US Government Needed Reform with a Scalpel; Trump Used a Sledgehammer
Washington Watch
September 8th, 2025
Dr. James J. Zogby ©
President
Arab American Institute
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking-ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide health care and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While’s Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neo-conservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam, install a government that met US criteria and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
