The Fight of the Century

Trump’s Taming of the Administrative Deep State

Within the first week of being re-elected President, Donald Trump has already filled out his cabinet picks with controversial nominations. Within hours of announcing these picks, X.com was overrun with previously quiet liberals, Beltway insiders, and old-guard conservatives who were aghast that Trump selected such non-traditional persons to head the most critical departments in Washington. The most common complaint was that Trump’s nominees were “unqualified” or “unfit”—but also that RFK, Jr. was a science-denier on vaccines and autism and the supposed health benefits of seed oils, and that Matt Gaetz is a party-boy and philanderer that has had a DOJ investigation and House Ethics Committee complaint opened over accusations of sleeping with underage girls and of sex-trafficking (Gaetz has since withdrawn his nomination and Trump has tapped Pam Bondi to be AG in his place).

Before wading into the details of these accusations and debates—which assumes a modicum of their credibility—we need to understand what’s happening at this phase of Trump’s transition to becoming our 47th President. What’s happening is this: Trump is bypassing both the traditional modes by which political department heads are cultivated and hand-selected after long periods of loyalty testing, he is violating the long-established criteria for qualification among the political class, and in doing so he is calling into question both our elites’ educational training and their self-inflated credentialing.

In other words, Trump is already assaulting the Washington bureaucracy and regime that hates him, signaling that he understands this time around what it will take to overcome their resistance to his administration. Some longtime Washington observers and commentators, like Curtis Yarvin, are deeply pessimistic that Trump can really change the system; others, hail Trump as a hero of old, the twenty-first century version of a Great Man who just might turn the tide of history. Only time will tell how successful Trump’s second term will be, but in Trump’s cabinet picks, in the contest over their senatorial confirmations, and in their effectiveness in the years to come, we might just be witnessing the fight of the century.

Violating the Cursus Honorum

As an august legislative body, the U.S. Senate is effectively dead. Instead of being a deliberative body made up of equal senators from all the states, internally organized by majority and minority leaders built around party coalitions, the Senate has been reduced to the worst kind of old boys club. While political patronage is impossible to eliminate, and can be used to great gain, Senate Majority Leaders since 2007 have oscillated among three men: Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer for the Democrats, and Mitch McConnell for the Republicans. McConnell has not been all bad for Republicans and conservatives (he admirably refused to bring a vote on Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016 during the Presidential primary), but he has essentially played the role of elder patron to a majority of GOP senators, who, as junior members, can credit McConnell with advancing their political careers. As such, McConnell has cultivated and hand-selected acceptable successors: John Cornyn (TX) and John Thune (SD). When Rick Scott (FL), backed by many in Trump’s camp, recently challenged Cornyn and Thune for Majority Leader, he was shut out and came in a distant third. Few Senators were willing to vote for an outsider for fear of disrupting the settled hierarchy and distribution of privileges in the upper chamber.

All throughout the federal bureaucracy, an elaborate and often unspoken system of cursus honorum (course of honors or ladder of offices) has long been established. One cannot simply insert themselves into a branch of government or department, even if elected by the people and favored by the president-elect. One must start at the bottom and work their way up. This career journey is a loyalty-vetting process: you must pay deference to senior authorities; you must believe the same ideology, hold identical policy goals, and repeat the same platitudes as those above you and who’ve come before you; you must fall into line with the bureaucracy and are thus shaped and formed into a loyal and obedient foot soldier for the regime. Those who are different or fiercely independent are shunned and silenced; they do not progress up the rungs of the career ladder, and so often leave Washington for opportunities elsewhere.

In his first term, Trump admitted that he appointed many “bad people” to department heads and critical posts. He didn’t know they didn’t share his views and wouldn’t be loyal to him. Nor did he realized that Washington viewed him as an infection, and mounted a bureaucratic immune response to resist and bog him down. Many potential candidates fed to Trump as being vetted and qualified (e.g., John Bolton as his National Security Advisor) had long been cultivated and approved by the administrative deep state. Any attempt to work outside the accepted cursus honorum system was and still is met with deep hostility and hysteria. The media, of course, plays a central role in blasting memos to the American people about how such-and-such a person is “grossly unqualified,” holds to “dangerous views,” or is a “conspiracy theorist.”

Trump’s current appointments heavily favor Florida politics, and while many within his inner circle are no strangers to Washington politics, they have been cast out from the Beltway as traitors. Trump knows that he must be smarter this time around, and not simply take for granted the ‘next-in-line’ appointee presented to him by career politicians. He must bring in outsiders who are utterly loyal to him and his America First vision, and who have not been conditioned by Washington’s career ladder. This is a major reason why there has been such an outcry over Trump’s cabinet nominations. 

