Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Trump’s Plan to Reorganize the Government Is a Road to Nowhere

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Donald Trump is apparently moving ahead with a plan for a major government reorganization. I have no idea whether it’s a good or bad plan on the merits, but I can say one thing either way: Don’t do it, Mr. President!

Trump is hardly the first president who has wanted to shuffle and rationalize an unwieldy collection of departments and agencies. It’s easy to see the appeal: The modern government grew higgledy-piggledy, usually in response to some crisis and even more often in response to particular, more-or-less-random congressional alignments of influence. Anyone designing the whole thing from scratch would never have done it this way.