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Written by: Eugene Steuerle
The wheel of Fortune turns: I go down, demeaned; another is raised up; far too high up sits the king at the summit – Let him fear ruin.
From Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff, performed by the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra, November 16, 2024
We, the public, have long been attracted to kings, dictators, and, in democracies, strong presidents or prime ministers. Kings offer the chance to unify over a person rather than compromise and struggle over multiple practical problems toward which no singular approach or philosophy offers universal answers. Kings and dictators, including Charles II of England, Mussolini, and Solomon, especially gained favor when more democratic forces could not unify enough to govern well.
The American experiment began soon after his “Majesty’s faithful servants” appealed unsuccessfully to George III to use his “Royal authority” against Acts of Parliament. In the Declaration of Independence, they then turned him from a favored intercessor to a villain who sought “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny.” The outcome of this experiment was long in doubt; for more than a decade, for instance, squabbling states couldn’t even agree to raise enough money to pay for its army.
In many ways, the king poses fewer threats to democracy than their retinue, especially if their numbers are large and their positions are powerful. Today’s King Charles III of the United Kingdom exerts little power, and his retinue mainly deals with ceremonial affairs. On the other hand, the President of the United States now presides over a somewhat centralized White House bureaucracy with hundreds of people, roughly 4,000 political appointees, about 1,200 of which must receive Senate approval, and several thousand civil servants subject to noncompetitive appointments. In 2020, President Trump proposed converting potentially tens of thousands of additional federal government workers into a “Schedule F” status that would remove civil service protections.
Unfortunately, the first test for Executive Branch political appointees centers on loyalty to a political party that controls their career and the ability to keep bad news about the Presidency from the public. This makes sense at one level; executives need people around them they think they can trust. And bad news loses elections. At one point in my life, I was a restored civil servant appointed to a political slot; no one in the White House even asked me about my vision for the job. Fred Goldberg, an outstanding former IRS Commissioner, relates that President George H.W. Bush said he wanted only one thing from him as Commissioner: never to hear anything (presumably always bad if in the news) about the IRS.
During COVID-19 isolation, my wife and I finally watched West Wing. I found it fascinating that the only characters with a solid professional background were military and intelligence officers, and they played secondary roles. While the scriptwriters portrayed the President and his wife as extremely wise and highly educated, the heroes of the drama were otherwise bored lawyers, political and campaign advisers, and reporters worming their way into a world of power and excitement. Anyone who knew anything about health, housing, retirement policy, military procurement, or budget management was generally left on the cutting room floor.
Since some former White House advisors served as consultants to the show, I often wondered what they considered the requirements for the most important Executive Branch jobs.
When the first test is loyalty, unfortunately, it breeds sycophancy, even among the best people, and sycophants seldom put the public good at the top of their list of goals. Less than fully qualified leaders in many organizations also seek to avoid surrounding themselves with knowledgeable people who might contradict or make them look bad. Problems then multiply and reverberate throughout the organizations. Some civil servants start playing the sycophancy game; others retreat to keeping their heads down; some of the most qualified leave.
The cascading doesn’t end when a new political party comes into office. The Biden Administration maintained the extensive White House control over information that its predecessors had bequeathed. In 2025, every new Executive Branch job for which the first qualification is political loyalty becomes one the subsequent presidents demand for their purposes. Meanwhile, young people seeking career opportunities decide they can’t work their way up in traditional government organizations, where presidents have set aside the top levels for others.
Perhaps most threatening is the effect on information flows. Scholars of government organizations have noted how the White House staff have increasingly displaced the policy shops in government departments, where much expertise and institutional memory reside. My experience has been that the policy shops generally stick with facts and what they believe to be an assessment of the costs and benefits of action. They don't dissemble. By contrast, many political appointees, especially those seeking further career advancement, view their job as enhancing the power of the President and their Republican or Democratic party’s power within the nation's political party duopoly. I remember joking with one head of the Council of Economic Advisers, one of the most professional offices within the Executive Office of the President, how the Economic Report of the President had to contain at the beginning and end a glowing report on every good and bad idea of the President, even though the professionals in the office made every effort to provide sound analysis of what was going on in the economy as well.
Suppose you are a decent civil servant in a department and think the President needs some information. Every layer of review, especially if the reviewers lack expertise or view their job as making the President look good, decreases the odds that that information will make it through the process.
Obviously, I cannot do justice to this topic in a short column. For those interested, I highly recommend DonMoynihan's Substack, “Can We Still Govern,” and, for a bit of history, Organizing the Presidency by Stephen Hess and James P. Pfiffner. However, if updated today, I wonder if that book would be quite as sanguine about the need to centralize policy in the White House.
Regardless of what disruptions President Trump makes to the Executive Branch over the next few years, we have reached a stage where we desperately need to rethink how to improve the bureaucracy’s function. Sychophancy, however, will not address its inefficiency. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, while there are few definitive answers to how policy should be developed and administered—that’s why we have elections—there are many definite answers to what should not be done, such as never laying too weak a cornerstone or violating the requirement for equal justice under the law. If the President and Congress really worry about “the “deep state,” I suggest they start with the crew of presidential appointees and then with the convoluted, contradictory, and confusing laws that civil servants try to administer as best as possible in the public interest.
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