens of millions to his reelection campaign—say fossil fuels may power the way to America’s AI dominance.

The chatbot boom, to hear tech executives tell it, will require unprecedented amounts of power, of which there currently isn’t enough. Soon, America just won’t have enough electricity, pushing the country further into the “energy emergency” Trump declared on his first day in office—and presenting an opportunity to build out natural-gas plants to power the data centers that AI relies on. Already, several major utilities are planning major fossil-fuel build-outs to meet growing demand from the technology. “The problem, though, is that the U.S. is not actually in an energy crunch,” I wrote in an article earlier this week. Rather than requiring more fossil fuels, AI seems to offer a pretense for expanding their production.

P.S.

Elon Musk appears on top of the world, or at least the U.S., at the moment. But his influence rests largely on the success of Tesla—and the car company is in an ever more precarious position, with Musk himself to blame, Patrick George writes.

— Matteo

The executive order rechristening the body of water known internationally as the “Gulf of Mexico” is not an easy document to take seriously. Portions of it read like a child’s research paper: “The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species.” The import of this and other facts is never quite explained. Perhaps the snapper will taste better now that it comes from the “Gulf of America.”

So, no, this is not a serious document. Is it an illegitimate one? The Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news-gathering organizations, appears to think so. Last month, a few days after Donald Trump issued the order, the AP announced that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico.” This week, the Trump administration retaliated by barring the AP’s reporters from covering White House events, placing the agency in an unenviable bind. The AP argues, convincingly, that denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment. To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.

A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from “legally questionable” to “plainly unconstitutional.” The “Gulf of America” rebrand is not one of them. A federal law passed in 1890 and updated in 1947 empowers the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “standardize” how the federal government refers to places. The board answers to the secretary of the interior, who answers to the president. That’s the same legal authority under which the Obama administration changed the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali.”

[David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat]

In fact, if Barack Obama hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the body of water between Mexico and Florida today. In physics, every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. In the Trump era, every progressive action generates an opposite MAGA reaction—but not an equal one. Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” began by changing “Denali” back to “Mt. McKinley.” Then, like an infomercial pitchman—but wait, there’s more—Trump tossed in the “Gulf of America” change, almost as a bonus.

Substantively, the stunt has nothing in common with the Obama administration’s decision on Mt. McKinley. The state of Alaska formally requested the change back in 1975, hardly a time of rampant woke excess, on the basis that “Denali”—the mountain’s historic name, still widely used by Alaskans—was a much better fit than “Mt. McKinley,” after a president who had never set foot in the state. Still, at a certain level of abstraction, Trump’s campaign to rename (and re-rename) mountains, gulfs, and military bases follows the same logic as the progressive version. Renaming a base named for a Confederate general, or a school named for a racist ex-president, is a declaration that values have changed since the days when those names were seen as acceptable. But in a democracy, values are determined by majority rule, and they don’t shift in only one direction. They can shift back.

The more that politicians mess around with place names, the more important it becomes for avowedly apolitical institutions to respond according to consistent principles. This is not so easy to do. In its style-guide update, the AP said that it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” because the Gulf is an international body of water that has been known by that name for 400 years. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world,” it said, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” It would, however, honor the change back to “Mt. McKinley” because, it said, “the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” (The Atlantic’s style guide matches the AP’s on this matter.)

But the federal law giving Trump the power to rename Denali applies explicitly “to both domestic and foreign geographic names.” If the AP is going to follow the federal government’s legally valid naming conventions, then it should go along with “Gulf of America” by default, no matter how stupid it sounds. Carving an exception because of the Gulf’s 400-year history is arbitrary—the same sort of appeal to tradition that reactionaries make to prevent progressive-coded changes. Why, indeed, should modern society continue to honor a name imposed by Spanish conquistadors? Nor is it uncommon for different countries to call a shared body of water by different names: What Americans call the “Rio Grande,” Mexicans call the “Rio Bravo.” This has not caused any kind of breakdown of the collective geographic imagination.

News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics. In 2019, the AP announced that the Ukrainian city of Kiev would henceforth be spelled “Kyiv.” (Chicken Kiev would remain untouched.) “To many Ukrainians,” the AP explained, “the former spelling Kiev appears outdated because it is associated with a time when Ukraine was part of the Russian and Soviet states, rather than an independent country.” That is a perfectly understandable reason for making the change, but it is also, on its face, a political one. By contrast, news organizations have resisted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to refer to his country as “Türkiye”—even after the U.S. State Department agreed to do so in 2023.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

These sorts of principled judgments are, as I said, hard to make. Trump makes them harder still by blowing past all standards of reasonableness or good faith, leaving high-minded institutions struggling to adapt. Even the best-designed rules break down when one side starts playing a completely different game. What if our president had decided to call it the “Gulf of Trump”? What if he had tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean? The man forces us to contemplate the previously unthinkable, because there is no norm or tradition that he won’t abrogate. For 134 years, “follow the Board on geographic names” was a simple, commonsense rule to follow. Then Trump got his hands on the Board.

