Suppose there was a Republican president who never showed any passion for limiting government but resented it when people on the public payroll undermined his agenda. Suppose he found a more ideological warrior, a man sometimes known to quote hardcore free market libertarians, and told him to blow up a nest of bureaucratic foes. Suppose that appointee took to the job with gusto, convinced that he had an opportunity both to roll back the administrative state and to defund the radical left. Suppose the bureaucracy threw everything it could at this new arrival, while critics raised constitutional questions about the way he went about his mission. Suppose the executioner was gone from his post by the summer. Suppose the barely bruised bureaucracy kept lumbering on.
That may sound like the story of President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the president I have in mind was Richard Nixon, the appointee was Howard Phillips, and the institution that Phillips was sent to destroy was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). And if the two tales did not play out exactly the same way, the similarities are strong. This is what can happen when the idea of rolling back state power tries to merge with the urge to purge.
