Trump’s War on the Administrative State Matters for Catholics

A social minority, pro-life, pro-family Catholics may now fortify protection from persecution — while they can

By Darrick Taylor*

The consequences of a second Trump term as President could be widely transformative (though maybe not). One arena in which they could be, and which would have immediate consequences for Catholics, is how Trump plans to deal with the federal agencies that he believes sabotaged his first term.

Trump and his transition team have set their sights on every federal bureaucracy from the FBI to the Office of Budget and Management, aiming to reshape them as part of his larger agenda. What are his plans, and how will this affect American Catholics?

Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in his first term, but underestimated the opposition of civil service personnel to his agenda, both political appointees and, more notoriously, unelected bureaucrats — ones who often have protections that make them impossible to fire. In his first term Trump issued an executive order named “Schedule F” which sought to strip these protections so that he could remove them at will. Trump never had the chance to implement this policy but has promised to do so on Day One this time around.

This is a major problem for all modern democratic societies, as permanent bureaucracies make the functioning of mass societies like the United States possible. The temptation for unelected civil servants to impose their own agendas in place of the will of democratic majorities is nowhere more evident than in the issue of immigration, in which there are multiple actors such as NGOs with a vested interest in thwarting the popular will (immigration restrictions are favored by seventy percent or more of the public, depending on what surveys you consult). In this vein, Trump’s creation of D.O.G.E. (Department of Government Efficiency), spearheaded by the entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, to rid government of useless waste could aid in reducing the influence of federal bureaucrats.

Personnel is policy, and this is the main reason there has been so much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Trump’s Cabinet picks. Trump wants loyal Cabinet members not only to ensure he can enact his policies but to hold accountable agencies he believes undermined his first term. His pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, the former Florida Congressman from Florida, aroused such opposition that he withdrew his nomination. Kash Patel, a former Trump administration member rumored to be his nominee for FBI director, has raised fears among the rank and file in that organization.

These agencies have reason to be afraid. The FBI’s role in the “Russian Collusion” hoax that bedeviled his administration even before he took office and the Department of Justice’s handling of that affair form the basis for accusations that Trump’s opponents used “lawfare” against him and his supporters (“lawfare” being a term for using the legal system to damage or delegitimize political opponents).

The prosecutions of the January 6 “rioters” who protested Joe Biden’s election in 2020 are a prime example of this. The Biden Department of Justice has convicted over 1400 and sentenced 460 of these “January Sixers,” many serving multi-year sentences for nothing more than trespassing; some have been subject to solitary confinement. One even committed suicide awaiting trial.

Combined with the efforts of Democratic attorney generals in New York and Georgia to bring lawsuits against Trump during an election year, there is ample evidence that Democrats abused state power for political ends, and holding the people who did these things accountable is high on Trump’s agenda.

This war on the administrative state matters to American Catholics precisely because the Left has used the same “lawfare” tactics against Catholics and other Christians since the Obama administration. Most notoriously, numerous states sued in federal Court to strip religious exemptions for employers under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), notably the Little Sisters of the Poor. The employers finally prevailed before the Supreme Court after eight years in 2020, but then in 2021 Joe Biden appointed Xavier Beccera to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Beccera had sued the HHS under Donald Trump as attorney general of California, arguing against exemptions from the requirement that employers provide insurance coverage for sterilization, contraception, and abortifacient drugs.

Joan Andrews Bell, 76, is one of eight pro-life protesters convicted of felony conspiracy to violate the FACE act restricting access of pro-lifers to abortion clinics. Bell is currently serving a two-year sentence; some of her co-defendants received sentences as long as five years

This pattern of using the legal system to intimidate political opponents continued throughout the Biden administration, who notably prosecuted pro-life activists for violations of the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act) for blocking entrances to abortion clinics. Congress passed that act in 1994, but 25% of all cases brought under the Act have occurred since 2022, according to Steve Crampton, an attorney with the Thomas More Society. This is not a coincidence: after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022, Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland set up a task force in the Department of Justice, presumably to reassure its pro-abortion supporters that they would protect access to abortion now that it was no longer a constitutional right.

Since 2022, all but one FACE Act prosecution have resulted in convictions, and this includes several Catholics. Most notoriously, the longest sentence for any convicted prolife activist is that of Lauren Handy, a 31-year-old from Virginia sentenced to 57 months in prison. The lone exception is the infamous case of Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life activist who was arrested at gunpoint after an early-morning FBI raid of his home in Pennsylvania in 2022, in front of his terrified family.

Young people during pro-life activities that included the March for Life pray the rosary in front of Planned Parenthood offices in Washington, DC.

Houck’s case is instructive. An abortion clinic volunteer in Philadelphia initially lodged a complaint against Houck, but local authorities declined to prosecute. Garland’s DOJ then stepped in and dispatched the FBI to arrest Houck. A jury acquitted Houck in February of 2023.

These acts against Catholics are part of the wider weaponization of the federal bureaucracy at the behest of left-wing activists. Under Obama, the IRS scrutinized the tax exempt status of conservative political groups (the IRS later apologized). More recently, the FBI investigated protesters of a local school board in Virginia and labeled them as “terrorists” after the National School Board Association sent a letter to Merrick Garland complaining of “threats” from disgruntled parents over school board policies. During the Biden administration, the FBI has taken to labelling conservative groups as “domestic violent extremists,” taking their cue from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-known left-wing activist outfit. Included in this list of “domestic extremists” are Latin Mass Catholics, whose parishes one FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia targeted for surveillance.

A second Trump administration that takes on the administrative state will benefit Catholics, who at times have suffered from these abuses of  power as they have put their faith in action. Reports indicate Trump will pardon “January 6th” protesters but also the pro-life activists mentioned above, and removing the activist element from the federal bureaucracy is the most important thing he can do.

But there will be other ancillary benefits from Trump’s planned defenestration. Reports claim that DOGE will seek to eliminate government funding of NGOs, among them, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions.

According to post-election surveys, Trump won the votes of Catholics by a healthy margin (56 to 43), and the open hostility the Democratic Party has shown towards Catholics recently partly explains this. This hostility is itself an expression of a broader hostility toward religion in general on the Left, which is likely to increase in the future.

Catholic teachings on the sanctity of life and sexual morality are minority positions in the U.S. now. America has become a firmly pro-choice country, as evidenced by the success of seven state initiatives to enshrine a right to abortion into their constitutions.

Those Catholics who believe all that the Church teaches are now a tiny minority — in other words, one that will be even more vulnerable to abuses of power in the future. The Democratic Party will not remain in disarray forever, and they will doubtless resort to the same tactics when they return to power at some point. Catholic leaders would be wise to take advantage of Trump’s war on the “Deep State” to push for greater protections for religious freedom and freedom of association against the depredations of government power, while they have the chance.

*Darrick Taylor earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Kansas. He teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida and produces a podcast, “Controversies in Church History.”