None of this means that the Gulf of Mexico is now actually the Gulf of America in any kind of objective or even linguistic sense. Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. More than 12 years after it was renamed for Governor Hugh L. Carey, New Yorkers still refer to the passage between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the “Battery Tunnel.” Washington, D.C.’s airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998; many if not most residents still call it “National.” The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the “Gulf of Mexico” or the “Gulf of America.” And if you ever find yourself at a loss, here’s a tip: You can always just call it the “Gulf.”

During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

Just a few years ago, then-Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio said that if Donald Trump were reelected, he would advise the president to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.” Nearly four weeks into his new term, Trump appears to be executing that plan, attempting to fire or place on administrative leave thousands of federal employees perceived to be politically adverse to him, and reclassifying many more to make them fireable at will. Those hired in their stead will be vetted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, thanks to a new executive order.

Last week, two sets of FBI employees filed the first lawsuits challenging these moves on First Amendment grounds. Both allege that the employees were targeted as a form of retaliation. The essence of a First Amendment retaliation claim is that although the government may deny someone a valuable benefit for any number of reasons, “there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely,” including, pointedly, someone’s “constitutionally protected speech or associations.” The plaintiffs in the FBI cases allege that the Trump administration is demanding a list of 6,000 agents involved in investigating the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases in order to possibly punish or purge thousands of agents Trump perceives (surely wrongly in many instances) to be politically opposed to him. The FBI employees should win their First Amendment claims, especially if any mass purge takes place.

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

Zooming out, thousands of other federal employees could well make similar constitutional claims, because what the Trump administration is doing with the FBI appears to be but a small part of a much larger effort to resurrect a government-wide political-patronage system, something the First Amendment forbids.

From the founding until 1883, a “spoils”—as in, “to the victor belong the spoils”—system of political patronage took root and flourished in the federal government. New administrations would fire federal officials belonging to the other party and hire their own people. President Andrew Jackson became particularly associated with the spoils system after campaigning on rooting out corruption and firing nearly 10 percent of federal employees, replacing many with supporters upon taking office, but he was far from the only president to reward political cronies with federal jobs, as the University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw has explained.

Political-patronage systems promote corruption at the expense of effective governance, and Americans grew dissatisfied with the cronyism and moblike rule that flowed from the spoils system. Following decades of effort to enact civil-service reform, momentum surged when a disgruntled office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield in 1881. In response, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to “regulate and improve the civil service of the United States,” establishing a merit-based system for federal hiring.

Under the current federal civil-service regime, fewer than 4,000 federal employees—including constitutional officers, such as the attorney general and secretary of state, and top agency officials—serve at the president’s pleasure, fireable for political disagreements or pretty much any other reason. The overwhelming majority of the more than 2 million workers who daily serve the American people in the federal civil service are wisely protected from political firings.

That protection flows from something even deeper than the Pendleton Act and other federal statutes. In 1947, the Supreme Court was faced with a First Amendment challenge to the Hatch Act, which limits the extent to which most federal officials can engage in overt political activity while in office. The Court upheld the act but made clear that the First Amendment would prohibit Congress from directly restricting the ability to hold federal offices to members of one party, such as by enacting “a regulation providing that no Republican … shall be appointed to federal office.” Notwithstanding the Court’s guidance, the worst practices of political patronage continued to crop up in state and local governments, forcing the Supreme Court to elaborate the point and put a stop to spoils practices in a series of cases.

The most relevant case to our present-day situation began in 1980, when Republican Illinois Governor Jim Thompson issued an executive order freezing all hiring across state agencies absent express permission from his office. Requests for exceptions became routine, and an agency was set up inside the governor’s office to vet them. Five job-seekers sued, claiming that in practice, the order and exceptions were being used to create a political-patronage system favoring Republicans.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held that systems of political patronage like the one established by Thompson violate the First Amendment. Quoting one of its first patronage decisions, the Court reaffirmed that “conditioning public employment on the provision of support for the favored political party ‘unquestionably inhibits protected belief and association.’” Doing so “pressures employees to pledge political allegiance to a party with which they prefer not to associate, to work for the election of political candidates they do not support, and to contribute money to be used to further policies with which they do not agree.” It is “tantamount to coerced belief,” something the First Amendment plainly forbids. Nor did it matter that Thompson had not issued a direct order specifying that only Republicans would be hired, because “what the First Amendment precludes the government from commanding directly, it also precludes the government from accomplishing indirectly.”