Washington’s Credential and “Scientific” Class

Trump’s selection of RFK, Jr. as the Secretary for Health and Human Services was immediately met with a flurry of responses, most to the effect that Kennedy is a “science denier” over the supposed relationship between vaccines and autism. His views about removing fluoride from public drinking water is “dangerous” and will lead to widespread tooth decay in children. He’s a crackpot who goes against FDA approval of seed oils as being healthy for human consumption.

RFK, Jr.’s selection is an affront to the credential and scientific political class currently running the American regime. As noted by Angelo Codevilla over a decade ago, the number one issue that binds America’s ruling class together is not party affiliation or wealth or even class status, but ideology. They believe they are the most educated, the smartest, the most experienced experts, the most credentialed, and thus the most qualified to rule. Their philosophy is, you pay taxes so that I can rule over you. Republican government, consent of the people, the protection of natural rights, and government for the common good, is dead. The ruling class has purposely reduced American citizens to little better than serfs, expendable in war and economically replaceable.

What qualifies the ruling class to rule is that they have received the proper scientific education and hold to the scientific “consensus” on all things, from the grave threat of climate change to the foolishness of tariffs to the imminent danger of gun ownership to the rights of abortion as healthcare to the safety of vaccines—especially the COVID vaccine. Anyone who strays outside the scientific consensus is stupid or a science-denier. Anyone who hasn’t read and agreed with the approved studies debunking the link between vaccines and autism is a conspiracy theorist. This elite scientific education is the result of modern American collegiate education, which, for all of its supposed variety, is remarkably narrow and uniform in its methods, its fragmentation and siloed learning, and its conclusions. The American Academy essentially functions as a training and educational ground for future politicos and civil bureaucrats. Due to this, the ruling class is not merely limited to those who serve in official political roles; it also includes sprawling colleges and university, hospitals and medical campuses, and massive corporate headquarters whose cubicles are stuffed with newly-minted college degrees. By some estimates, our “ruling class” could be upwards of 30 million people.

Trump could care less about the scientific consensus because he sees and understands as statesmen of old did. As such, he has been roundly condemned as being dumb, and his supporters have suffered the same slander. Trump’s cabinet picks reflect his outsider’s view, his dissent from the preferred orthodoxy, and his violation of the Overton Window of acceptable opinion. Tulsi Gabbard is not a neocon war hawk or primacist willing to topple foreign regimes or persecute nonconforming citizens, and so her appointment as the Director of National Intelligence is met with accusations that she is a Russian agent. And so forth. The charges against Trump’s nominees are not honest, but deeply unjust lies motivated by Washington’s self-preservation and hostility.

The Death of Legacy Media

Trump has announced all his cabinet picks through his Truth Social account, which immediately gets fed into X.com. The most important reporters, as well as the average citizen, now covers news and learns what happens through social media first. Few of us can remember the last time we voluntarily read an article in The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Trump’s reliance upon new media—despite being systematically deplatformed and censored by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube during his first term—has placed legacy news organizations on their back foot. This is critical, because the Washington media complex has become an American Pravda—a subsidiary and emissary of the Democratic Party, financially and ideologically aligned as de facto state-run media.

Media outlets like the New York Times have played a key role in internal leaks. The “anonymous” op-ed claiming to be resistance within the first Trump administration was run by the Times in September 2018. When the DOJ wanted to smear Matt Gaetz’s name but knew they didn’t have evidence for a conviction, they leaked the scandal to the Times. The implacable hostility between Trump and the mainstream media hasn’t slackened at all but will only ramp up now that Trump is back in the White House. Much of Trump’s current and future success will depend upon him being able to continue to sidestep, marginalize, and discredit major media while reaching the American people directly in order to overcome the lies and propaganda blitzkrieg the media is undoubtedly planning over the next four years.

What Trump Must Do

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, previous director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russ Vought, walked listeners through the battle Trump faces to tame the administrative deep state. According to Vought, the most critical task, prior to all legislation and policy, is that the President and the American people must gain control of their own government. Washington runs automatically, without and against the will of its citizens. It rules for the benefit of itself, its cronies and subsidiaries, and its international partners. Conquering and subduing the “swamp,” Vought said, requires that Trump “move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible, and with a radical constitutional perspective,” in order to “dismantle the bureaucracy and their power centers.”

Vought outlined four steps Trump should take. First, he must discard the old progressive ideal of administrative agencies being “independent.” Those who pioneered the idea of a fourth administrative branch of government a century ago—Woodrow Wilson in his “Study of Administration” (1887), Frank Goodnow’s Politics and Administration (1900), and James Landis’ The Administrative Process (1938)—believed that administration must be overseen by educated, enlightened, and disinterested experts that were cordoned off from the polluting influence of politics. Their importance, utility, and efficiency came from their objective and non-partisan operations. This, of course, didn’t happen, as one-by-one the agencies were eventually captured by both party and special interests. All the agencies today are biased and self-interestedly and ideologically entrenched; they hate Trump and his attempt to corral and diminish their power.

