The second Trump administration is waging a war on the administrative state. Nearly 300,000 planned job cuts across 27 agencies have led to a raft of lawsuits. 

In April, President Donald Trump’s administration dismissed 3,500 workers at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a regulatory agency overseeing pharmaceuticals, medical devices and much of the US food supply.

The abrupt dismissal of nearly 20 per cent of the FDA’s workforce – which the administration says will reduce ‘bureaucratic sprawl’ – triggered paralysis at the agency. Key functions critical to the US food, pharmaceutical and medical industries all but shut down. ‘Lots of people were let go, almost haphazardly and cruelly in a way that made no sense,’ says Anne Walsh, Co-Chair of the IBA Healthcare and Life Sciences Law Committee.

Senior FDA leadership, anticipating the upheaval, began resigning en masse. ‘A lot of folks at high levels of leadership saw the writing on the wall and resigned. As it currently stands, there’s a loss of talent at the top,’ adds Walsh, who’s also a director at Hyman, Phelps & McNamara in Washington, DC.

As with many US agencies affected by the Trump administration’s layoffs, the FDA is today still suffering from staffing gaps and operational failures. Emails to FDA staff bounce back as undeliverable, while phone calls go unanswered. ‘The total silence at times is really hard to stomach, especially for publicly traded companies who require disclosure of information and timing. So, it’s really still a tough situation for the FDA,’ Walsh says.

Some former employees have now been brought back in a staffing ‘boomerang’. But it’ll probably be months or even years before key positions are filled and a sense of ‘normalcy’ returns to the FDA.

‘We are deeply concerned about the current state of the agency and its future,’ the non-profit group No Patient Left Behind says in a letter signed by more than 400 biotech executives who fear the loss of institutional knowledge at the FDA – a result of the reduction in the agency’s workforce and the wave of retirements – will jeopardise new financing deals.

The dismissals and chaos at the FDA reflect a pattern seen across other US agencies. President Trump is waging a campaign to dismantle the US administrative state by fundamentally altering the structure and function of federal agencies. His second-term agenda goes far beyond regulatory rollbacks into a wholesale remaking of the federal government.

Battling the ‘bureaucracy’ in Washington has long been a conservative cause. But what Trump is doing represents a radical restructuring that circumvents Congress and expands his presidential power in unprecedented, and potentially unconstitutional, ways.

Commentators warn the long-term impact may not necessarily be as good for business as President Trump claims to intend. By undermining institutions, circumventing procedures and sowing unpredictability, the Trump administration is introducing a new kind of structural volatility into the US regulatory regime.

Enter DOGE

The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), until recently led by President Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk, is asserting unprecedented authority to overhaul or eliminate government operations. Early personnel purges directed by Musk’s team shocked the Washington establishment.

The Trump administration shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and is folding its functions into the State Department as it seeks to curtail the US’s overseas spending. The administration is attempting to close the Department of Education, expressing a desire to ‘return education authority to the states.’ Both agencies are authorised by Congress in statutes that President Trump is seeking to override by executive fiat.

The Defense Department alone is planning to slash up to 60,000 civilian roles. The Department of Health and Human Services is eliminating 20,000 jobs, including at the FDA, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Commerce, Labor, Interior, Housing and Urban Development departments and the Social Security Administration are all planning similar cuts.

Indeed, announced and planned job cuts by DOGE amount to a staggering 275,000 positions across 27 US agencies, according to data collected as of April by recruitment company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as the Trump administration seeks to produce ‘efficiencies’.

Operating on President Trump’s word alone and without legislative authority from Congress, the actions of Musk and DOGE have led to a raft of federal lawsuits. These cases test the balance between the authority of Congress to mandate regulatory regimes and the president’s authority to revise or undo the work of agencies. The lawsuits are in various stages of argument and appeal. They will probably land before the Supreme Court.

In February, President Trump issued an executive order instructing all federal agency heads ‘in coordination with their DOGE Team Leads’ and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to review all regulations and identify whole classes for elimination. ‘Ending Federal overreach and restoring the constitutional separation of powers is a priority of my Administration,’ Trump’s order says.

But the president’s approach is not just about deregulation. It’s a deconstruction of the administrative state. It’s about undermining the statutory mandates of federal agencies. More than simply repealing rules, the Trump administration’s actions will predictably disable enforcement and oversight by removing personnel and the functional machinery of government, commentators say.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), for example, has been hamstrung by DOGE’s attempts to cut nearly 90 per cent of its workforce. A federal court found in March that Trump administration officials ‘were in fact engaged in an unlawful effort to dismantle and eliminate’ the CFPB, which was created by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis to supervise unscrupulous lending.