There is an exception to the First Amendment bar on political hirings and firings. Those officials in legitimate policy making positions can be dismissed for political reasons without offending the Constitution. That’s because in America’s representative democracy, it is important that lawful policy reflects the political will of the voters, as voiced by the executive. But the executive cannot simply label large numbers of officials “policy makers” and render them all fireable at will. Instead, courts must look through labels to the substance of an official’s role and determine whether political alignment is necessary in that role. In any given dispute, the government has the burden of demonstrating that a particular position is in fact a policy-making one before the job-holder may be fired based on raw political allegiance.

The Trump administration seems set on flouting this precedent. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and those around him signaled that the MAGA movement would expect total loyalty from federal officials. On Inauguration Day, after taking office, Trump suggested that “all” of the “Biden bureaucrats” should be fired. The same day, Trump signed one executive order to freeze much merit-based federal hiring, and he signed another that will help him consolidate political control over existing employees. The latter order conveniently expanded the number of officials to be classified as policy makers—from fewer than 4,000 to potentially hundreds of thousands. The administration also expanded the type of agency hiring authority that would make bringing in loyalists easier. And late last month, federal employees were informed by email that the majority of federal agencies are likely to downsize, and that loyalty will be a determining factor in deciding who stays.

Meanwhile, purges of employees whom Trump likely views as politically misaligned with him have begun to roll out across agencies. The administration has directed agencies to fire most probationary staff, nearly all of whom were hired during the Biden administration. Department of Education employees were reportedly put on leave for simply attending a DEI training in 2017. The FBI officials who sued say they have reason to believe that the Department of Justice is planning to engage in the mass unlawful firing of agents who had any involvement in certain investigations related to President Trump, including the January 6 cases, and the lawful search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ attorneys involved in the January 6 prosecutions were terminated because their work on those cases purportedly would prevent them from “faithfully” implementing Trump’s agenda. At the beginning of February, the administration moved to shut down USAID entirely. Although the administration explains the move as aimed at preventing waste and fraud, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said—without citing any evidence to support the improbable claim—that the Trump administration had determined that “98 percent of the [USAID] workforce either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate,” and Elon Musk posted on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” As for replacing those fired, Trump signed a new executive order this week, directing that all future career-appointment hiring decisions be made in consultation with a team lead from Musk’s DOGE.

[Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

Taken together, the administration’s actions bear a striking resemblance to the Illinois patronage scheme that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional: freeze hiring, purge perceived political opponents, and consolidate all hiring and staffing decisions in a body close to the executive.

The Trump administration clearly knows that the First Amendment prohibits resurrecting a government-wide political-patronage system. That Inauguration Day executive order expanding the number of purported policy makers claims that “employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.” Similarly, the administration’s implementing guidance, issued at the end of January, in fact cites the Supreme Court’s anti-patronage decisions, specifying that “Patronage Remains Prohibited.”

But the administration’s actions and statements suggest that the resurrection of a political-patronage system is well under way. Particularly if political purges continue, courts must see the anti-patronage posturing as pretext and enforce the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court memorably put it in the Illinois case, “To the victor belong only those spoils that may be constitutionally obtained.”

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

Trump allies make noises about expert failures—and yes, experts sometimes do fail. In particular, MAGA world continues to demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic. (Those are arguable charges; Trump himself presided over a wave of shutdowns in 2020.) None of these complaints explains why DOGE teams have been unleashed in places such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for American spy satellites. Worse, Musk’s team accidentally posted sensitive information from NRO in what one intelligence official called a “significant breach” of security.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

DOGE also blundered into dismissing hundreds of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency within the Energy Department that is responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. It’s one thing to be angry about having to wear a mask at Costco; it’s another to engage in the apparent indiscriminate firing of more than 300 people who keep watch over nuclear materials. (The agency backtracked on Friday and rescinded some of those terminations.)

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect.

You can see this resentment almost every time President Trump (and Co-President Musk) speak. No one is allowed to know more about anything than Trump. When pressed, Trump will defensively say things such as “I’ve read a lot on it,” an implausible claim from a man who is famously reluctant to read. Musk, for his part, commands a personal fortune so large that it dwarfs the GDP of many small countries, and he brags about having a top U.S. security clearance—but he bristles at any doubts about whether he is, in fact, the most accomplished player of the video game Diablo IV.

