Transcription
Even when elections change, the people in parties in power, sometimes it can seem as though most of the government keeps running the exact same way. Well, why is that?
As it turns out, the people we elect into our office make up only a fraction of the political machinery moving our government. The vast majority are unelected officials. The federal civil service has some of the 2 million employees federally across several departments who do everything from policy analysis to regulation, and more often than not, they don't leave when a presidential administration does. They stick around for their entire careers. This is your deep state. It's the people making decisions on how the country's run without any real public oversight or accountability.
Foundationally, the Constitution allows for Congress and the executive to make political appointments and to delegate responsibilities to agencies and their staff. As the country got bigger in size, population, and scope, more and more needed to be delegated. Fears of corruption abounded since the 1800s, and it led to more rigorous and meritocratic standards for those positions like the Pendleton Civil Service Act. But as agencies continued to pile high as their staffs grew larger and larger, it became more difficult to rein in the beast that was the regulatory state.
President Jimmy Carter was perhaps the point at which the government really lost control of its regulatory and delegated agencies, and saw the birth of a true deep state. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 had intended to modernize the civil service, but in reality, it made near impossible to hold civil servants accountable, effectively abolishing the meritocratic system established under the Pendleton Act.
Look, in simple terms, after Carter's attempted civil service reform, America had a huge regulatory state that had built up over the previous decades, but now merit-based standards were abolished, and the president and Congress lost much of the ability to hold unelected officials accountable. Some of the most vital policy decisions in the country end up in the hands of the civil service, an army of unelected officials who for the longest time operated without any serious elected oversight or limitations.
This type of federal machinery is for better or worse necessary to running a country as large as the US, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed to run rampant. I mean, come on. In an age of large civil service, merit, transparency, and efficiency must be held up as enforceable standards of quality to ensure effective governance, responsible stewardship of tax dollars, and accountability of these unelected officials to the American public.