Dismantling the bureaucracy

‘The Trump administration clearly is trying to do a pretty fundamental paradigm shift,’ says Michael Showalter, an Officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee. ‘It all rests on the syllogism that there’s too many regulations and too many restrictions, and they’re trying to do as much as they can to have regulations get out of the way of businesses.’

‘The real meat and potatoes that they have done so far in the government is through removing people,’ says Showalter, who’s also a partner at ArentFox Schiff in Chicago. ‘If you take away the opportunity to get somebody readily on the phone, you are going to fundamentally change how individual people, how individual businesses relate to government.’

President Trump is trying to work around the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, a keystone of the US legal system that requires adherence to congressional statutes, public notice and lengthy comment periods for rule changes.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an order called ‘Unleashing American Energy’, which seeks to promote US oil and gas production by sweeping aside decades of regulations. In an April executive order entitled ‘Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers’, meanwhile, President Trump mandated federal agencies to create a process for eliminating regulations ‘to revitalize the American economy.’ The order requires agencies to review all of their rules to identify those that should be eliminated if they distort the ‘operation of the free market.’

Another presidential executive order, titled ‘Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy’, imposes on agencies an obligation to sunset – and thus set an end point for – regulations on energy production, notably oil and gas, wherever possible under law.

‘In our country, laws are supposed to provide the certainty and order necessary to foster liberty and innovation. Instead, our vast regulatory structure often serves to constrict ordered liberty, not promote it,’ President Trump’s order reads. ‘But unelected agency officials write most of the complex, legally binding rules on top of that, often stretching these statutory provisions beyond what the Congress enacted.’

‘How these reorganisations go, how quickly they can change the underlying regulatory structure, beyond just getting rid of people and getting rid of funding, those are the big questions. That has not played out yet,’ Showalter says. ‘It is causing a fair degree of concern among international businesses.’ He adds that ‘you can literally take away the law, or you can take away any way to vindicate the law.’

War on climate policy

Among the agencies most affected is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose 15,000 employees are responsible for enforcing anti-pollution legislation as well as clean air and water laws.

President Trump appointed Lee Zeldin, a former congressman, to head the EPA. Zeldin has led aggressive rollbacks of climate policies and green energy promotions. ‘We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,’ Zeldin wrote in March in an op-ed.

He has exempted US coal plants from mercury emission rules and rolled back limits on forever chemicals in drinking water. In May, Zeldin announced plans to reduce the EPA’s workforce to levels not seen since the administration of former US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, potentially cutting 4,000 positions. Zeldin says his plans represent ‘organisational improvements’.

‘The reductions in force, or firings, or strongly encouraged resignations and attrition are just beginning to be felt,’ says Lynn Bergeson, a Member of the IBA Agriculture and Food Section Advisory Board. ‘The impact has been very severe. It’s distressing to see people leave who have been working as hard as they have on objectives that are as laudable and important as they are. It is demoralising for the EPA and discouraging for those of us who are committed to the goals of green energy and environmental justice.’

Staff cuts landed hardest in areas such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as well as clean energy – policy priorities that don’t align ideologically with the new Trump administration. ‘Those were the first to go,’ says Bergeson, who’s Managing Partner at law firm Bergeson & Campbell in Washington, DC.

Nonetheless, the second Trump administration’s commitment to deregulation is benefitting the domestic US industrial and agricultural chemical industries by boosting staffing for scientific approvals of new chemicals.

Under the previous administration of President Joe Biden, the manufacture of industrial chemicals had migrated offshore as new product approvals were delayed by the EPA’s interpretation of the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, a landmark 2016 law setting US toxic substance controls.

‘It’s cheaper to make something offshore and then import it, than it is to wait for the one, or two, or three years to get new product approval,’ Bergeson says. ‘That just doesn't make sense, especially when this administration is keen on bringing manufacturing jobs onshore. We need better, more scientifically grounded risk evaluations.’

Still, Bergeson warns that companies need to be ‘mindful’ of ‘fluctuating policy interpretations’ between successive Democratic and Republican administrations. ‘How do you square the circle where you have certain laxer standards here in the United States and yet corporate commitments to principles and goals that other jurisdictions honour and will continue to honour, and perhaps the next administration will want to see?’ Bergeson says.

