Sacks predicted that a core, outcome-defining question of Trump’s second term would be whether he could curb the autonomy of the federal bureaucracy and bring agencies under tighter presidential control. That is exactly how the second Trump administration has been widely characterized so far.

Trump has made implementation of the Project 2025 vision to “dismantle the administrative state” and centralize control of agencies in the White House a central tenet of his second term, according to detailed reporting and analysis.(en.wikipedia.org) On taking office in January 2025, he immediately reinstated and expanded Schedule F–style classifications (now “Schedule Policy/Career”), making tens of thousands of policy‑influencing civil servants easier to remove and more directly answerable to presidential directives.(theguardian.com) He also created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk to drive layoffs and restructuring across agencies, leading to roughly 200,000–300,000 federal employees being fired or pushed out in 2025 alone, an effort commentators describe as an unprecedented attempt to reshape the civil service and concentrate executive power.(en.wikipedia.org)

Additional executive orders have aimed to bring independent regulators under White House control and to “commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state,” explicitly framing bureaucratic restructuring as a top presidential priority.(politico.com) Major outlets and scholars now treat the struggle over the administrative state—reclassifications, mass layoffs, union rollbacks, and litigation over agency independence—as one of the defining battles of Trump’s second term, not a side issue.(millercenter.org)

Because this fight over reducing bureaucratic autonomy and increasing direct presidential control has, by late 2025, become a central organizing theme of Trump’s governance and a major determinant of his administration’s trajectory, Sacks’s prediction about what would be a key, outcome‑shaping issue of the term is borne out by events to date.