De-Wokeifying Government Is Easier Said Than Done

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, February 01, 2025

 

I haven’t seen Chuck Schumer so happy in months. There he was Wednesday, practically ready to burst into song while celebrating the Trump administration’s withdrawal of a memo ordering a federal spending freeze.

 

“Americans made their voices heard,” Schumer crowed. “Donald Trump rescinded the OMB order.”

 

Schumer was too giddy to tell the full story. On Monday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directed federal agencies to stop spending money, with exceptions for entitlements, defense, and direct support for individuals, until grants-in-aid programs were aligned with the president’s agenda.

 

The document’s broad language resulted in confusion. Democrats stoked the outrage. A federal judge enjoined the order. Before long, the White House rescinded the OMB directive — though not, said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the president’s earlier executive orders on DEI and the Green New Deal.

 

For 45 hours this week, then, the Resistance was reborn. But just for a moment. The memo kerfuffle was quickly, and tragically, overshadowed by the collision over Reagan Airport, as well as by hearings for some of Trump’s controversial cabinet picks.

 

The memo dust-up was news precisely because it was so unlike the Trump’s administration’s first week in office. According to one tracker, at the time of writing, President Trump has issued 64 executive actions. They have been issued swiftly and smoothly. And they have left the Resistance in shock and Democrats stunned.

 

Trump’s orders are sweeping. They cover the economy, immigration, education, transgenderism, and beyond. They enact policies he laid out on the campaign trail. And they have a singular aim: removing progressive ideologies from the federal machinery.

 

Read their titles. “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”

 

Two things bind the populist conservative coalition. The first is Trump. The second is opposition to wokeism: the catch-all of anti-Western, anti-American attitudes that sees the world through the victim-victimizer binary and privileges group membership over individual rights.

 

The populist conservative coalition formed in response to the spread of wokeism throughout the academy, the media, entertainment, corporate boardrooms and HR departments, K–12 schools, and government. It’s a reaction to changes in American liberalism that echo through the vast spending and regulatory power in Washington.

 

The welfare state Trump seeks to reform is a misshapen layer cake of liberal ambitions. The rusted instruments of FDR’s New Deal, such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, sit at the bottom. LBJ’s Great Society — Medicare and Medicaid and the civil rights apparatus — is in the middle. It’s the top layer — the woke revolution — that is the least appetizing.

 

Liberalism’s radical turn began in Barack Obama’s second term. The Me Too movement and anti-Trump Resistance, Covid-19, and the death of George Floyd in 2020 catalyzed the intemperate demands of BLM, Greta Thunberg’s climate hysteria, the 1619 Project, Defund the Police, Abolish ICE, and the transgender rights movement into the worldview of most Democratic elites.

 

Former president Joe Biden embedded these revolutionary ideas within the federal bureaucracy. Where earlier welfare states delivered benefits, Biden’s welfare state became a crusader for economic, social, and cultural change.

 

In Biden’s vision, America would adopt a net zero economy. Mass immigration would produce economic and demographic growth. DEI and gender ideology would make America a more diverse and equitable place. And if people didn’t like it, well, they would face censorship, cancellation, and prosecution.

 

By 2024, this agenda had become so unpopular that Biden retired, and Kamala Harris pretended she’d worked at McDonald’s while packing heat. Trump won every swing state and the popular vote not just because of the open border, inflation, and chaos abroad and in the streets. He won because of an anti-woke cultural appeal made most famously in the “Kamala is for they/them” television ad.

 

Now comes the hard part. You exorcise wokeness from government by tackling spending, for sure. But you also wrestle back control of the bureaucracy through hiring freezes, a return to the office, Schedule F, offers of early retirement, moving federal agencies outside the Beltway, and attrition.

 

Just don’t expect it to be easy. The snafu over the OMB memo was a reminder that de-wokeifying the government isn’t a matter of snapping one’s fingers. The federal workforce backs Democrats both politically and financially. Powerful interests are invested in the status quo. The response to the spending freeze revealed the extent of government dependence. Only careful planning, precise language, consistent messaging, and effective legislation will rein in the federal Leviathan. And wipe the smile off Schumer’s face.