David Lewis

Media Appearances

• Elon Musk's time machine

  Perhaps that techno-libertarian vision — of a digitized world without government — is the entire point of DOGE. "You strip government down to remove all the parts of it that are resisting you," says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, "and rebuild it in a way that makes it, in your view, more efficient and responsive to you." That's actually more authoritarian than libertarian. But it does make government smaller — and weaker. And the weaker government is, the more the powerful can call the shots.

  April 21st, 2025

• The history of civil service and the impact of Trump’s slashing of the workforce

  When Roosevelt takes office, the national government's probably about 500,000 employees. By the time he leaves office, it's well over three million. In response to the Great Depression, he dramatically expands the role of the national government. These government employees are doing lots of new things. So the federal government's taking new responsibilities in regulating markets and providing social welfare, so we get Social Security and these kinds of things. And it created a conservative backlash.

  March 14th, 2025

• Breaking down the first month of Trump 2.0

  President Trump signed more than 50 executive orders on his first day in office —the contents of which are already fundamentally changing the federal government. David E. Lewis is the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss Trump’s first month in office, from tariffs to foreign policy, domestic actions to DOGE, and what it all means to the American people so far.

  February 21st, 2025

• Trump Tests Legal Limits in Pushing Out Federal Employees

  David E. Lewis, a Vanderbilt University expert on presidential power, said that the gutting of those panels in particular seemed designed to test the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president wields exclusive control of the executive branch, making laws that give independence to other officials unconstitutional.

  February 13th, 2025

• How the civil service system changed American government

  The constitution itself doesn't say much about the bureaucracy. It has a few references to departments or officers, but it doesn't give you any detail about what they should look like or what their structure should be, or how they should be populated or these kinds of things. The way it gets created is through politics. So it's through political decisions from year to year from party to party. And so the government kind of builds up that way.

  January 14th, 2025

• If You Can Keep It: The future of the federal workforce

  More than 2 million Americans serve as career civil servants in the U.S. federal workforce. President-elect Donald Trump’s team has promised to reduce federal spending in part by cutting government employees. Now, those plans are looking more concrete.

  November 25th, 2024

• Musk and Ramaswamy Unveil Plan to Overhaul Government

  David E. Lewis, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, told Newsweek that, while presidents should be free to get advice "pretty broadly from inside and outside government," concern arises over potential conflicts of interest emerging from Musk and Ramaswamy's business dealings.

  November 21st, 2024

• Trump wanted to slash the federal government. But federal agencies are doing just fine.

  Many people worried that the Trump presidency had undermined the administrative state — the agencies, people and policies that make up the executive branch. Their fears were motivated by the president’s disdain for the administrative state. Donald Trump labeled government scientists, generals and prosecutors variously as part of the “swamp” or the “deep state,” while his early-administration adviser, Stephen K. Bannon declared that one of the administration’s three primary goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

  October 18th, 2021

• Here’s why Trump is threatening federal layoffs if Congress won’t shut this agency down

  Congress and the Trump administration are playing a game of chicken over the fate of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the civilian federal workforce. This past week, Margaret Weichert, the acting head of OPM, threatened to furlough 150 workers if Congress refuses to endorse the Trump administration’s plan to reorganize the agency. Meanwhile, Congress has already written into law limitations on the president’s reorganization efforts and is likely to call the OPM’s bluff on furloughs.

  June 24th, 2019

• Trump's slow pace of appointments is hurting government -- and his own agenda

  Six months into his presidency, President Trump has just pulled retired general John F. Kelly away from his position heading Homeland Security to be his White House chief of staff.

  August 3rd, 2017