As someone who presently works in the public sector and having expended much labor and treasure to get a master’s degree in public administration, I take attacks on civil servants to heart. I fear that conspiracy theories that characterize career bureaucrats as disloyal members of a deep state undermine the core values of independence and nonpartisanship that lie at the core of civil service. Since the concept of a deep state is at the heart of the attacks on public servants, I thought a post devoted to it would be worthwhile.
Short History of the Deep State
According to Rebecca Ingber, a Boston University Law School Professor who has written extensively about the deep state, “Historically, the term has been employed with respect to regimes in Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt, to describe control of the state, irrespective of democratic institutions, by powerful and clandestine alliances among the intelligence, military, and business elite, often with ties to organized crime.”1 The term remained relatively obscure until John le Carre used it in a plot device in his 2013 novel, A Delicate Truth. The next milestone for the term came when a former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren appropriated the term he read in the spy novel when he penned the essay, Anatomy of the Deep State, which he later expanded into a book. In Lofgren’s defined the deep state in his article as the power lobbyists within the military-industrial complex, financial services industry, and trillion-dollar tech companies who carry an outsize influence on public policy.2 In interviews and follow-up essays, he is clear that he does not believe that the idea of the deep state he described as a conspiracy theory. Instead, his theme centered on the dynamics of entrenched institutions that resist reform.
According to a study conducted by NPR, the term deep state appeared in stories 64 times in 2016, then jumped to 2,300 in 2017 and then nearly 5,000 times in 2018. (3) In 2016, Trump was elected president, and the term’s popularity exploded as it morphed into a catch-all word that filled the role of boogeyman for the Trump administration and its supporters. Among the things that supporters of the administration blame on the deep state are leaks damaging to the Trump agenda, the Mueller investigation, and Trump’s impeachment. The deep state conspiracy found champions among neo-Nazi websites like Breitbart and by FOX News host Sean Hannity.
Bureaucratic Resistance
Many career bureaucrats accept lower wages, work long days (and often nights and weekends) and hold valuable expertise and experience having worked through several presidencies of different parties. They would undoubtedly be surprised to learn they are deep state actors undermining the American republic. Rather than being a victim of a deep state conspiracy, Trump is facing what every president before him has—bureaucratic resistance.
Bureaucratic resistance is defined as any action or inaction of bureaucratic actors that hinders the will of political leadership. The idea of resistance, in this sense, focuses on the notion that bureaucracies have a bias towards the status quo. Large institutions do not change course quickly. Such bias may even benefit democracies by protecting against rapid and potentially destabilizing change. While civil servant disobedience can play a role in bureaucratic resistance, it is rare, and for the most part, not what the Trump administration is experiencing. Even the leaks that the administration decries can hardly be characterized as undemocratic acts by a deep state in the Trumpian sense. Leaks, by their very definition, are acts that improve transparency, a hallmark of a democratic government.
Leadership in the Public Sector
An experienced leader in the public sector understands change management. Currently, Trump has left appointments at every level of government empty and routinely attacks the people left. He also faces a retention problem as resignations of career bureaucrats are at unprecedented levels. Perhaps, this is all intentional and part of Trump’s war on the administrative state. However, hollowing out government bureaucracies through refusing to fill posts or replace experience staff is counterproductive. Even successful downsizing requires experienced managers. The goads of the Trump administration are made more difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish given the conditions that the administration created for itself. In his own fashion, the Trump administration is doing the opposite of what any good change management manual would suggest, and then blaming the results on the deep state.
1 See Rebecca Ingber’s “Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State.” Iowa L. Rev. 104 (2018): 139.
2 In Lofgren, M., 2014. Essay: Anatomy of the deep state. Bill Moyers and Company.
3 See Ingber’s article from footnote 1.
