Washington: Fairly or not, presidents sometimes are cast in the shadow of their advisers - think George W Bush and Dick Cheney. So, as the Trump administration promises a triple-barreled Armageddon, by hacking into the budget, the bureaucracy and regulations, it's no surprise that some look past this president - to fix on his anarchic chief strategist Stephen Bannon.
There are three battlefronts in the Trump war on Washington - a scorched-earth attack on the budget in which billions of dollars and thousands of jobs would be stripped from departments and programs; a complete executive make-over, in which whole agencies face elimination; and an unprecedented attack on regulation - a cornerstone of which is a presidential edict that two existing regulations must be rescinded before any new one can be implemented.
As a history-making takedown of Washington as a national and global centre of power, it amounts to what the self-described Leninist Bannon declared in a recent rare speech would be the "deconstruction of the administrative state."
Bets are flooding in on how successful Trump will be in a venture described by a CNN pundit as dismemberment of government, "one dollar at a time."
Talking up Trump's chances, former House Speaker and Trump supporter Newt Gingrich explains: "This budget is the first step toward what will be, three or four years from now, a dramatically different federal government.
"We have never had anybody like him. He's one-third Andrew Jackson for disruption, one-third Theodore Roosevelt for energy, and one-third P.T. Barnum for salesmanship. If you weave those together you understand what Trump is."
But Norm Ornstein, who's It's Even Worse Than It Looks is a devastating critique of policy and politics in DC, told Fairfax Media: "In a fundamental sense, this budget is dead on arrival???there'll be confrontation and maybe a prolonged, or several government shut-downs."
The budget Trump unveiled on Thursday is a politically brazen document, which budget director Mike Mulvaney described as a reduction to numbers of all Trump's nationalistic and populist campaign rhetoric- "We wrote it using the president's own words," he said. "We turned those policies into numbers."
Trump's vision, while campaigning, was of a nation getting back to basics, about reining-in profligate capital city bureaucrats who recklessly threw around taxpayer funds, at home and abroad, in the midst of what he called "American carnage."
Trump's budget shifts tens of billions of dollars to defence and homeland security, by cutting a swathe through dozens of other agencies - many of which have enjoyed bipartisan support and some of which are geared to the needs of typical Trump voters.
In fact, the budget is the third time in a matter of weeks that Trump has screwed his voters - first on protection for their retirement planning, then in his makeover of Obamacare, and now wanting to slash programs by which they get affordable housing, banking, weatherizing homes, job training, paying home heating oil bills, and legal advise in civil matters.
But defence get an extra $US54 billion, while as many as 20 other agencies would feel the knife - with cuts of more than 20 per cent for Agriculture, Labour and the State Department; and a crippling 30-plus per cent for the Environmental Protection Agency - which would lose 50 programs and 3200 jobs.
Contributions to the United Nations would be cut and Washington would pay no more that 25 per cent of the cost of international peacekeeping ventures. It's funding for development banks like the World Bank would be pared by $US650 million.
The National Endowment for the Arts, the US Institute of Peace, the Chemical Safety Board, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a $US430 million training program for nurses and other health professionals would be eliminated. Work on climate change and medical research would shrink dramatically.
As Trump's budget fattened the national security apparatus, rural communities would no longer get grants and loans for water facilities and local airports. After-school and summer programs would go unfunded; and home energy aid, job training programs and legal services would get the chop.
But the Mexican border wall, which Trump insisted Mexico would pay for? That's in there - $US1.7 billion in new funding this year and another $US2.6 billion next year.
"There's a lot of programs that simply cannot justify their existence, and that's where we zeroed in," Mulvaney said, making explicit mention of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where the $US3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds anti-poverty efforts, including the iconic Meals-on-Wheels programs, would be eliminated.
"There's no question this is a hard-power budget," said Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. "It is not a soft-power budget. It represents a president who is beholden to nobody but the voters - he's following through on his promises. We did not consult with special interests; we did not consult with lobbyists."
This is a good point at which to make clear that a presidential budget is more a signal of White Houses priorities, than it is a decree. It is Congress that writes budgets and few observers expect to see the Trump wish list formalised as the budget.
Others have arrived in Washington with the same intention to slash and burn.
In his first year, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically and cut projected government spending by five percent. But as he left office eight years later, most of the programs he had had trimmed were bigger than when he had arrived, and those that he wanted to shutter were still in existence.
