The great irony of the moment is that the Democrats’ insistence on shutting down the government could be strengthening the hand of President Trump in his campaign to shrink the federal leviathan. It might not be that this surprise bonus will empower Mr. Trump and his budget-cutting lieutenant, Russell Vought, to the extent they anticipate. It’s hard to miss, though, their understandable delight at the chance to defund the ranks of the Beltway bureaucracy.

Mr. Trump this morning crowed on his Truth Social platform that “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” Mr. Trump adds: “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

Mr. Trump’s reference to Project 2025, of which, during the 2024 campaign, he had denied familiarity, is sparking criticism. Vice President Kamala Harris is suggesting now that it “was always the plan” to follow the policy roadmap. She decried it as “Donald Trump’s blueprint to seize unchecked power within the federal government and restrict Americans’ freedoms.” This kind of rhetoric ignores the need for reform of the hypertrophied bureaucracy, though.

There are some 2.9 million people on the federal payroll, per statistics kept by the St. Louis Fed. While that’s less than the peak of 3.4 million in 1990, it’s far higher than it needs to be. In 1939, when the St. Louis Fed’s statistics begin, just 912,000 were working for Uncle Sam. The number jumped during World War II, but fell again in 1950 to fewer than 2 million. With higher productivity and technology, it’s hard to account for such a large payroll today. 

The vast federal bureaucracy is also out of step with the ideals of the Framers, who envisioned a limited central government leaving most regulatory tasks and local governance to the state governments. Historian John Lukacs has traced the rise of a permanently bloated federal bureaucracy as a traversal of the American spirit that prevailed before the New Deal and the growth of the defense establishment after World War II. 

Lukacs called it a “discrepancy between the historical development of the American people and of the American state.” Prior to Pearl Harbor, he reported, America’s state and war departments were “much smaller” than those of “any comparable Great Power.” After the war, the bureaucracy doubled in size and the Department of State grew by six times. Congressional committee staffs, too, rose by some 250 percent in the 1950s, Lukacs wrote.

Feature, too, the size of the White House staff, which was in 1933 less than 50, Lukacs wrote. By 1954 the staff had grown to 355, and by 1983 more than 600. In 2024, some 565 were on staff. If Messrs. Trump and Vought are looking for greater efficiencies in the federal workforce, they could stand to start with the excesses in the executive mansion. Yet a more pressing concern centers on the so-called Deep State that has taken root in the bureaucracy.

The growth of the federal workforce, in addition to symbolizing waste, has diluted presidential authority. It’s symptomatic of a Deep State that the executive no longer gives orders. Instead “it is the bureaucracy that presents the Chief Executive,” as Lukacs put it, “with a decision, often wrapped in reams of cloudy verbiage, that the latter may accept.” This upending of the line of command, it seems, is what Messrs. Trump and Vought’s reforms aim to repair.