As political red meat, “the deconstruction of the administrative state” sounds like a yawn — too academic, too abstract, too boring, too many syllables.
Yet Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing podcaster and dark lord of the MAGA movement, has been using this exact phrase for nearly a decade to insist that Donald Trump would accomplish just that. Last summer, when asked by the New York Times columnist David Brooks what the early days of a second Trump presidency might look like, Bannon envisioned thousands of Trump appointees descending on Washington and going “to war with the existing administrative state and the Praetorian Guard deep state.”
Trump, unsurprisingly, seems to prefer the more menacing phrase “deep state” over the sterile-sounding “administrative” one. But among the MAGA faithful, both “the deep state” and “the administrative state” are epithets for a sprawling federal bureaucracy that encompasses everything from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to the National Weather Service and the Department of Education (which Trump says he will abolish). The first item in Trump’s “plan to shatter the deep state and return power to the American people” is a pledge to “fire rogue bureaucrats” on “Day 1.”
To that end, Trump is handing out sledgehammers to those who share his anti-bureaucratic animus. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his choices to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have promised to slash an “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy” that they call “an existential threat to our Republic.” Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (a job he held during Trump’s first term), has said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
“Villains” is a strikingly personal way to talk about an apparatus of impersonal institutions. But Trumpism is nothing if not personal. For the president-elect and his supporters, a faceless bureaucracy is the perfect foil: hard to understand and even harder to love. The administrative state has long been central to governing a large, modern country and revolves around the slow grind of expert knowledge and a respect for procedures — the very things that Trump is eager to demolish.
Bureaucracy and Its Discontents
Bureaucracy has long been associated with stasis and resignation: It’s ordinary, exasperating and spectacularly dull. Literature is filled with absurd ordeals involving intransigent pencil pushers and their red tape. Consider the endless offices in Kafka’s “The Trial,” the obstinate clerk in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the arcane details of the tax code in David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” the nonsensical rules in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” In “Little Dorrit,” Charles Dickens described the Circumlocution Office, “the most important Department under Government,” whose civil servants have dedicated themselves to the mission of “how not to do it.”
The caricatures reflect the fact that bureaucracy has been an inextricable feature of modern life. The United States government employs more than 2.2 million civilians, spread across hundreds of agencies. About 4,000 are political appointees; the rest are nonpartisan workers hired to administer policies. An astrophysicist at NASA is part of the administrative state; so is a social worker at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Much of what the Civil Service does takes place behind the scenes instead of on center stage. Basic public goods that Americans take for granted, like clean air and safe drinking water, rely on a complex infrastructure of regulation and enforcement. The American way of making policy means that benefits, such as they are, are often channeled through the tax code. The political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this invisible work “the submerged state.”
During the first decades of the 20th century, the rapid growth of the administrative state aroused suspicions. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt created new federal agencies and programs in the 1930s to address the Depression, small-government conservatives were outraged. A group of businesspeople created the American Liberty League to attack the New Deal on constitutional grounds, charging it with executive branch overreach — a “strategic choice,” says the legal scholar Gillian Metzger, who notes that any attempt to go after the New Deal for burdening elite economic interests would have been a hard sell to a suffering public. In the lurid rhetoric of one Liberty League pamphlet, “The federal bureaucracy has become a vast organism spreading its tentacles over the business and private life of the citizens of the country.”
Conservative denunciations of the administrative state have continued to couch objections in terms of the Constitution and bureaucratic treachery. In “Unmasking the Administrative State” (2019), the conservative political scientist John Marini warned that the growth of government bureaucracy “had opened up the prospect of the greatest tyranny of all.” Two years later, Trump’s 1776 Commission published a report that compared President Woodrow Wilson to Mussolini: “Like the progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.”
Fears of an undemocratic, overweening bureaucracy haven’t only served as a right-wing talking point. Some of the administrative state’s most pointed critics have been intellectuals on the left, like the anthropologists James C. Scott and David Graeber, each of whom has argued that a domineering bureaucratic state is hostile to local ways of living. But anarchist critiques like theirs are harder to marshal into a mass political movement. In 2015, a time when the Tea Party, a MAGA precursor, was already well underway, Graeber lamented that the right had figured out how to politicize antipathy toward the bureaucracy, deploying the rhetoric of “anti-bureaucratic individualism” to push through a free-market agenda that guts social services while bolstering business interests.
An ‘Unrelenting, Fantastical Assault on Specialized Knowledge’
The MAGA thrashing of bureaucracy, though, is of a different order. The political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum distinguish between critiques of government and Trump’s vows to hobble it. “Every modern state is an administrative state,” they declare in their spirited new book, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.” They take a common complaint about bureaucracy — its inescapability — to highlight its necessity. A bureaucracy filled by professionals and experts who administer the day-to-day functions of governing is the price we pay to live together in a big, complex, populous society.
