There’s an old adage that says you can tell a lot about a country by how it governs in a crisis. But lately, it’s hard to shake the feeling that America isn’t being governed at all.
Whereas the media often frames the administration’s problems as incompetence or deliberate chaos, I think the truth might be more alarming: What if it’s not that the car is being driven poorly, but that no one is even in the driver’s seat?
Take, for instance, the hollowing out of federal agencies. During President Trump’s first presidency, there was a well-documented purge of career civil servants, scientists, diplomats and department heads. But what followed wasn’t a thoughtful reconstruction, however ideological. It was a slow fade into nothingness. Positions simply weren’t filled. Appointments were left pending for months, even years. Entire sections of departments, like at State and the EPA, became ghost towns.
This wasn’t sabotage in the traditional sense — it was more like strategic abandonment.
In Trump’s second term, the administration is doubling down on its strategy of management by absence. The presidency — and now the president’s party — is defined not by a coherent philosophy but by a refusal to govern unless there is something immediate to gain from it. It’s government via headline. An illusion of action only when the cameras are rolling.
We see this neglect everywhere. In public health, lessons from COVID-19 have evaporated into a partisan fog, such that pandemic preparedness offices remain underfunded. In environmental policy, regulations are repealed but no new frameworks are proposed. In immigration, cruelty often seemed like the point, but even cruelty requires planning. Now the system is simply jammed — not out of some calculated malevolence, but because nobody showed up to fix it.
You don’t need a grand conspiracy to get government dysfunction. You just need people to stop doing the work. And when apathy trickles down from the top, the rot spreads quickly. Mid-level managers take their cues from the inaction above. Good-faith civil servants burn out or check out. Soon, systems very finely and intentionally designed to respond, regulate and reform start wheezing like old radiators in an abandoned house. And when the alarm bells go off — a train derails, a border crisis flares or a hurricane hits — there is no one to pick up the phone, much less coordinate a response.
Of course, the Trump administration, like every administration, has its die-hards, its loyalists, its cult of true believers. But increasingly, their job seems less about governing and more about defending the lack of it. They hold press conferences, write posts and give interviews not to lay out plans or update the public, but to justify why good, functional governing isn’t happening.
In this sense, we’ve moved beyond the conventional dysfunction of past administrations. George W. Bush had Katrina. Barack Obama had the VA scandal. Joe Biden had the Afghanistan withdrawal (and a whole lot more). These were failures of execution — bad choices, misjudgments, slow responses. But even in those moments, there was a clear chain of command, someone trying (however imperfectly) to steer the ship.
What we have now is something eerier: silence from the cockpit. This kind of neglect is dangerous not just because things break down, but because when they do, no one has the blueprint. Bureaucracies, for all their flaws, exist to create consistency. They are built to run on rules, institutional memory and procedures that persist regardless of who’s in power. But when you fire the institutional memory and never bother to train anyone new, the rules go with them. And when crises come — and they always do — there’s no muscle memory left. Just chaos and improvisation.
Some might argue that this is the point. That dismantling government, shrinking it down to the size where it “can be drowned in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist famously put it, is the actual goal. But that interpretation gives too much credit. It suggests strategy, direction, an endgame. What we’re seeing doesn’t look like the pursuit of smaller government; the destination isn’t libertarian paradise. It’s bureaucratic purgatory.
And let’s not forget the global implications. At a time when the world was crying out for American leadership — on climate, on public health, on technology, on human rights — America hit everyone in the face with tariffs and then ran to the sideline, distracted by culture wars and internal squabbles, content to watch the gears rust. The G-7 doesn’t wait. Neither does China. The world moves on, whether or not the United States is ready to lead.
So where does that leave us? In a strange limbo, with a vacuum of leadership dressed up as populism, filled with slogans and scapegoats instead of solutions.
There’s still time to course correct. To re-staff, to rebuild, to remember what a functioning government actually looks like. But that starts with acknowledging the scope of the neglect — not just its outcomes, but its origins. It’s not enough to say “government is broken.” We have to ask who stopped trying to fix it.
At the end of the day, a democracy can survive bad drivers. What it can’t survive is nobody driving at all.
Aron Solomon is the chief strategy officer for Amplify. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania.
