🔴 Website 👉 https://u-s-news.com/
Telegram 👉 https://t.me/usnewscom_channel
President Trump capped his first six months back in office with a big win, passing permanent tax cuts and more funding for immigration control and defense rearmament in “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which made it through Congress after a tough fight.
Now he’s kicked off the second half of his first year back by defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and continuing the government downsizing he began with the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yet some old-guard Republicans still don’t consider Donald Trump a legitimate heir to Ronald Reagan.
They’re wrong: “He’s much more Reaganite than anybody thinks he is, including him probably,” says someone in a position to know — the man who led the Gipper’s efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.
In 1982, The Washington Post dubbed him Reagan’s “terrible swift sword of the civil service.”
Today, Donald J. Devine is a silver-maned mentor revered by a new generation in Washington serious about cutting Leviathan down to size.
At 87, the Brooklyn-born Devine finds his counsel more sought after than at any time since he was Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management head more than 40 years ago.
“I call myself the poor man’s DOGE,” he says — and in the 1980s, “I was a one-man DOGE.”
Reagan’s famous firing of the air-traffic controllers? Devine inspiration.
“Reagan’s sitting there, and I can tell he doesn’t like what’s going on in the room,” Devine says about the 1981 meeting where the administration had to decide what to do about PATCO, the air-traffic controllers’ union, which was threatening to strike.
“Don’t these people take some kind of oath?” he recalls Reagan asking. At that moment, says Devine, “my lawyer, who’s with me, pulls out the thing they have to sign. And I had to break in: ‘It says they can’t go on strike.’ Reagan says they’re gone.”
Nobody in the administration wanted to manage the media fallout — except Devine.
“I handled all the press operations on this. Thousands of media people. I like conflict. I really do. I just had a great time during that whole operation.”
Even Devine expected Reagan to relent: “I argued that we should eventually hire them back because I’m thinking one airplane goes down during this thing, we’re through.” The president stuck to his principles — federal employees had no right to hold the country hostage by refusing to do their jobs.
In his four years in the Reagan administration, Devine reduced the federal nondefense workforce by more than 100,000 employees and saved the country some $6 billion with the changes he implemented to bureaucrats’ pay and benefits.
That’s what earned him the moniker that became the title of his 1991 book about how he did it — “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword: An Insider’s Story of Abuse and Reform Within the Federal Bureaucracy.”
But who reads books by the former head of OPM? The people whose job it is to get government under control today, it turns out.
Devine’s friend Morton Blackwell, impresario of the conservative politics training academy the Leadership Institute, insisted Devine redo the book for the Trump era.
“Morton forced me into rewriting my book in a shorter version” in 2017, he remembers. “I was in the middle of writing a serious book that I care about — I’m more of a professor now than I am of a politician.”
Indeed, Devine holds a PhD from Syracuse University — where one of his professors was the Democrat who, as it happens, became the first head of OPM, under Jimmy Carter — and today he’s a senior scholar at The Fund for American Studies in DC.
He was working on a book of “fusionist” conservative philosophy, “The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order,” but he agreed to let Blackwell bring out a new edition of his guide to cutting government, abridged and unsexily retitled “Political Management of the Bureaucracy: A Guide to Reform and Control.”
Nobody was interested — until President Trump decided it was time for a personnel shakeup.
“The personnel department was an absolute disaster for the first three-and-a-half years or so of the first Trump administration,” Devine recalls. “But Trump finally figured that out. He fired the personnel director, and he brought in the guy who was carrying his bags to run the White House personnel.”
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!
Thanks for signing up!
What an inexperienced new personnel chief needed was a guide, and that’s exactly what Devine had written. The book got into the right hands and became required reading for personnel circles in the first Trump term’s last days — and Devine’s sage advice has continued to inform the second administration.
“I’m a great believer that small groups can make big changes. My favorite example is Communism,” he says, noting how small the Bolshevik inner circle that revolutionized Russia was. “You know, a dozen people change the world. Jesus only had 11 or 12, and he changed the world. So it doesn’t take large groups, necessarily, to make big changes — and I know a lot of people who could make them. Trump may be one of them. The good thing about him is he’s fearless,” a quality Devine says Trump shares with Reagan.
“Courage is what counts,” he says. “You’ve got to find some way to restore a courageous view of life,” if anything is going to get better in DC or in the country.
Free-market conservative that he is, Devine has his doubts about Trump’s tariffs, but he suspects the president is using them as negotiating leverage: “I think it’s very possible we could have a net worldwide reduction of tariffs because of this and be more free market, more libertarian, than when we started.”
There are differences between the two presidents — “I think he’s a very practical person,” Devine says of Trump, “unlike Reagan, who was philosophical.”
“But a big part of Trump’s brain is what Reagan believed in,” he adds, noting Trump’s coalition includes Reagan’s. “He knows that my kind of conservative is also a big part of his, and he’s got to satisfy us, too. He knows you have to balance these things.”
What advice does Reagan’s paladin have for Trump now?
It’s worth fighting to get the right people through the Senate.
“The senior executive service is the top of the bureaucracy. A thousand of those people can be political appointees. Rarely is that thousand full, especially in a Republican administration.”
Personnel is policy, as Reagan’s scourge of the bureaucracy knows — and teaches — better than anyone.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.