Gov Exec: Deconstructing the Deep State

A Hostile Takeover

Even before he took the oath of office, Trump took to Twitter to characterize suspected leakers in the intelligence community as behaving like Nazis. At the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions in August issued a loud warning to would-be leakers, even as some career Justice staff continued spilling to the media their worries about Sessions’ policy reversals on such issues as immigration and affirmative action.

Also enlisting in the war against the deep state are right-leaning legal activists who use the Freedom of Information Act to target disgruntled career federal workers who use encrypted software to make anonymous political commentary unflattering to Trump.

But to many with years in government, the term “deep state” is disturbing. “Deep state is both inaccurate and grossly misleading,” said Nancy McEldowney, who retired in June as director of the Arlington, Va.-based Foreign Service Institute. “The term originated in the context of analyzing the situations in Turkey and Egypt, where I served, usually to talk about propaganda, dirty tricks, and even violence to overthrow the government,” she said.

“To refer to career civil servants in the U.S. government as some form of deep state is a clear attempt to delegitimize voices of disagreement,” she added. “Even worse, it carries with it the potential for fear-baiting and rumor-mongering, and is really a dark conspiratorial term that does not correspond to reality.”

Chris Lu, President Obama’s deputy Labor secretary, rejects the notion that some entrenched deep state is undermining Trump’s political appointees. “The politicals set the direction of the agency, but they can only do it effectively if they tap into the expertise of the federal civil service,” he said.

Lu, now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs, says it’s important to remember why the civil service was created under the 1883 Pendleton Act. “Before then, there were stories of the amounts of time [President] Lincoln spent meeting with job seekers, with ads in Washington newspapers selling jobs under the spoils system and the tradition of incoming administrations kicking everyone out,” he said. Creation of the civil service was “one of the most important reforms of the past century and a half, and is one reason the federal government is still the most important and powerful organization in the world.”

But if the Trump team is misreading how government works, it is not the first new administration to do so. Every new president brings into office political appointees who are wary of “bureaucrats,” said Paul Light, Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University. “Democrats historically have been as reluctant to work with careerists as Republicans, not because of the ideology but because of the desire for speed.”