For Trump and his allies, this kind of resentment is tightly threaded into  practical and self-interested concerns: Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery. Meanwhile, Musk and others believe that money should translate directly into power, and that their wealth should confer intellectual legitimacy. Such people chafe at the reality that getting their way still sometimes requires arguing with experts, and that opposing those experts requires knowledge. Their solution is not to listen or learn but to try to replace those troublesome pencil necks with pliable servants.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon firsthand: More than a year ago, Musk’s occasional sidekick David Sacks was so offended by an online disagreement with me about the Russia-Ukraine war that he publicly made a large donation to the GoFundMe page of a part-time professor in Canada whose views more closely aligned with his own. He did this in my name, as if that would help him gain the upper hand in an argument that required facts and expertise.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Another dynamic at play is that Trump, Musk, and many others treat “experts” and “elites” as functionally indistinguishable. This is a dishonest claim, but it is useful in mobilizing public sentiment against experts in the name of a mindless egalitarianism. It is also part of the overall ruse: The DOGE assault has nothing to do with merit or equality. Indeed, Musk’s attack on federal agencies, with one group of privileged and educated people trying to displace another, is the most intra-elite squabble Washington has seen in years.

A similar resentment may also drive the young volunteers who are waving Musk’s name in front of career government servants. Washington has always been full of disappointed strivers who feel they’ve been kept out of the game by snotty social and intellectual gatekeepers—and, as a former young striver in the capital, I can affirm that there’s some truth in that. Now they’re in charge and more than ready to become obnoxious new elitists themselves. (“Do I need to call Elon?” one young DOGE-nik reportedly snapped when a federal official had the temerity to deny him access to sensitive information.)

In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically.

A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.

That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility rates. And they found that after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically than after the 2016 election. According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.

Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea: Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.) And the study looked only at those three elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But plenty of  studies have found that political stability, political freedom, and political transitions all affect fertility. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work suggests that the next four years might follow similar trends.

In the U.S., partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew Democratic, families tend to be smaller. And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tilt more Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years. “I don't think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.

That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent. “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,” Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told me. They also consider more subjective factors, such as their own well-being, their feelings about the state of society, and their confidence (or lack thereof) in political leadership. Trump’s supporters may feel more optimistic than ever about the future, but his detractors feel otherwise. After a few short weeks in office, the president has already announced withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization, and paused funding for a slew of government services. Those include child-care-assistance programs, although the administration has promised to support policies to encourage family growth. “If you’re a Democrat and you really care about child care and family leave and climate change,” Dahl said, you might conclude that “this is maybe not the right time to bring a kid into the world.”

Some would-be parents aren’t just worried about the world they might bring a child into—they’re worried about themselves, too. In 2016, Roe v. Wade still protected Americans’ right to an abortion. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe, states across the country have enacted abortion bans. In some cases, those bans have meant that pregnant women have had to wait for care, or be airlifted to other states; as a direct result, at least five pregnant American women have died. These risks can weigh heavily. After the election, Planned Parenthood locations across the country saw a surge in appointments for birth control and vasectomies.

Brittany, a labor-and-delivery nurse in North Carolina, told me that she and her husband had decided to try for one more kid—she wanted a girl, after three boys—but after Trump was reelected, she changed her mind. (Brittany requested that I not use her last name, in order to protect her medical privacy.) During her first pregnancy, when she nearly lost her uterus to a severe postpartum hemorrhage, doctors stopped the bleeding with the help of a device that can also be used in abortions. Emergency abortion is legal in North Carolina, but Brittany fears that could change or that doctors might become more wary about using those same tools to save her reproductive organs—or even her life—under an administration that has signaled support for anti-abortion groups. Brittany is 37 now, and not optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant in four years, when Trump is out of office. Her husband, who voted for Trump, “thinks that I’m kind of blowing things out of proportion when I say we’re definitely not having another baby because of this administration,” she said. For her, though, it seemed like the only rational choice.

If Democrats’ drops in fertility over the coming years do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of an aging population with few younger people to care for them. In the U.S., fears about population collapse also have helped unite conservatives with the techno-libertarians who have recently flocked to Trump’s inner orbit. Elon Musk, who has 12 children, has repeatedly claimed that population collapse is a bigger threat than climate change. At the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., last month, Vice President J. D. Vance told the crowd, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”

So far, no country has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. Taiwan introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. Russia, Italy, and Greece have all tried paying people to have kids. Japan has tried an ever-changing list of incentives for some 30 years, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash. None of it has worked. Vance favors expanding the child tax credit; the Trump administration has also sent early signals of family-first policies, including a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services toward communities with high marriage and birth rates.

As Musk and Vance fight against population decline, they could entice enough Americans to have kids that they can counteract a Democratic deficit, or even reverse falling birth rates. But that won’t be easy. “There may be a Trump bump in conservative places and a Trump bust in liberal places,” Stone told me. “I would bet on the dip being bigger.”