The Post-Trump Challenge Isn’t Restoration. It’s Reinvention.

Few presidents ever make enough impact to lend their name to an era. Capturing an era takes more than just an ideological shift in American politics and government. It requires a singular personality so strong that society bends and warps around its gravity. Eras reshape the collective DNA of a nation. The society that emerges at the end speaks a different cultural language than the one that came before.

Thomas Jefferson’s historic shift toward a limited government and vast westward expansion gave us the quarter century historians now dub the Jeffersonian Era. A surge in education and the rapid democratization that followed defined the Jacksonian Era of the 1820s. The buzzing 1980s, with its “greed is good” mentality and Moral Majority politics, trickled down from a Reagan Era that lingered on into the new millennium.

Then there is Donald Trump. That Trump’s chaotic and corrosive decade on the national stage represents a defining era in American culture is beyond question. But unlike his predecessors, the Trump Era will be measured not by what it reshaped but by what it destroyed. Even if Trump’s MAGA movement fades in 2026 and disappears in 2028, our national DNA has already been rewritten.

Americans in the decades to come will face the monumental task of reckoning with the shattered government that remains. But that reckoning doesn’t need to be a eulogy for democracy. As the former government officials and public policy experts I spoke to for this piece agreed, the disruptive wake of Trumpism offers a real opportunity to rethink our government from the ground up by creating a modern bureaucracy that redefines what it means to be a government by, for, and of the people.

A Government that Governs Least

Trump’s second term has coincided with a light-speed destruction of what was once the most robust and experienced government civil service in the world. The pace of federal employee firings has been matched only by their depth, with nearly every single department and agency suffering major losses. In all, Trump has fired, retired, or removed over 310,000 federal employees from jobs he later dismissed as “boring” — roughly 15 percent of the entire federal workforce.

What remains is a government barely able to function, where skeleton crews man mission-critical agencies that keep drinking water safe, defend American national security from foreign threats, police financial corruption, and monitor the nationwide spread of infectious diseases like the measles. In some cases entire agencies have been dissolved, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where over 16,000 employees woke up in March 2025 to find the White House had terminated their jobs without notice.

For climate scientists and academics, it became clear early on that Trump’s goal wasn’t just to defund and shutter agencies working on climate change research, but to totally eliminate any access to the taxpayer-funded research they had already completed. The result is a gaping hole where years of valuable climate data once existed, leaving researchers with no easy way to replace or replicate the data that was lost.

“All of the websites and materials that were on agency websites around climate risk modeling information, regulations, everything has been wiped,” said Laurie Schoeman, a former senior advisor on climate resilience for the Council for Environmental Quality during President Joe Biden’s tenure. “This is profoundly difficult because agencies have an obligation to deliver some materials to the Library of Congress for preservation. That data was not preserved.”

Schoeman also served as a senior advisor on housing policy for Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, where she focused on issues including housing access and affordability. She sees many of Trump’s sweeping cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development as targeted attacks on the Biden administration’s legacy work.

“The restrictions Trump is imposing on Section 8 public housing are extremely Victorian, because nobody’s choosing to not make enough money to live. People aren’t able to afford housing because housing prices have skyrocketed and wages have stagnated,” Schoeman said. “HUD hasn’t put forward any innovation around housing supply or production because the staff there are afraid to say anything.”

Facing an open assault on their work, the government’s most experienced civil servants are instead choosing to leave public service entirely. Over 15 percent of senior researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have left government since January 2025. The General Services Administration, which oversees government purchasing, saw over 2,500 forced resignations in 2025 alone. The Department of Agriculture, which regulates food safety and supports small farmers, lost 20,000 employees as well, many of whom were paid through the year despite being barred from actually working.

Some of those officials who chose to leave government rather than serve Trump’s autocratic personal rule may return if a Democrat regains control of the White House in 2029, but many are gone for good. Beyond that, the funding cuts Trump instituted will take multiple sweeping acts of Congress to restore, which would require hefty Democratic majorities in both chambers. Even if funding isn’t completely restored, Congress could rebuild confidence in agency independence (and address future brain drain) by drafting clear new laws that insulate agencies from presidential mass-firings and political purges.

“A lot of these employers were kept on salary until the end of the year, so they were essentially not working for six months and taxpayers were paying their salary,” said Schoeman. If government efficiency was Trump’s goal, he couldn’t have chosen a more backward approach.

A Shrinking America Abroad

Perhaps the deepest cuts have come in America’s national security apparatus, including the country’s diplomatic corps. The State Department has lost nearly 20 percent of its career foreign service experts amid a flood of forced retirements and layoffs, leaving more than 80 embassies without ambassadors or senior diplomatic staff.

