Welcome to the Hackocracy

Wonks and hacks used to be at odds. Guess how Trump solved that problem.

E.J. Antoni (photo by the Heritage Foundation)

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Way back in 2004, Bruce Reed, who had served as a top official in Bill Clinton’s White House and would later do the same for Joe Biden, wrote an article for the Washington Monthly arguing that the tension between “hacks” and “wonks” — the political people and the policy people — defined how any administration operated. These non-overlapping Washington tribes, Reed said, were inevitably at odds, and the real problem with George W. Bush’s government was that the wonks had been sidelined and the hacks held all the power:

In every administration, wonks and hacks fight it out. The measure of a great president is his ability to make sense of them both. A president must know the real problems on Americans’ minds. For that he needs hacks. But ultimately, he needs policies that will actually solve those problems. For that he needs wonks. [...]

But the longer I watch this White House, the more convinced I become that ideology is just a convenient rationalization for why the president’s agenda isn’t working. The real reason is darker and more disturbing: The Bush White House is so obsessed with the politics of its agenda that it never even asks whether it will work.

In retrospect it seems like a charmed time, when Democrats could complain that a Republican administration was too political, the chief problem being that its policies would fail to accomplish their goals.

Nevertheless, the hack/wonk dichotomy was a useful tool to understand how governing worked. In years to come, liberals sometimes lamented the “hack gap,” that Republicans had more advocates who would flood the zone with whatever partisan nonsense would benefit their side on a given day, repeated with such synchronization and volume that it inevitably overwhelmed the messy messaging issued from the Democratic side, which in comparison was always full of self-criticism and hesitation. The definition of “hack” shifted from Reed’s understanding as just a political operator (Karl Rove was king of the hacks when Reed was writing) to someone who is not just consumed with politics but is also guided by no principle or morality beyond “Our side wins, the other side loses.”

That brings us to today, and the innovation of the second Trump presidency. In this administration, there is no conflict between hacks and wonks. Because there are no wonks.

That isn’t to say there are no officials who understand and care about policy, because there are. What distinguishes them from previous generations of Republicans is that the wonks in the Trump administration are also hacks, of the most dishonest, ideologically extreme, and repellent sort. Chief among them is Stephen Miller, who is not only the guiding policy hand of the administration — you regularly heard Republicans praise him for his deep knowledge of policy details — but also writes speeches for the president (if Trump sounds particularly fascist when reading from the teleprompter, that’s a good hint it’s Miller’s hand at work). Unlike the wonks of the past, Miller regularly goes on TV to screech at Democrats and the public about how this president will subjugate all of us vermin until we salute with the proper enthusiasm.

Wonkery will be tolerated, but only if accompanied by hackery

That brings us to the man of the moment: E.J. Antoni, Trump’s choice to become head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS is an absolutely vital national resource, gathering and processing data on inflation, job creation, and all kinds of other important metrics. Even under previous Republican presidents it was assiduously non-partisan, its hundreds of analysts dutifully producing the best information they could, then passing it on to the administration and the public to do with what we will.

But after a single bad jobs report, Trump decided that reality has a well-known liberal bias, so he fired the head of the BLS. Even if he was looking for not just a non-partisan official but a Republican one to replace her, there were plenty of experienced and credentialed economists and statisticians out there he could have chosen from. But he passed them all over to pluck out Antoni, who may be the prototypical hack masquerading as a wonk.

Who is Antoni? A regular guest on right-wing media, where he can be relied on to repeat whatever the GOP talking points of the day are; a buddy of Steve Bannon’s; a contributor to Project 2025; a “history buff” who for some reason has a giant photo of a Nazi warship on his wall, and a January 6 protester. But let’s talk professional qualifications. Antoni got a Ph.D. in economics five years ago, which means he can call himself an “economist.” But despite the fact that he has never published a single academic paper, he is now the Chief Economist at the Heritage Foundation, the right’s premier think tank (a term I use loosely).

Let’s consider this for a moment. Heritage is a huge and influential organization; its budget in 2023 (the latest for which documentation is available) was $108 million. It’s safe to say that it could have had its pick of plenty more experienced and credentialed candidates for Chief Economist — professors at large universities, former officials who served on the Council of Economic Advisers or in the Treasury Department in prior Republican administrations. Instead, they chose Antoni — who again, and I’m sorry if I’m being a snob here, but this matters — has never published a single academic paper.

Let’s compare that to the American Enterprise Institute, another big conservative think tank funded by many of the same right-wing donors and corporate interests. As Heritage’s influence has grown in the last decade, AEI’s has waned, and now it finds itself largely on the outs in Trump’s Washington, because as conservative as it is, some of its people have from time to time criticized his administration on particular policies. They have done this for classic wonky reasons: not because they want Trump to lose in some way, but because they’re arguing for conservative policy goals.

Antoni’s counterpart at AEI, directing its economic policy work, is Michael Strain. He’s a familiar figure in wonky Washington circles, and if you asked liberal economists what they think of him, they’d say that while they disagree with him on lots of issues, he’s a reasonably serious scholar with whom they can have honest policy debates.

Which is why there was no way in hell he or anyone like him would get hired by the Trump administration. It’s not that you can’t have genuine credentials to work in this government, but if you do, you have to prove that you’re willing to sacrifice whatever integrity you have to become a Trump lickspittle. Like Kevin Hassett, a perfectly well-credentialed economist who has done plenty of academic research published in scholarly journals, but who is also a spectacularly dishonest spokesperson for the administration, and therefore may be the next Federal Reserve chair. In other words, you can be a wonk, but only if you’re also a hack.

The position of Fed chair is a good illustration of what has changed from Trump’s first term to now. Back then he was essentially fooled into appointing any number of officials who were qualified, because the aides who presented him with a potential appointment would say something like, “This guy is a Republican; he’ll be fine.” In some cases those people were just what Trump wanted, but in others they turned out to have enough integrity or conscience to make them a problem. Jay Powell is the prime example; Trump appointed him chair of the Federal Reserve on someone’s recommendation, but he clearly didn’t investigate whether Powell was the kind of pliable lackey he was looking for. He won’t make that mistake again; the Fed chair he appoints to take over when Powell’s term ends next May will be carefully vetted, including, it is all but certain, interviews in which Trump will ask candidates point-blank whether they’ll move to raise or lower interest rates at his command. What do you think Hassett’s answer will be to that question? There is no doubt.

It’s easy to think of other examples, from his cabinet to someone like Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is extremely conservative but every once in a blue moon will side with the court’s liberals. If Trump gets to fill another seat on the court, it won’t be with someone like her; he’ll demand only an Alito-esque partisan hack — not just an ideological extremist, but someone who has demonstrated their enthusiasm for lying and cheating in service of the MAGA cause — and he’ll get it.

There are still wonks on the Republican side, dutifully going to work in places like AEI, mulling over policy ideas and producing white papers. They may tell themselves that there will be a place for them in the next Republican administration, when things get back to normal. That might even happen. But in the Republican Party that exists today, it’s hacks all the way down.