Trump v. the Bureaucracy
/The Atlantic published a long article in March 2020 about Donald Trump’s efforts to weaken the federal government: The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions: How Trump is Destroying the Civil Service and Bending the Government to his Will. Click here to read the Atlantic article by George Packer.
In his fourth year in power, Trump has largely succeeded in making the executive branch work on his personal behalf. He hasn’t done it by figuring out how to operate the bureaucratic levers of power, or by installing leaders with a vision of policy that he shares, or by channeling a popular groundswell into government action. He’s done it by punishing perceived enemies, co‑opting craven allies, and driving out career officials of competence and integrity.
The article is much more than an update on Trump’s campaign promise to drain the Washington swamp. And it’s more than a caution about what Trump could do if he is re-elected. It is a lesson about the massive national government bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy consists of 15 major departments, and hundreds of smaller agencies. The bureaucracy functions like a separate, fourth branch of government. It dwarfs the Congress in terms of people, and, to be honest, in terms of power. Congress makes laws and passes budgets. But those laws go straight to a government bureaucracy that interprets them as it pleases, making them weaker or stronger through regulatory language and discretionary enforcement.
More than two million people work in the national bureaucracy, and every one of them is, directly or indirectly, an extension of presidential power. And that suits Trump. According to The Atlantic article, “When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty.”
The thing is, bureaucrats don’t typically think of themselves as loyal to the president. Instead, they are loyal to their agency and to their mission. Most of them work in the same agency their whole career and become experts in a narrow and arcane field. The accumulation of facts they build up over time doesn’t change when a new person moves into the White House. So when Trump won the 2016 election, the bureaucrats expected to go on as usual. Trump’s lack of qualification wouldn’t matter.
The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.
Their mistake was supposing that intelligence and commitment and integrity would win in a contest against aggression. In schoolyard fights, the bully beats the egghead. In Washington, the same thing happened.
For some bureaucrats, their second mistake was overestimating their own integrity. Andrew McCabe, once the number two man in the FBI, is an example. McCabe was deeply involved in the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and her mishandling of official emails. The FBI eventually dismissed the Clinton email case, finding what Clinton did foolish and irresponsible, but not criminal.
Andrew McCabe
Meanwhile, McCabe’s wife ran for congress and received a donation of almost $700-thousand from a Clinton ally. Did McCabe cut a deal with the donor, to get Clinton exonerated in exchange for the money? No. Almost certainly there was no connection at all. But it looks dirty.
Trump told the story during his campaign – making it sound like McCabe managed the case for the personal benefit of his wife. As I said, it probably isn’t true that McCabe did anything wrong. But it is true that his wife got the donation and it is true that under McCabe, Clinton was cleared. Trump stitched together a version of the facts that sounded suspicious enough to his campaign audience. (Watch the clip at 7:52 to get Trump’s remarks.
McCabe trusted in his own rectitude and in his compliance with regulations, and in the durability of the career Washington-insider class. He didn’t understand, until it was too late, that a large part of America is disgusted with Washington insiders, and are eager to believe stories of their rottenness. To people who’ve never been given a $700,000 donation, McCabe’s actions seemed fishy, or if not exactly fishy, then elitist and privileged.
McCabe wasn’t the only FBI agent whose reputation Trump sullied. He also took down Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and they too were dirty enough that Trump’s accusations stuck to them. Many Democrat commentators have insisted that Trump’s accusations against Strzok and Page (for having an extra-marital sexual affair) doesn’t hold water because Trump is himself guilty of sexual infidelity. But that is a weak argument. If Strzok and Page were guilty, Trump’s guilt doesn’t make them innocent. It just makes them all equally ridiculous.
And since Trump is in charge, he wins. Trump won against McCabe and against Strzok and Page and some others because they weren’t as pure as they supposed. Not all the bureaucrats who have been ruined and driven from office were guilty of anything, though. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich appears to be clean and virtuous. Trump bullied her out of place just because he didn’t want her around.
When Trump says, as he often does, that Article II of the Constitution says he can do anything he wants, he’s wrong. The words, “do anything he wants” aren’t there. But in a limited way, it is nevertheless true. He can do whatever he wants with the bureaucracy, or at least with the thousands of appointed positions. He can fire any of those appointed leaders. He can fire any of them for any good reason. He can fire them for no reason at all. And he can fire them for the rottenest reason you can imagine. The Constitution is on his side.
The Constitution says almost nothing about the federal bureaucracy. It doesn’t set a minimum or a maximum for how many bureaucrats there can be. It doesn’t describe the relationship of the bureaucracy to the president or the congress. It doesn’t clarify the extent to which bureaucrats can legislate by setting regulations. All the Constitution says, regarding the massive federal bureaucracy, is (in Article II, Section II) that the president:
may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices,
he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . other public Ministers and Consuls . . . and all other Officers of the United States.
but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
I suggest that the rapid decline of the bureaucracy under Trump is evidence that our Constitutional foundation has never been solid. The Atlantic agrees that the bureaucrats misjudged how solid their position was, and how little was needed to topple them.
Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.
For the most part, those massive agencies have done their work reasonably well. We need the government agencies. But we need them to do their work in better order than exists today.
There is plenty more to read and learn and know about bureaucracies. The original expert was a German Sociologist named Max Weber, who recognized late in the 19th Century that as societies become complicated, it becomes necessary to put arcane and complex systems into the hands of people who know those systems. Weber said bureaucracies were necessary. He also said bureaucracies turn men into little more than little cogs, and that they are horrible:
It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.
Now, counterpoint Weber’s fatalistic notion about petty little bureaucrats doing petty little jobs with the story from the satirical news site, The Onion, which reports that bureaucrats are heroic and vigilant, but that they don’t exist.
