Eight ways the government will look different in 2029
The aim of the Trump administration is to re-cast the federal role, rolling back the clock as much as possible to a pre-Great Society era or even maybe a pre-New Deal era. While there have been setbacks in the courts, the administration has made significant strides towards its goal.
The federal government in 2029
Whoever takes the reins of government in January 2029 will likely inherit a transformed federal government. Notable changes will probably include:
An arts sector that has been decimated. The endowments for the arts and humanities (NEA and NEH), The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and the Kennedy Center are already shadows of their former selves, and the relatively independent Smithsonian Institution will probably look different as well.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often colloquially referred to as “food stamps”) and assistance for low income housing at Housing and Urban Development will have suffered deep cuts.
The administration has begun a process to cut Pell Grants for low income college students. Student loan criteria may be made more stringent as a cost-cutting measure, and some educational investments at the K-12 level could be cut.
There are likely to have been reductions in research funding in the sciences, including medical science, basic science, earth science, environmental science, marine science, and meteorology. Agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the EPA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will have suffered deep cuts and personnel reductions.
Agencies that also fund science research but focus more on practical applications — the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the FDA, and the EPA — will have seen significant reductions and refocusing.
Regulatory agencies including the Federal Communications Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Finance Protection Board (CFPB), and others will have their independence undercut and may in some cases have suffered sharp reductions in funding.
The Inspectors General offices across the government will have had their roles re-cast, no longer serving as relatively independent investigatory units rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse within the agencies.
The federal workforce will have undergone a makeover, with civil service protections stripped for many managerial positions, cuts in staffing at many agencies, and a less stringently non-partisan hiring process.
This all will be met with a “hurrah” if Republicans retain control of the White House. But if a Democrat takes over the new landscape presents a rebuilding challenge.
There’s bad news and good news
The bad news is that putting the pieces back together cannot be done overnight. With budgetary and political constraints, particularly if one or both chambers of Congress are in Republican hands, it will simply be impossible to reconstitute the federal role in a way that closely resembles what was there pre-Trump II.
You might call it the 2029 challenge — what should a Democratic administration prioritize?
It’s notable that in particular it’s many of the productive investments that the government makes in science and education that are targets, as compared to the vast bulk of government spending that is focused on widely shared programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Veterans benefits.
Which brings us to the good news: most of the items on the Trump hit list have been pocket change. The arts, the CPSC, NIH, the CDC, the EPA, NOAA, the NSF, Pell Grants, and earth science at NASA totaled less than 2% of the federal budget in 2024. Maybe these areas are the low hanging fruit to focus on first.
Learning from Trump
The other good news — you might call it the Trump Silver Lining: the administration has shown what’s possible when you clear the plaque in the arteries of government. Which might be a good thing — after all, not even most liberals think the government was working well before Trump took office.
The Trump project has been to attack the very routinization that is characteristic of bureaucracies. The century-long accumulation of institutional power in the White House has been deployed to put in place major changes. This can work both ways, as an astute Democratic successor to Trump will understand. Although our imaginary Democratic president will face the fact that it’s harder to build something than tear it down.