Centralization, Politicization, and the Trump Administration

• In Event: The Impact of Politicization and the Budget on Federal Agencies

Abstract

Did the Trump Administration’s use of centralization and politicization align with theoretical expectations from the literature? When seeking to influence policymaking in the executive branch, presidents typically turn to centralization, the creation of policy in the White House, and politicization, the use of political appointees throughout federal agencies. However, both of these tools are costly and past work has found that presidents weigh the tradeoffs of each strategy, adjusting where and how much they engage in each tool based on agency ideology, the complexity of the policy area, and the utilization of the other strategy, among other factors. The Trump Administration clearly engaged in both strategies, but it remains less clear if and how Trump’s use of these tools differed from previous administrations and whether he departed from theoretical expectations. This paper introduces new measures of centralization and politicization based on the 2020 edition of the Survey on the Future of Government Service, a large-scale survey of government executives, and also employs measures that have been consistently asked across administrations in earlier waves of the survey. These data reveal how modern presidents deliberately employ centralization and politicization within and across presidential administrations. Among other results, I find that the Trump Administration systematically engaged in higher levels of both centralization and politicization than the Obama and Bush Administrations. These findings help us better understand presidential use of these core strategies and have important implications for the current state of agency capacity.

Author

• Nathan Gibson, Princeton University