The problem is that Republicans in Congress, as much as Democrats, are quick to sign on for the broad, philosophical notion of cuts, but much less so for axing any program that has support among their own constituents or which bring money or jobs to their state or district.
Hence Bannon's prediction, in a speech in Washington last month, of an ideological "fight every day." Anticipating never-ending conflict as Trump fought for the rights of his "forgotten people" over those of coastal elites and international institutions, he warned: "If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken."
That's the context in which Justin Bogie, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, urged Trump on - "I think for President Trump, it is important for him to get these ideas out there and show 'I am still committed to these things.'"
Quite the banner. pic.twitter.com/bGE73TTEvL??? Zach Wolf (@zbyronwolf) March 16, 2017
But Congress is jacking up already, with Senator Marco Rubio, who lost to Trump in the battle for the GOP nomination, reminding the White House: "the administration's budget isn't going to be the budget, we do the budget here. The administration makes recommendations, but Congress does budgets."
Another of Trump's primaries challengers, Senator Lindsey Graham is of like mind, declaring of the Trump budget: "dead on arrival."
And in a withering statement, former House Appropriations Committee chairman and Republican Hal Rogers said: "I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the president's skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive. We will certainly review this budget proposal, but Congress ultimately has the power of the purse."
The same uncertainty clouds hopes for Trump's bid to reorganise the federal bureaucracy - again, it's a system that in its national guise is seen as sprawling and unwieldy, but at a local level it delivers money and jobs which are the bacon that senators and house members like to claim they have bought home for their communities.
"Every president since Roosevelt ??? every one, every single one ??? has done a study of how to fix government," Paul Light, a New York University professor and author of A Government Ill Executed, told USA Today. " Presidents can dream the big dream. They can have studies. President Trump won't be the first to have one, and he wouldn't be the first to be disappointed in it."
Trump has already imposed a federal hiring freeze and his brief to Mulvaney on remaking the bureaucracy is expansive - come back within a year with proposals for the president and Congress to "eliminate unnecessary agencies."
Ah, yes. Congress gets in on this act too.
To date, Mulvaney is talking the talk, but Elaine Kamarck is one who tried to walk the walk. Now at the Brookings Institution, she managed the Clinton administration's bid to reinvent government - her memories are not exactly happy.
"You have to tell big pieces of the government to stop doing stuff, and the only way to do that is to overturn statutes," she told The Washington Post. "That's why almost every effort has come far, far short. Despite many Republican administrations and Republican Congresses, the government is bigger than it ever was."
President Obama had a crack at it too, with Congress passing a law in 2010, by which agencies were required to account annually on wasteful spending. And in its first five years it saved $US56 billion - mere petty cash in a budget worth more than $US3.5 trillion a year.
With all that in mind, Trump needs to contemplate his relationship with Congress, and in that he might conclude that it would have been more sensible, politically, to have rolled out something like his proposed $US1 trillion infrastructure scheme before tangling with repealing and replacing Obamacare.
On infrastructure, once the local spending had been factored in, Trump would have won sufficient backing from Republicans and Democrats. But few if any Democrats will back the carpet-bombing of Obamacare - and Trump is even having difficulty rounding up the necessary number of Republicans.
And with his GOP critics split, because the health insurance makeover is either too little or too much, it becomes difficult for Trump to appease them all. The risk is a protracted brawl that could permanently poison the president's relationship with Congress.
State governors are leery too, because a big part of the Trump governance equation is to shift responsibilities and costs from Washington back to the states.
"It's very much a zero-sum game at the state level," said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Governors Association. "It's not like there are pots of money sitting around that can move in. If grants are cut to state and local governments, something has to give."
Ed Rogers has been around the block a few times, as a GOP political consultant and as a senior staffer in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations. Thinking aloud in an op-ed in The Washington Post he was hopeful, but uncertain on Trump's chances of crashing through.
"We just can't afford to keep spending at the rate that we are, not when each taxpayer is now responsible for $US166,000 of the nation's $US19 trillion debt. I'm sure the spending is doing some marginal good, but is it worth borrowing money from the Chinese to keep supporting our debt?
"If he's serious about deconstruction, it starts with the budget. It's certain that Trump's budget will receive zero Democratic votes, so he needs the Republicans to stand in unison. Is that realistic? History would suggest it is not. [But] if he pitches the budget as a catalyst for change and deconstruction, as an opportunity for Americans to shake up the status quo, well at least the debate won't be over before it starts, as most budget battles are."
