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he declared that only the president and attorney general may define matters of law within the administration, and that all agencies, including independent agencies, must take orders from the White House.
Meanwhile, an executive order establishing a new form of civil service employment called Schedule Policy/Career (formerly known as Schedule F) would allow Trump to fire vast swathes of the federal civil service and replace them with loyalists. Trump has further asserted the power to fire any official he wants, even when Congress has put restrictions on that power and Supreme Court precedent has upheld those restrictions.
By centralizing power over the agencies and individual employees, Trump can use the government to enact his will. That will is to extort civil society to bend to his designs, and to eliminate opposition from Democrats, law firms, universities or any other institutions inclined to challenge him. To do so, Trump creates legal pretexts ― DEI, illegal immigration, antisemitism ― that can be used as cudgels against his targets by the agencies he controls.