Consolidated power

Beyond mass dismissals, President Trump has taken targeted steps to consolidate his power over independent boards and commissions. He issued an executive order in February asserting that the Constitution vests all executive authority with the president and arguing that regulatory agencies set up by Congress to be independent fall under the president’s supervision and control.

‘Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination,’ Carr said in March.

Paramount’s management has announced it’ll revise ‘the way the company approaches inclusion’ to comply with Trump administration mandates. The company will no longer ’set or use aspirational numerical goals related to the race, ethnicity, sex or gender of hires.’

What appears to be emerging at the FCC, as at other agencies, is a picture of two parallel regulatory systems – one in which most legal processes function normally, and another where political interference undermines institutional norms. ‘Basically, if you have a transaction that needs approval by the FCC, there’s an expectation you're going to have to pay some kind of Trump tax,’ says one Washington lawyer, who was speaking on condition of anonymity.

Carr opened an inquiry into CBS News regarding an interview conducted by its show ‘60 Minutes’ with Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign. The inquiry parallels a private lawsuit Trump brought against CBS just before election day, claiming the media outlet distorted the interview by editing Harris’ responses. A full transcript released later by CBS showed editors used fair discretion. Still, Trump is seeking $20bn in damages, and the case is going to mediation.

Big Tech’s stake

One area where there has been surprising continuity with Biden administration policies, at least so far, is in enforcement of antitrust laws against Big Tech. The Department of Justice (DoJ) is continuing a lawsuit against Google that could force divestiture of its Chrome browser. The FTC is proceeding with its case against Facebook owner Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. ‘President Donald Trump and his administration are committed to robust competition-law enforcement,’ FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told the International Competition Network Annual Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May.

In a measure of how much is at stake for these companies, in addition to Musk, Meta’s Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tim Cook, Amazon’s Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s presidential inauguration inside the US Capitol dome after donating large sums to his inauguration party fund.

Practitioners anticipate a more business-friendly application of the rules but also an increasingly political case-by-case enforcement approach as President Trump’s White House asserts more control at the DoJ and the FTC.

‘Initial indications suggest a fair amount of antitrust continuity with past administrations,' says Daniel Swanson, a Member of the IBA Antitrust Section Advisory Board. ‘The agencies appear to be rolling forward with an active inherited litigation docket. The embrace of Biden merger initiatives – new guidelines and more premerger paperwork – is even [more] surprising, although merger enforcement should be more flexible.’

While budget and personnel cuts could hamper the antitrust agencies in maintaining a high level of activity, the Trump administration has ‘moved quickly’ to staff the DoJ’s antitrust division and the FTC ‘with a strong team of professionals,’ says Swanson, who’s also a partner at Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles. ‘The firing of the FTC’s Democratic commissioners, however, raises the concern that politics might override antitrust policy at times.’

The Trump administration is likely to be sceptical, if not hostile, towards corporate collaborations around environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives. Meanwhile, the president’s antitrust enforcers can be expected to target deplatforming – the removal of individuals or groups from digital platforms – and content moderation, which the administration sees as the suppression of conservative voices by large social media companies.

Autocracy contested

None of this should be viewed as a done deal. The legality of President Trump’s restructurings of agencies remains contested. Dozens of lawsuits are pending against the administration. Public opposition to the president ahead of the US midterm elections in 2026 is rising. Trump’s drive to dismantle US agencies is seen as an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law, and not just a traditional political contest between Democrats and Republicans.

‘We still do have judges freely operating and making rulings that the government is not happy with in a way you do not see in Russia or in Hungary,’ says Andrew Seligsohn, President of Public Agenda, a pro-democracy, non-profit research organisation. ‘This is still a moment of contestation over what our future is going to be like.’

Seligsohn argues that the role of DOGE and Musk, who recently left the agency to focus on his electric car company Tesla, illustrates what happens when unchecked executive power expands. DOGE and Musk’s leadership of the department were brought into existence by presidential order. Musk bypassed the Senate confirmation process. With Trump’s backing, the DOGE team operated in defiance of federal law. ‘DOGE and Musk’s role in all of this is an example of what it might look like if things go fully off the rails,’ Seligsohn says. ‘The whole story has been consistent with one of the very frightening scenarios about where American democracy could be heading.’

Whether Trump’s radical reorganisations hold up in court, or not, they have already redrawn the boundaries of regulatory authority in the US. The consequences will reverberate through boardrooms and workplaces around the world over the next few years.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com

Illustration: www.illustrationx.com/uk/artists/ThiloRothacker