Second, Vought argued that Trump should revive Presidential impoundment powers. Title X of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act took away the executive office’s power to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress (the President can request that Congress rescind funds, but the House and Senate merely have to wait forty-five days and refuse the rescission, and then they can spend the money). Without the ability to withhold funds from departments and agencies, even those directly under the President’s control, the executive is essentially hamstrung; he becomes a figurehead more than a governing force. This allows Congress to outsource governance to administrative agencies using massive and ambiguously worded omnibus bills, knowing that the White House has no power to intervene and stop the spending. As Vought pointed out, this is a form of parliamentary congressional government, something that Woodrow Wilson lobbied hard for (and that requires the destruction of separation of powers, which is what the administrative states accomplishes). The result is an imperial Congress that rules through a sprawling network of executive agencies.

Third, Trump needs to restore at-will employment for federal employees. While this may seem incredulous to the American citizen, the President of the United States cannot simply fire agency employees that report to him. If he tried to do this, he would be inundated with lawsuits, and employee termination would get gummed up in the courts for months or years. The creation of a permanent civil service class goes back to the early twentieth-century. In 1914, Congress passed (and Woodrow Wilson signed into law) the Federal Trade Commission Act. That act created the FTC and empowered the President to appoint five commissioners. However, there were stipulations: “not more than three of the commissioners shall be members of the same political party,” and no commissioner could be removed by the President except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance” while in office.

Fast-forward to 1935. In a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (295 U.S. 605), the Court ruled that President FDR could not fire FTC Commissioner William E. Humphrey. Humphrey was a conservative within the FTC who was obstructing FDR’s New Deal policies. Despite being pressured by the President to resign, Humphrey refused; so FDR fired him, and the case went to court. The Court ruled that FDR was prosecuting a political firing, and had not met the standards of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” Part of the Court’s reasoning, in stripping the President of his removal power, was that an agency like the FTC was a “quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative” department. Since it had and exercised legislative and judicial powers, it could not be exclusively controlled by the executive branch; the President could not fire its commissioners at will, nor could he terminate the department altogether. Congress quickly figured out that by delegating its legislative powers to agencies (which had begun in 1928 with J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, 276 U.S. 394), and by writing general law that agencies would then fill in with detailed regulations, the sprawling Washington bureaucracy could all be considered “quasi-legislative” departments. The executive branch was shut out.

Trump must overcome this practice and precedent if he wants to gain control not only of the executive branch but the whole of the administration as well. During his first term, Trump had proposed a provision known as “Schedule F Appointment,” which would require agencies to classify their employees by policy, and thus be eligible for at-will employment. This would allow President Trump to wrestle removal power back under the executive and eliminate thousands of positions that are no longer necessary (as well as incentivizing staff workers to perform better).

Finally, Trump needs to dismantle the byzantine apparatus of security clearances, declassify information that has long been held secret, regulate FBI background checks, reign in rubber-stamping FISA court orders that allow spying on and arrest of innocent American citizens, and expedite FOIA requests to make transparent what our government has been intentionally hiding from us. In many ways, this last step is the most dangerous, as it would expose the corrupt, criminal, and degenerate underbelly of the current Washington elite. To accomplish this work, we need men with spines of steel. Trump and his inner circle must find the courage and political will to do what must be done.

Conclusion

In many ways, the four-year interim Biden administration has been a gift to Trump 2.0. So many egregious things took place under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s watch, that Trump has an opportunity to take steps and push boundaries like no GOP president before him. From appointing transgender (“Rachel” Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Resources; Shawn Skelly, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness) and gay transvestites (Sam Brinton, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy) to high office, to nominating those clearly unqualified (Pete Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation and Karine Jean-Pierre as White House Press Secretary), to the DOJ running illegal lawfare against President Trump, to the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago, to the unjust and unconstitutional prosecution of J6 protestors, to the failed Ukraine proxy-war, to the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, to the overrun southern border, and so much more—the American voters who put their full weight behind Trump have had enough.

Not only did Trump win in a landslide, but the disastrous Biden-Harris regime gives him a mandate to clean house. Trump must be aggressive; he must be smart and wily; he must adhere to constitutional precedent but cleverly use all the powers of the executive branch to purge the administrative deep state of its career politicians. This won’t happen overnight or magically through a couple of brilliant cabinet picks. Trump must be ruthlessly dedicated to rooting out his political enemies over the next four years. The American people should be patient but urge Trump on, regardless of obstacles and setbacks. This job is not glorious, and it won’t be easy, but it just might be the most important fight of the century. 

---

Image Credit: Unsplash

Share This