Abandoning the Field

How did we allow the left to take control of our government?

One of the biggest problems in America today is the permanent bureaucracy. Some call it the deep state, some call it the managerial state, but whatever moniker you prefer, it is the mass of career employees in the federal government that remain in place no matter which party controls Congress or the White House. This apparatus was mostly created during the Great Depression as President Franklin Roosevelt usurped extensive authority to deal with the crisis. Then came World War II, then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and now the permanent bureaucracy is firmly embedded in our society. The deep state is the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are generally left wing, hard to remove, and who have authority to micromanage your life.

Conservatives mistrust this sort of bureaucracy, and we have long wished for it to go away. But all our wishing has somehow failed to roll back the administrative state. Even when Republicans campaign on shrinking government, as in 1980, 1994, and 2010, it never seems to actually happen. So the bureaucracy marches on, always expanding, full of career leftists who think it is their right and duty to tell us how to live our lives.

Once upon a time, the president had ultimate authority over the Executive Branch. He could hire and fire whomever he wanted. Presidents often appointed executive staff based on political support rather than competence - Andrew Jackson was notorious for this practice. After the particularly corrupt and disastrous administration of Ulysses Grant, Congress completely overhauled the civil service, creating a system wherein executive staff were hired on merit and could not simply be removed by the next president. However, the downside of this system is apparent today - it is almost impossible to fire modern civil servants no matter how little work they do or how much they sabotage the administration.

Ironically, the original civil service reforms have been retroactively criticized by woke historians who say they were designed to keep free blacks out of government jobs. Today, black employees have outsized representation in the federal bureaucracy.

At this week’s Ronald Reagan Club luncheon I had the opportunity to chat with political veteran and Ada County Commissioner candidate Tom Dayley. After seriously underestimating Mr. Dayley in the primary last May I have made it my mission to listen whenever he shares his wisdom borne out of long experience in government. At this event he shared stories from his time in the Reagan Administration, and his attempts to reform the bureaucracy.

Mr. Dayley described ways they dealt with employees who were at best unwilling to work, and at worst actively opposed to the goals of the administration. Firing them was impossible, so they settled for transferring them to positions that required no actual work. It still wasted money, but at least they could not actively hinder the work being done. Dayley suggested that President Trump did not have the political experience to know how to deal with the bureaucracy, attempting to run it like he would his real estate business. This backfired, as the deep state was often able to stymie Trump’s attempts at reform.

President Trump has promised a harsher hand if he is reelected, but in the meantime, what can we do about the administrative state? Tom Dayley suggests that conservatives need to get involved. We should not be afraid to go to work for the government. I know, it sounds awful, but the alternative is to let these agencies continue to run roughshod over our liberties. Republican politicians always promise to shrink government, to eliminate bureaucratic agencies, but they are rarely successful. Mr. Dayley told the story of how he and his colleagues worked for three years to eliminate a WWII-era department that had no purpose by the 1980s and cost taxpayers $4 million a year. Yet the executive bosses and legislative staff still fought even such modest attempts to trim the size of government.

We ceded the bureaucracy, public schools, public libraries, and most of the non-profit sector to the left and then we wondered why the left has taken over our entire culture. Winning our culture back means getting involved in those things, as Tom Dayley has done for his entire career. Run for school board. Apply to be on your local library board. Apply for a job with the city, the county, or the state. We are not going to change the course of our nation overnight, but we can start nudging it in the right direction.