Inside The Resistance: How Washington’s Deep State Counters Trump’s Policies

The federal government is out of control and President Trump is working overtime to fix it, but the bureaucrats causing the problem have powerful allies striking back at the president from outside.

The basic problem isn’t just the woke spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though that is a prime example of the central issue.

The problem is that unelected bureaucrats have real power to determine policy, and they consider themselves intellectually and morally superior to the people and their elected representatives. This mentality explains why 64% of Washington, D.C.,-based bureaucrats who voted for Kamala Harris in November say they won’t follow a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy.

This should also remind Americans of how aggressively certain actors within the executive branch opposed Trump during his first term. Agents within the government helped prop up the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent, and a news outlet partially funded by USAID helped launch the first Trump impeachment. At least one bureaucrat openly described himself as “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.”  

The rot runs deep, and rooting it out won’t be easy. To make matters worse, the deep state has allies outside the government who are working hard to prevent Trump from changing the system.

The Freak Out

Democrats have taken to the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest Trump’s restructuring of the federal government, acting as though cutting waste and abuse from the bureaucracy amounted to a national crisis.

“People need to know how serious this is,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) whose congressional district is home to more than 70,000 federal workers, said at a recent protest. “You tear down the federal government, you also tear down our whole society. If you eliminate one of the three branches of government, you can’t run a country.”

Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aren’t tearing down the entire government, and they’re not even eliminating one of the three branches. Rather, they’re making the administrative state — effectively a fourth, extra-constitutional branch of government — accountable to the people’s elected president. 

The Democrats and their allies don’t like it because it involves rooting the woke activism out of the entrenched bureaucracy. 

For example, USAID had been funding Marxist “equity,” transgender activism, and climate alarmism, the woke ideologies voters rejected in November. USAID had partnered with the Open Society Foundations, the massive funding apparatus of Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros and his son Alex. 

In one particularly egregious example, USAID and Open Society funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. This news outlet attacked conservatives for criticizing Soros and released the report that spurred the first Trump impeachment in 2019.

Conservatives should be familiar with George and Alex Soros. Soros and his son have bankrolled almost every leftist cause you’ve ever heard of, and the Open Society Foundations played a major role in propping up the leftist groups that called the shots in the Biden administration.

As my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” reveals, woke activist groups fed staff into the Biden administration and pressed the administration to implement woke policies. Scratch the surface of any Biden policy, and you’re likely to find activists with the Center for American Progress, the Human Rights Campaign, or the Natural Resources Defense Council. America’s largest unions, such as the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees Industrial Union, also had tremendous access and influence in the administration.

Now, those same groups are gearing up to defend the deep state, and they’re doing more than just picketing outside USAID.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Anti-DOGE Lawsuits

Many activist groups have sued to block DOGE and SpaceX founder Elon Musk from accessing federal data.

The AFL-CIO; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; and the SEIU — three of the major unions that helped fund the Woketopus and influenced policy in the Biden administration — joined other unions in suing DOGE and the Department of Labor to prevent DOGE from accessing the department’s data. A federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing the data. 

“DOGE seeks to gain access to sensitive systems before courts can stop them, dismantle agencies before Congress can assert its prerogatives in the federal budget, and intimidate and threaten employees who stand in their way,” the lawsuit states. “The results have already been catastrophic.” 

Democracy Forward is representing the unions in the lawsuit. Marc Elias, the left-leaning election lawyer who tried to reverse the results of the 2024 U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania, serves on the board of this group.

The SEIU also sued Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, aiming to block Treasury from sharing data with DOGE. A federal judge limited DOGE employees’ access to the data in a ruling Thursday. Nineteen Democratic attorneys general, not to be left out, filed a similar case Friday, and a judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking DOGE access Saturday.

Blocking Key Reforms

In addition to DOGE, Trump has directed key reforms to the administrative state that would make the bureaucracy more accountable to the people’s elected president. Schedule F, for instance, creates a new classification of federal employee that makes bureaucrats who make policy easier to fire. 

The Woketopus has taken aim at Schedule F. 

Governing for Impact, a shadowy activist group that advised top Biden administration bureaucrats after getting launched through the dark money network established by Arabella Advisors, released a memo outlining what it calls the “Legal Vulnerabilities of Schedule F.” This document appears to be a roadmap to inspire lawsuits against the reform.

On Jan. 29, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, one of America’s largest unions and an arm of the Woketopus, teamed up with the American Federation of Government Employees — which represents 800,000 federal employees — to sue President Trump and the Office of Personnel Management. The same left-leaning law firm that represented left-leaning nonprofits in attempting to block Trump’s funding freeze is representing AFSCME and AFGE.

AFSCME and AFGE claim that Trump’s executive orders aim to “politicize the civil service,” but these orders aim to prevent woke bureaucrats from undermining the president’s ability to deliver on his promises to the American people.

‘Deferred Resignation’

President Trump has reversed policies that allow federal employees to work remotely. He has required all staff to return to work, but he also gave them an offramp should they refuse to return to the office. The Office of Management and Budget has offered to pay federal employees through the end of the year if they resign before Feb. 6.

The AFSCME and a few other unions filed a lawsuit to block President Trump’s offer. The lawsuit asks the court to issue a stay to block the deferred resignation practice. On Feb. 6, a federal judge extended the deadline through Feb. 10.

As of Feb. 14, more than 75,000 employees have indicated they will resign, according to News Nation. That represents over 3% of the workforce.

Constitutional Acid

Democrats and the Woketopus may act as though Trump’s reforms are the end of the world, but the president’s acts arguably represent a long-overdue attempt to bring a metastasized administrative state to heel.

As the head of the executive branch, Trump should have the ability to reform the federal government, and Congress should aid him in this task. The president has taken strong steps in the right direction, but the Woketopus’ response shows that the path ahead will not be easy.

The deep state isn’t just a threat to Trump — it’s an acid corroding the constitutional structure of our government. Americans cannot afford to forget just how corrupt the bureaucracy is, and we should support Trump’s goal of rooting out the deep state.

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Tyler O’Neil is managing editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.