But those institutions do things. Like the CDC. Imagine if this was 1939 and the stock market crashed and there was imminent war likely against one or both of Japan and Germany and maybe Russia too. Wouldn't you want your national institutions to be functional and maintained? The answer is yes, today or pretty much any other time. There will always be new diseases, new conflicts with other countries, issues with resources and there's value in people studying these things.
A better measure might be whether those institutions are functional to a degree that their current form of existence is a net benefit to us vs. their cost, not whether they return any value at all.
While I could probably quibble about certain details, I'm pretty happy overall with how things are going in regards to this. If anything, I wish it'd extend more into some of the even bigger establishments, like defense and entitlement systems.
Those institutions are only as functional as the leadership.
If the leader cuts teams, prevents delegation and starves recruitment then it should be obvious that the end result is going to be something dysfunctional.
If you've ever been under incredibly bad management it's the exact same story. Management can destroy the value a team was previously generating, then get away with blaming the team for not doing enough for the company.
Trump is indeed waging a war on the DC establishment and its longstanding norms and practices.
His constituents elected him as the proverbial "bull in a china shop" so he would break all the glassware.
As this article lays out, by many measures he appears to be succeeding.