During a recent interview with journalist Mark Halperin, he explained just how President-elect Trump is going to reshape the federal government with drastic changes ahead.
President-elect Trump overwhelmingly won the electoral college and popular vote and the Republicans have secured the majority in the Senate with a likely hood of retaining majority in the House. With a possible clean sweep, the upcoming Trump agenda has the chance of radically changing the federal government as we know it.
Halperin told "2 WAY Tonight" that he has learned from his four year hiatus from the office and with a Republican majority he is capable of "radical change."
WATCH:
“If you look at all the Republican presidents since Reagan, including Reagan — Bush I, Bush II were never going to be bulldozers of the establishment. They just weren’t. Bush 43 looked for some change, no doubt, but he was not a bulldozer against the establishment,” he said. “Reagan talked that way, but he had a Democratic-controlled House and, some of the time, a Democratic-controlled Senate, and did not really follow through on this rhetoric of fundamental change.”
“Trump I did some things along those lines, but really, if you kind of tally it up — and of course COVID intervened — but if you tally it up, there wasn’t a ton of fundamental change. There was changes in the tax code, changes in energy policy, changes in regulation, but not a fundamental remaking of what people in MAGA-land would call ‘deep state,’ of the culture, of the liberal culture, moving vast numbers of federal employees out of Washington,” Halperin said. “For all of the talk of Project 2025 — which Donald Trump did not write or own, but the Democrats tried to make a big campaign issue of it — there is a desire to fundamentally change things.”
With Trump's decisive victory, the American public have voted for comprehensive reforms.
“A normal two-term president in his second term is exhausted, and his staff is exhausted because they’re five years in. And they are wiser, but they don’t have the momentum of coming out of, typically, a more dominating reelection,” Halperin said. “Most incumbents — not all, but most reelected incumbents — have a smaller victory the second time. Why is this president different? Number one, he was out for four years and had four years to think about all this, to formulate policy, and to think about what he did wrong the first time from his point of view.”
“They’ve also rested because although some of them have been through a campaign, they haven’t governed for four years. And he won — you know, he won the popular vote this time; he didn’t last time. So, arguably, he’s got a greater mandate than he did the first time,” he explained. “All of those things, I think, open the possibility to some pretty radical change — and I’m using ‘radical’ in a neutral way — just fundamental about changing the nature of the federal government.”
Trump has already decided to create a new Department of Government Efficiency office where Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the effort to streamline government and reduce taxpayer funded waste. Trump wants this department to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies."
The federal government is about to audited by two outside businessmen along with the White House Office of Management and Budget with the purpose of driving "large-scale structural reform."