{"id":18176,"date":"2017-03-14T12:46:10","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T16:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18176"},"modified":"2017-03-14T12:46:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T16:46:10","slug":"on-the-deep-state-the-administrative-state-and-the-civil-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18176","title":{"rendered":"on the Deep State, the administrative state, and the civil service"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last few days have\u00a0seen several prominent articles about &#8220;the Deep State&#8221;: by David Remnick in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2017\/03\/20\/there-is-no-deep-state\">New Yorker<\/a>, Marc Ambinder in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/five-myths-about-the-deep-state\/2017\/03\/10\/ddb09b54-04da-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?utm_term=.459a685931b0\">The Washington Post<\/a>, Julie Hirschfeld Davis in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/06\/us\/politics\/deep-state-trump.html?_r=0\">New York Times<\/a>, and Kevin Williamson in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/445702\/deep-state-trumps-neocon\">The National Review<\/a>, among others. I&#8217;d been thinking of writing myself, and I think we need some definitions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Civil Service: a body of government employees who are protected against political patronage and dismissal without cause in return for embracing norms of nonpartisanship, public service, and professionalism.<\/li>\n<li>The Administrative State: government agencies that make and enforce rules and regulations (in contrast to statutes enacted\u00a0by legislatures) and\/or directly manage public resources, such as land.<\/li>\n<li>The National Security Apparatus:\u00a0military and spy\u00a0agencies as well as\u00a0police agencies concerned with terrorism, foreign espionage, and subversion.<\/li>\n<li>Bureaucracy: any large organization divided into specialized offices, each requiring appropriate training and having defined roles and responsibilities, the whole being organized hierarchically and aimed at achieving some predefined or externally defined end or purpose.<\/li>\n<li>The Deep State: a group of people within any or all of the above who collude secretly to pursue their own shared agenda, which may reflect their self-interest or an ideological interest contrary to the goals of elected leaders.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Some observations based on those definitions:<\/p>\n<p>Most\u00a0of the above definitely exist. Whether the (or a) Deep State exists is a matter of conjecture. One reason that the answer\u00a0is not obvious is that the National Security Apparatus is cloaked in considerable secrecy. But secrecy\u00a0is necessary for the existence of such an apparatus at all, and is\u00a0not indefensible. There are many things we would like our\u00a0government to know yet\u00a0not publicly disclose. State secrecy is a problem for a democracy but not necessarily an avoidable one.<\/p>\n<p>If there is a Deep State, it would form <em>within<\/em> one or more bureaucracies yet\u00a0would subvert them. That is because bureaucracies constrain their employees to carry out defined tasks, but people\u00a0who collude for their own agendas are evading\u00a0such constraints.<\/p>\n<p>The Deep State could exist within the National Security Apparatus, the domestic civic service, or both. Americans\u00a0in a large swath of the center-left and left tend to be critical of US foreign policy but\u00a0supportive of regulation and the welfare state. Some of them have feared secret agendas in the National Security Apparatus while viewing officials\u00a0in the domestic welfare and regulatory agencies as dedicated civil servants. Americans in a large swath of the right have been more supportive of foreign policy than of domestic policy, so they have been prone to see soldiers, police officers, and spies as public servants, and other federal employees as uncontrollable bureaucrats. However, the hard right has also been critical of foreign policy, so there have been Deep State narratives on the right\u00a0at least since the McCarthy Era. Some on the hard left see the domestic policy apparatus as basically a Deep State devoted to\u00a0disciplining the poor, but I hear less of that than I used to 20 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>To the extent that we have a genuine civil service, it is designed to push back against elected officials and political appointees. That is not sign of a conspiracy but evidence that popular sovereignty conflicts with such values as scientific rigor and legal consistency. The civil service has a checks-and-balances relationship with\u00a0elected politicians.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we do have a problem with the Administrative State, but it is not a conspiracy or anything wrong with the people who work in it. Theodore Lowi was a very fine political scientist whose death on Feb. 17 didn&#8217;t get enough attention. Lowi\u00a0argued that liberals built the regulatory and administrative agencies to enact demanding values for which they had received popular support. But the agencies that liberals\u00a0created do not have legitimacy to make value-judgments themselves. In lieu of making explicit value-judgments, they claim to make their decisions based on science, efficiency, precedent, or stakeholder negotiation.\u00a0But they actually make value judgments every day. This creates a crisis of legitimacy that threatens the liberal project.<\/p>\n<p>Another way to make Lowi&#8217;s argument is to note that the Administrative State is not\u00a0envisioned in our Constitution (nor is a permanent\u00a0National Security Apparatus). Agencies are widely understood as parts of the executive branch or as arms of Congress. (They even employ their own <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Administrative_law_judge\">judges<\/a>, which makes them resemble the judicial branch.) I think a better interpretation is that they represent a fourth branch altogether, which has developed since\u00a01900. It should embody certain norms, such as impartiality, rigor, and predictability, and it should be designed to push and pull with the branches that reflect popular will (Congress and the presidency), deliberation (Congress), discretion and flexibility (the presidency), and law (the judiciary). We should expect tension between the president and the administrative agencies and improve our means of resolving those tensions.<\/p>\n<p>As long as we do not regard the Administrative State as a branch with its own norms and standing, we should expect constant crises of legitimacy, because the existence of this branch has never been recognized by the American people. This\u00a0is not to defend or rationalize Stephen K. Bannon&#8217;s attack on the\u00a0administrative state. But there is a deeper and longer-term problem that will require attention sooner or later.<\/p>\n<p>See also: \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15743\" rel=\"bookmark\">the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution<\/a>;\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5949\" rel=\"bookmark\">the public interest and why it matters<\/a>; \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5129\" rel=\"bookmark\">problems with \u201cstakeholders\u201d<\/a>; and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9268\" rel=\"bookmark\">on government versus governance, or the rule of law versus pragmatism<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last few days have\u00a0seen several prominent articles about &#8220;the Deep State&#8221;: by David Remnick in the New Yorker, Marc Ambinder in The Washington Post, Julie Hirschfeld Davis in the New York Times, and Kevin Williamson in The National Review, among others. I&#8217;d been thinking of writing myself, and I think we need some definitions: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18176"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18192,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18176\/revisions\/18192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}