They concede that a thicket of rules and procedures and petty officials can sometimes make for dysfunction. The political scientist Steven Teles coined the word “kludgeocracy” to describe layer upon layer of public policies and patchwork fixes that have made the operations of the administrative state ever more incoherent and complex. Jennifer Pahlka, who served as the deputy chief technology officer for government innovation in the Obama administration, has argued that a bureaucratic fetish for caution and compliance has compounded “an already debilitating risk aversion.” In his forthcoming book, “Why Nothing Works,” Marc Dunkelman makes the provocative argument that his fellow progressives, with their “cultural aversion to power,” have hamstrung the administrative state to the point where it’s no longer possible to get anything done.
But these critics of the administrative state want to reform and strengthen it, while Trump wants to do the opposite. To hear him tell it, the administrative state has been too aggressive and too effective, especially when it comes to thwarting his will. Instead of bumbling bureaucrats, Trump mostly talks about wily operatives with malign intentions. Vought casts the administrative state in similarly malevolent terms: “It’s a Barack Obama, Joe Biden-infused hybrid, militant, woke and weaponized government that makes every decision on the basis of climate change extremism and on the basis of woke militancy where you’re effectively trying to divide the country into oppressors and the oppressed.”
Dark visions like these are what animates repeated invocations of “the deep state,” a term that has long been used in Turkey, denoting a shadowy network that rooted out dissent, sometimes using violence, and propped up the country’s secular order. Muirhead and Rosenblum, whose previous book was about the rise of conspiracy theories in politics, note that Trump’s grousing about sinister plots is aided by the administrative state’s “illegibility.” The intricacies of policy implementation make the nuts and bolts of governing opaque. This informational vacuum is fertile ground for Trumpism’s “unrelenting, fantastical assault on specialized knowledge.”
Muirhead and Rosenblum point out that “ungoverning” is a truly unusual phenomenon. Leaders typically want a strong state. Some conservatives don’t want to destroy the administrative state; they want to take it over. The constitutional scholar Adrian Vermeule favors a “powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy” that could work in concert to “legislate morality.” The vice president-elect, JD Vance, has said that the right “should seize the administrative state for our own purposes.”
By way of elaboration, Vance spoke admiringly of “what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary,” adding, “That’s basically my strategy: deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right.” His argument presumes there are no genuinely apolitical experts — there are friends and there are enemies, and a powerful bureaucracy is a terrible thing to waste.
Brash Displays of Executive Power
Given the vulnerability of a faceless bureaucracy to Trump’s personal attacks, some writers have tried to counter his belittling insults with praise. In 2018, the best-selling author Michael Lewis published “The Fifth Risk” — “a book in which the central character is the Agriculture Department,” as he put it. This spring, he will publish “Who Is Government?,” an edited volume of articles, most of which appeared last fall in The Washington Post. That “who” is key. Lewis and the six other writers rebut the dehumanization of the administrative state by drawing our attention to the unsung humans who serve it.
The articles collected in “Who Is Government?” are terrific. Even John Lanchester’s “profile” of the Consumer Price Index reads like a magic trick, bringing a lofty abstraction to vivid life. In the introduction, Lewis says that he wants the book to “subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly.”
Yet in the maw of relentless vilification, humanizing a handful of federal workers only gets you so far. Not to mention that valorizing the Civil Service doesn’t reckon with the fact of real public discontent. And neglecting genuine bureaucratic dysfunction, according to Dunkelman, is what ushered in Trumpism in the first place: “By helping to render the government incompetent, we have pried open the door for MAGA-style populism.”
It’s far from clear what Trump’s plans are to fix government. His theatrical pronouncements tend to emphasize not the hard work of building but the revelry of wreckage. Yes, during his first term, the Department of Homeland Security was one of the few agencies that actually grew. But the spectacle of mass deportations has arguably less to do with governing per se than it does with his irrepressible craving for brash displays of executive power. “Ungoverning favors incessant, potent, easily understood public dramas,” Muirhead and Rosenblum write. The behind-the-scenes deliberations of an administrative state get jettisoned in favor of “performative aggression.”
Toward the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order, known as Schedule F, to make it easier for him to fire career federal employees. (Rescinded by President Biden, Schedule F has been dusted off by Trump’s allies for use in his second term.) A series of decisions by the Supreme Court has curbed the independence of regulatory agencies and bestowed on the president extraordinary immunity from prosecution. By throwing off the constraints of government bureaucracy, Trump is vying for what he evidently wants — what Muirhead and Rosenblum call “the arbitrary rule of personal will.”
“Who is government?” you ask. For Trump, there is apparently only one acceptable answer. The state, it’s him.
The post Trump vs. the Bureaucrats appeared first on New York Times.
