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Democrats warned that such moves would undermine the American civil service. Republicans replied, asking why civil servants shouldn’t be loyal to the elected president of the United States—and have spent the intervening years compiling lists of people to fill such roles. On his very first day back in office, Trump reinstated Schedule F.

Neither is this the president’s only move in his battle against the American federal bureaucracy—or as he casts it, the “deep state.” He’s reportedly asked three senior officials to leave their roles overseeing the State Department’s workforce and internal coordination. He’s also placed Russell Vought—who’s vowed to shutter large parts of the federal bureaucracy—at the Office of Management and Budget. Recently, as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Vought ordered it to halt nearly all its operations.

Meanwhile, Trump has fired 17 inspectors general, who are tasked with investigating government waste, fraud, and abuse. The Department of Justice has fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on cases pertaining to Trump himself. And it’s forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hand over a list of some 5,000 agents who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot.

Perhaps most conspicuously, Trump has tasked the high-profile billionaire Elon Musk with overhauling the federal bureaucracy with the help of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has now sent his employees into various government agencies, seemingly to take control of their operations. In the case of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), he’s halted it completely—or as he put it, he’s “[fed] USAID into the wood chipper.”

It’s a flurry of initiatives. But what exactly is going on?

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Fukuyama says Trump’s apparent onslaught is actually the culmination of a nearly century-long conservative effort to strip the American civil service of authority. But where previous Republican presidents hesitated, Trump is bearing ahead—because, Fukuyama says, he’s not worried of breaking laws. In part, that’s because the battle with the civil service is profoundly personal for Trump. He believes that the “deep state” has had it in for him ever since he first ran for president, sabotaged his agenda while he was in office, and sought to prevent him from getting reelected. Now, he’s getting his revenge. But he’s already pushing the boundaries of the law, setting his administration up for a confrontation not only with the civil service but with the courts too. And yet, Fukuyama says, the bureaucratic inertia that so frustrated Trump in his first presidency is now benefitting him, as the American state’s checks on the fast-moving executive are only slowly beginning to gather any momentum …

• “At the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F,” with the intention of moving a large part of the civil service into that category so they could be fired and replaced by people selected by his administration. When the Republicans were out of power between 2021 and 2025, they spent a lot of time thinking about how they would staff a second Trump administration, because they realized some of their inability to accomplish their objectives was due to the non-cooperation of legacy personnel—holdovers who weren’t first and foremost loyal to Trump.”
• “Ever since the New Deal in the 1930s, conservatives have been very unhappy about what they call the “administrative state”—by which they mean, a permanent government bureaucracy they see as acting independently of democratic control. During the first Trump term, this metastasized into a denigration or even a demonization of the federal bureaucracy, which they’ve taken sometimes to calling the “deep state”—and which Trump and many in his circle have vowed to destroy. They don’t simply want to reform it. They want to eliminate as much of it as possible.”
• “There is a legitimate concern with the federal bureaucracy, because it really doesn’t perform effectively in many areas, but I think conservative critics have misunderstood the problem. To my mind, the real problem with American democracy is the opposite of what they say it is: Their charge is that the bureaucracy operates independently of the elected political officials; I think the problem with the American bureaucracy is that it is over-constrained.”

Planning your next break or just feeling the urge to escape for a while?

Meanwhile, the penalties for steel and aluminum are clearly directed at China, which makes more of these metals than the rest of the world put together: China produces 54 percent of global steel output and 60 percent of aluminum output.

But Trump isn’t alone in his opposition to Chinese steel and aluminum. After he put tariffs on them in 2018, his Democratic successor, Joe Biden, raised those import duties by 25 percent. And while campaigning for the presidency last year, Biden called for tripling the size of those tariffs—naming China as the target of the proposal.

It’s not just the United States, either: Within the past year, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, and Turkey have all placed new tariffs on Chinese steel. India imposed tariffs on Chinese aluminum last year—and it’s considering tariffs on Chinese steel now. Why do Chinese steel and aluminum seem to be such a problem?

In simple terms, China just makes too much of them, producing far more than its domestic market can absorb. So it looks to export the surplus. Beijing’s exports of the metals have been surging in recent years, driving prices down—which has hurt the bottom lines of steel and aluminum producers the world over.

What’s driving the overproduction? China’s domestic economic problems: The country’s housing market collapsed in 2020, eroding much of the domestic market for local producers of steel and aluminum. And, as Alice Han says here in The Signal, when Beijing faces persistent economic challenges, it turns to its most historically reliable strategy for growth: overproduction for export.

And now, Han says, China’s economic problems at home are causing it political problems globally, as more and more countries are starting to fight back against Chinese overproduction of—and Chinese government subsidies for—steel and aluminum, as well as solar panels, electric vehicles, and more.

—Michael Bluhm

• Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s call for the creation of a European army over the weekend, saying, “f you understand by it the unification of national armies, it will not happen.”
• Pope Francis has appointed an Italian nun, Sister Raffaella Petrini, as the first woman governor of Vatican City, following his appointment last month of Sister Simona Brambilla as the Vatican’s first woman prefect: “By giving women the top ranking position over cardinals, Pope Francis has broken a centuries old tradition in the Vatican.”
• A humpback whale briefly swallowed Adrián Simancas, a kayaker in Chilean Patagonia. Simancas is fine—but: “While whale attacks on humans are extremely rare in Chilean waters, whale deaths from collisions with cargo ships have increased in recent years, and strandings have become a recurring issue in the last decade.”

• The tech sector is moving faster than ever—and growing faster than any industry in the economy. How to keep up? Join the 2.5 million who read The Hustle, a free, daily, five-minute briefing on business and tech news. Sign up here.

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