When Trump began his Iran war in late February, the United States had no Senate-confirmed ambassadors across most of the Middle East. The result was chaos and uncertainty as the White House struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing situation on the ground. Without diplomats in place to manage countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the United States found itself unprepared when allied nations cut off oil and natural gas shipments in early March. Two months later, Trump’s feckless administration is still racing to contain the fallout.

“The people removed were holding relationships, maintaining data systems, and carrying context that takes years – decades, even – to build,” said Dr. Daniel Abrahams, a former senior climate security advisor at USAID who now serves as Founder and CEO of executive search firm BeechTree. “Climate modeling, early warning systems, international climate diplomacy, and adaptation programming in fragile states all depend on continuity.”

Replacing the decades of experience lost to Trump’s cuts will be a challenge even if a Democratic administration succeeds him in 2029, Abrahams warns. “You can hire someone with the right credentials, but you cannot quickly replace someone who has spent a decade building the interagency relationships and field experience. This is the decimation of essential public infrastructure.”

Rehirings take time and money, two things a divided Congress has proven terrible at providing. If Democrats retake majorities in Congress, Schoeman says, they will likely focus on staffing the most mission-critical national security and international agencies first. That’s good news for USAID and the State Department, but it likely means that domestic-focused agencies like HUD and the USDA will be waiting years for the federal money necessary for restaffing and capacity-building.

Meanwhile, the collapse of USAID slammed the brakes on a steady flow of federal contracts to American businesses and NGOs, leading to a wave of layoffs that stalled the domestic economy. What Trump and his allies failed to realize was that every dollar in USAID funding generates roughly $8.52 in economic activity here at home in the form of higher exports and new jobs. In the absence of USAID’s economic multiplier, many of the small businesses that drive America’s economy simply stopped growing.

Worse still is the effect of America’s pullback from global foreign aid — a gap the Chinese government has raced to fill with its own influence operations. With USAID money now absent from developing nations and crisis regions, struggling countries are left to chart their own paths to stability in ways that often run counter to U.S. economic and security interests. Eventually those far-off crises will become America’s problem.

“When the U.S. helps a fragile state build resilience to drought or flooding, it is partly doing that for the people who live there, and partly managing a risk that would otherwise arrive in the form of refugees, instability, and the kind of cascading crises that demand much more expensive responses later,” Abrahams said. “Prevention, at that scale, is one of the best investments the federal government can make.”

Rethinking Government

By cutting the federal government to the bone, Trump has unwittingly created a fertile ground for rethinking core principles about how the government delivers services both domestically and internationally. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, they will inherit a government so emaciated that restoring it to the status quo ante Trump might be functionally impossible. The only choice, then, is to champion a new vision for what the American government looks like.

“One of the things that we’ve suffered from is this feeling that the federal government is not there for the American people,” Schoeman said. “We need a massive town hall where we ask Americans what they need the federal government to do. What does a redesigned government look like? What is our customer service model?”

That sounds a lot like a national re-founding, and it’s an idea a growing number of Americans think is necessary in the wake of Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidency. It’s clear that a majority of voters no longer believe the government is capable of responding to their needs. Many of those voters sided with Trump in 2024 when he pledged to tear down the pillars of our creaking national bureaucracy. Instead of reform, he’s left them with little more than smoldering ruins. If Democrats can seize this moment to reform the federal bureaucracy from the ground up, they can restore public faith in the American experiment at its source.

Abrahams advises that a major part of those reforms should be restoring “real interagency cohesion across the diplomatic, defense, development, and intelligence communities,” much of which has been dissolved under Trump. Schoeman and Abrahams both agree that a restored and expanded USAID will play a critical role in providing a new foundation in any restructured federal administration.

“Within the first 100 days we need to get USAID back online and restore the network of support that we deliver around the globe to communities that depend on the U.S. for support,” Schoeman said. Climate and housing priorities also ranked highly for both former advisors, especially restoring funding for critical climate research at the intersection of environmental policy and national defense readiness.

Still, reforming the federal government from the ashes left by Trumpism will be an effort that spans beyond a single Democratic administration. Even if the next president fully restores USAID funding and turns the lights back on at the EPA, federal agencies are facing a generational loss of expertise. It will likely take decades to bring those agencies back to the level of functionality they enjoyed on the last day of Biden’s tenure. It’s a big job, and it isn’t one for any presidential candidate who thinks a return to “normalcy” is the primary goal of a post-Trump America.

The Trump era may have rewritten the nation’s DNA, but it also offers the era that follows it a unique opportunity to continue reshaping public institutions in ways once considered unimaginable. Trump’s contempt for institutions has in its own way freed Democrats up to think more flexibly about what the future of government looks like — and how it connects to a public that has lost hope in a better future. It’s a rare opportunity that the American people can’t afford to squander.