US President Donald Trump holds up a pen he used to sign one of various bills in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Photo / AP
Reading some of the news coverage this weekend, one might get the impression that Donald Trump's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a fatal blow to his presidency. That's hooey.
Healthcare is a siren song that has seduced many presidents since Harry Truman called for a national insurance programme in 1945. Bill Clinton, for instance, spent far more political capital on the issue than Trump during his first year as president. His party also controlled both chambers of Congress, and he too failed spectacularly. But Clinton bounced back and won re-election.
Liberals mock Trump as ineffective at their own peril.
Yes, it's easy to joke about how Trump said during the campaign that he'd win so much people would get tired of winning.
Both of his travel bans have been blocked - for now.
An active FBI investigation into his associates is a big grey cloud over the White House.
The President himself falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping him.
His first national security adviser registered as a foreign agent after being fired for not being honest about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. His attorney general, at best, misled Congress under oath.
Despite the chaos and the growing credibility gap, Trump is systematically succeeding in his quest to "deconstruct the administrative state," as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon puts it.
He's pursued the most aggressive regulatory rollback since Ronald Reagan, especially on environmental issues, with a series of bills and Executive Orders.
He's placed devoted ideologues into perches from which they can stop aggressively enforcing laws that conservatives don't like.
By not filling certain posts, he's ensuring that certain government functions will simply not be performed.
His budget proposal spotlighted his desire to make as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible wither on the vine.
Trump has been using Executive Orders to tie the hands of rule makers.
He put in place a regulatory freeze during his first hours, mandated that two regulations be repealed for every new one that goes on the books and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the government with an eye toward shrinking it.
Justice Dept. follows through on executive order to withhold as much as $4.1b in grants from "sanctuary cities" https://t.co/YMj5SYJX2X
— NPR (@NPR) March 27, 2017
Any day now, Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at undoing Obama's Clean Power Plan and end a moratorium on federal-land coal mining. This would ensure that the US does not meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement.
The Administration is also preparing new executive orders to re-examine all 14 US free trade agreements, including NAFTA, and the President could start to sign some of them this week.
Trump plans to unveil a new White House office today with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and, potentially, privatise some government functions.
"The Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power centre within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump," the Washington Post reports.
"Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to . . . create a lasting legacy for a President still searching for signature achievements. . . . Kushner's team is being formalised just as the Trump Administration is proposing sweeping budget cuts across many departments, and members said they would help find efficiencies."
Kushner's ambitions are grand: "At least to start, the team plans to focus its attention on re-imagining Veterans Affairs; modernising the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodelling workforce-training programmes; and developing 'transformative projects' under the banner of Trump's US$1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American. In some cases, the office could direct that government functions be privatised, or that existing contracts be awarded to new bidders."
The Congressional Review Act had only been used once since it passed in 1996 to get rid of a regulation.
Kushner was once seen as lead player on tax reform. Curious timing to roll out his innovation SWAT team. https://t.co/XPmYfYUFDd
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) March 27, 2017
Trump has already used it three times since February to kill regulations put into effect by the Obama Administration: He eliminated the Interior Department's stream protection rule, which barred coal-mining companies from conducting any activities that could permanently pollute streams and other sources of drinking water. He killed an SEC rule requiring oil and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments. And he made it easier for the mentally ill to get guns by blocking the Social Security Administration from turning over certain data to the FBI.
Seven more bills to undo Obama regulations have passed both chambers of Congress and will soon be signed by the President.
Among them: Rolling back worker safety regulations to track and reduce workplace injuries and deaths, reducing disclosure requirements for federal contractors and abolishing a rule that restricted certain kinds of hunting, such as trapping and aerial shooting, inside national wildlife refuges in Alaska.
Several more are in the pipeline.
The Republican Senate last week voted to repeal rules aimed at protecting consumers' online data from Internet providers. Once the House passes the measure, and the President signs it, it will be vastly easier for broadband companies to sell and share your personal usage information for advertising purposes.
He can't pass legislation to repeal Obamacare, but Trump is weakening the pillars of the healthcare system from the inside so that he can blame Democrats for future problems.
Democrats say Supreme Court nominees have always needed 60 votes for confirmation. Is that true? https://t.co/d1bBwmxONP
— TIME (@TIME) March 27, 2017
Although Paul Ryan acknowledged that "Obamacare is the law of the land," its survival or collapse in practical terms now rests with decisions that are in the President's hands.
On his first night in office, the President directed federal agencies to ease the regulatory burden that the ACA has placed on consumers, the healthcare industry and healthcare providers.
"So far, the main action stemming from that directive is a move by the Internal Revenue Service to process Americans' tax refunds even if they fail to submit proof that they are insured, as the ACA requires," the Post reported.
Personnel is policy, and Trump has appointed several people who openly oppose the missions of the agencies they lead. "If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction," Bannon explained at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Scott Pruitt, for example, spent six years suing the Environmental Protection Agency as Oklahoma's attorney general. Now he's running it. He's already done a great deal to narrow the scope of the agency's mission and halted inquiries launched by his predecessor.
Soon after getting confirmed, for instance, he told operators of oil and gas wells that they could ignore the agency's previous requests for information about their equipment's emissions of methane.
As Jared Kushner ascends White House ladder, Senate Russia inquiry adds scrutiny https://t.co/pE4WZuGMrE
— Guardian US (@GuardianUS) March 27, 2017
Now the White House is taking active steps to starve the bureaucracy of its lifeblood: money and staff. He called for slashing the EPA's budget by 31 per cent, the biggest cut of any federal agency, in addition to eliminating a fifth of its workforce.
Efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes are among the more than 50 programmes that would be eliminated.
Sometimes who you don't hire is just as important as who you do. Trump recently told Fox News that he will not fill all the vacancies he's entitled to. He explained that not moving to populate the Cabinet departments is a feature, not a bug, of his Administration.
"When I see a story about 'Donald Trump didn't fill hundreds and hundreds of jobs,' it's because, in many cases, we don't want to fill those jobs," the President acknowledged. "Many of those jobs I don't want to fill."
Those unstaffed jobs will be chokepoints to block action by the administrative state.
Trump's biggest donors, who have been briefed on his theory of the case, are giving him a very long leash because they are playing the long game.
Most importantly of all, Neil Gorsuch is poised to secure a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Bannon said the president has chosen his appointees with the deconstruction of the administrative state in mind. Nowhere is that more obvious than on the high court.
Republicans are confident Gorsuch will facilitate a major rollback of the regulatory state over the next 30 to 40 years, which would be a major part of Trump's legacy as president.
The conflict is nearing its seventh day.