Wrecking ball: Trump's power-hungry orders wage war on US government

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : "Whether Trump can keep up that pace of change, and the US system can survive it, remains to be seen.
40% : The world's richest man has promised to slash and burn his way through the federal bureaucracy as Trump's choice to head a "department of government efficiency (Doge)".
40% : The move is an attempt by Trump to bypass the 1978 Civil Service Act assuring that career federal workers are hired on merit, not political loyalties, and cannot be dismissed arbitrarily.
39% : But that may prove no more than a bump in the road for Trump as he works to remake the entire federal government in his image following a blueprint laid out by rightwing strategists.
39% : Not coincidentally, the OPM also released an order giving federal agencies 90 days to identify which civil servants should be stripped of legal protections barring them from being fired for political reasons.
32% : This time Trump has surrounded himself with those driving his policies, including authors of the Project 2025 plan for an authoritarian takeover of government.
24% : But the most far-reaching orders amounted to a power grab by the White House, with a purge of senior officials regarded as insufficiently deferential to Trump from the justice department to the national security council, a demand for the mass resignations of civil servants and an illegal attempt to snatch control of trillions of dollars in government spending from Congress.
24% : William Galston, former deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton, said Trump had unleashed a "deluge" of policies to overwhelm opponents, from pardoning about 1,600 rioters convicted of the January 6 insurrection to attempting to strike down the constitutional right of citizenship for anyone born in the US.
20% : President's deliberate deluge of policies overwhelms resistance as he aims to weaken the legislature, analysts sayDonald Trump was barely into his second week back in the White House when he declared that his latest presidency already heralded the "golden age of America".
20% : Trump campaigned on a promise to "dismantle the deep state" and sack "rogue bureaucrats".
19% : Trump issued a similar but less wide-ranging order in 2020, but it was overturned by Biden.
19% : Still, Trump has already run into problems.
18% : Trump came out of the starting gate fast with a "crowd-pleasing" crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the cancellation of federal diversity programmes and the wholesale dismissal of independent anti-corruption inspectors from a raft of federal agencies.
18% : Everett Kelley, president of the largest federal workers union, the American Federation of Government Employees, accused the Trump administration of an assault on the independence of the civil service.
16% : "If President Trump and the Republicans overplay their hand, there could be a major pushback in the midterm elections and that would bring the legislative phase of the Trump presidency to an end," he said.

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