One of the cromulent critiques of the Administrative State is how the bureaucracy became a force unto itself. Indeed, that is due to the very nature of bureaucracy itself. Reigning in this self-created autonomy is absolutely a valid necessity. But draining this “swamp” means nothing if you just fill it up again with your own swamp replete with biased and partisan operations.
Nearly a century and a half ago, the spoils system was replaced with civil service reform under a Republican President who literally was assassinated for supporting that. In a government, we first and foremost expect them to execute the law under the direction of the President (or at the state level by statewide executive officers and/or boards) who can direct the particulars as authorized by legislation. But the response to the over-politicization of the Administrative State by unelected bureaucrats should not, and can not, be countered by… over-politicization of the Administrative State by unelected bureaucrats.
The top levels of the Executive Branch indeed must be political appointees whose job it is to implement policy that the President has been given the power to make by Congress or via tools authorized by Congress to do the same. As much freedom of action as Article II grants the President, even he is still subject to Article I, with only the Constitution itself and the checks and balances therein as overarching limitations on all.
Yet we live in an era where “norms and laws” are not just political obstacles, but outright tools of irredeemable evil. The application of “laws equally and in an even handed manner” must be tossed aside in the name of “winning” and then “crushing” one’s enemies. This is just the natural result of declaring that there are “no rules” and one’s side can only win by dominating over one’s political enemies.
We get to the point where we no longer even expect government employees to do their job in service or under the direction of the policymakers, but to become policy shapers themselves, with “neutral” employees being limited to technical minions like code monkeys or lab monkeys. Having someone with institutional and technical knowledge running analyses, laboratories, &c., under a President’s policy, is, in fact, desirable. When you deal with some part of the Federal Government, there ought to be an expectation that you will be treated fairly and according to the law with neutral rules; you should not have to second guess if you are being targeted by some partisan political apparatchik.
It is with this new governing philosophy that we should view a memorandum from the Office of Personnel Management declaring that senior executive service government positions are “[n]o longer the station of impartial and apolitical technocrats”.
A President is served by an objective civil service who, while under the direction of a President’s policy, are not themselves shapers of policy. Being shapers of policy is exactly the problem, and an apparatchik remains apparatchik regardless of whether he or she is hired via civil service laws or appointed by another apparatchik higher up on the organizational chart.
Sometimes, a neutral analysis is necessary to assess or implement political policy. Bending facts and analysis is, again, the exact problem memoranda like the one above were purportedly promulgated to combat. An administration’s own bias and policy preference can act as blinders that narrow their vision and compromise their ability to govern. The problem lies not in who chooses the apparatchik, but with the very nature of an apparatchik as an apparatchik.
The true folly of this approach lies in it’s extent of replacing every sinew of the body politic with motive will from the head of Leviathan. Even in a human body, many functions are automatic, as much as we may be able to shape them for good or ill. In the short term you get your immediate policy preferences implemented. In the long run, you get replacement every new administration, or at least change in partisan control of the White House.
This results in lack of institutional knowledge, with each not administration needing to reinvent the wheel, or otherwise subjecting the people to ever changing arbitrary and capricious bureaucrats on any time scale longer than a major election.
This, in turn, could only be countered by outsourcing such decisions and future politicized employee training to… who know? And isn’t that how you get a Deep State?
The full memorandum can be read here, or below:
