We Needed a Deeper State
Public Service Should Be for “The Best and the Brightest,” but That Doesn’t Work for a “Strong Man” President
Donald Trump’s promised attack on his despised “deep state” is well underway, with shadow president Elon Musk staging blitzkrieg-style attacks on professional civil servants, illegally seizing control of the Treasury, firing members of the Justice Department, threatening the Departments of Labor and Education, and hacking into the private records of millions of Americans — among other nearly hourly outrages.
Now, they are flouting court orders.
People working for Musk did all they could to disappear the headquarters of USAID in Washington, removing letters or covering them with black tape after a federal judge set a hearing to determine if Trump had the authority to close the agency. (One imagines this was Trump’s revenge because the Trump brand was removed from some buildings after he incited, and refused to stop, the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by his supporters, many armed with makeshift weapons.)
ProPublica has reported on key figures on Musk’s team raiding federal agencies, a number of whom have chummy ties with members of the Supreme Court.
It should go without saying that these attacks on vital administrative parts of our government are not being done to make government more efficient but to dispense with the checks and balances set by the Constitution so Trump, and his minions in Congress, can establish permanent minority rule.
It’s a coup, one with devastating consequences for the nation and the world.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte writes that MAGA’s embrace of white supremacy and disdain for public health has logically led to the Republicans’ embrace of an “unleash the plague” era in their twisted belief in eugenics. (Cue, then, anti-vax fever during the next pandemic.) In his Prevail newsletter, Greg Olear calls this an extinction event for humanity, and he doesn’t think he’s being hyperbolic. And I guess we’ll all get to enjoy the same kind of economic growth that Viktor Orban, the beloved authoritarian leader of the American right, has established for his subjects in Hungary.
Timothy Snyder writes we are close to crossing a border into Russian-style rule. Remember those T-shirts that said “I’d Rather Be a Russian Than a Democrat”? Well, those guys may get their wish.
But let me pause for a moment — because that is precisely what the “flood the zone with shit” gang does not want any of us to do — to focus on the hard-working, knowledgeable civil servants who are being summarily kicked to the curb by rapacious, sociopathic billionaires.
Trump, who spent nearly a decade whipping up the public’s sketchy understanding of what career civil servants do into a deep mistrust of the vast administrative parts of government, almost immediately fired 17 inspectors general and their staff who oversee crucial federal agencies and report to Congress. He did this without notifying Congress, which is the law. For any wannabe strongman, the rule of law is an impediment to be dispensed with, but to Trump, our twice-impeached, first-felon president, being required to be law-abiding is, naturally, a personal affront.
Trump’s selection of wholly unqualified or deeply flawed (or both) extremists for his cabinet reminds us that he’s unhappy dealing with anyone with expertise in any field. In just my lifetime, we have gone from President John F. Kennedy’s call for the best and the brightest to come to public service to Trump’s insistence on filling the government with suckups and sociopaths — not to mention predators and misogynist, alcoholic fascist fanboys.
Given his Cabinet picks, Trump’s executive order getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in government, stating that we are “going back” to merit-based hiring, would be hilarious if it weren’t so stupid and horrifying. Trump absurdly tried to blame the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and tragic crash of the passenger plane and military helicopter in Washington, DC, on DEI hiring. After he reached those new low points, there’s been no letup in the illogical attacks on diversity from members of the party that once called itself grand.
His conspiracy theory about nonpartisan federal government workers, like his strategic attacks on journalists, has always been intended to juice his supporters’ mistrust of expertise and government in general so he could further insulate himself from scrutiny, opening the door far wider than it was in his first term for Trump-style in-your-face corruption and profiting from the office.
When an inveterate liar and career grifter like Trump rails against expertise in government, or claims he is draining the Washington, D.C., “swamp,” one would think any citizen of good faith would have seen it as nothing more than a hungry wolf bad-mouthing the fencing around the chicken coop.
Trump ostensibly garnered some support with his promise to cut the $6.2 trillion federal budget and make government “more efficient,” by defunding agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and closing the Department of Education. As he attempted in his first term, with his Schedule F reclassification executive order (which he immediately ordered up again), he intends to remove protections from many federal civil service employees whose positions have a confidential or policy-making character to make it easy to fire them so their jobs can be filled by those who will pass his loyalty test and do his bidding.
Add his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers to that goal of getting rid of tens of thousands of nonpartisan government workers, and you might say that Trump prevailed, with his decisive but small plurality of votes (not a majority and arguably dependent on vote suppression), with what is essentially a massive anti-jobs policy — one that will hurt the economy, our national security and the American people directly by weakening federal agencies that work to protect them from many threats.
Trump quickly asserted his power to do whatever he wants by naming billionaire supporters Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a “non-governmental government efficiency program” they (trollishly) named the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, after dogecoin, Musk’s favored cryptocurrency. (Ramaswamy has since been dropped from DOGE and is now threatening to run for governor in Ohio.)
After picking two men to run an efficiency operation with no power to do anything (which naturally led to quite a few quips), Trump named Russell Vought, Christian nationalist and coauthor of Project 2025, to head the Office of Budget and Management again. As reported by ProPublica, in a private speech last year Vought said this:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work….We want to put them in trauma.”
It’s worth noting that this plan to psychologically damage hard-working federal employees in the hopes it will drive them from their jobs was hatched by self-described Christians, like Vought and Trump, for whom putting one’s hand on a Bible (or not) and taking an oath appears to be meaningless. Their actions so far have been even more brutal and cavalier than most corporate layoffs.
So Christian, these men!
The imaginary deep state has, so far, failed to save us from any of this. The truth is that a more knowledgeable and empathic state was needed in our increasingly complex and dangerous times even before this takeover of our government by Trump and Musk.
Yes, a deeper state.
On an episode of NPR’s “1A” that ran after Trump prevailed in the election (Do we even remember November now?), David E. Lewis, professor of political science at Vanderbilt, pointed out that professional government workers are people we all know — veterans, academics, our neighbors — and the vast majority have nothing to do with regulating anything.
Of the more than 2 million career federal civil servants, about 70% work in national security, Lewis noted. “These are people that are enforcing laws, they’re protecting ports, they’re approving patents. The number of employees that are doing regulating is actually quite small.”
These nonpartisan subject experts and support staff work for all of us as food scientists, airport security staff, rangers in the Forest Service, national security experts. They work to serve and protect us in a multitude of ways, from enforcing environmental regulations to keeping the pharmaceuticals we take safe to making sure your Social Security check is mailed on time.
Federal employees represent only about 0.6% of the general population, far less than in previous decades.
According to a useful overview by Reuters, federal civil servants tend to be older and more educated and about 30% have served in the military. These federal employees represent only about 0.6% of the general population, far less than in previous decades. The number has remained steady as the population has grown, so their story is likely the same as yours in your profession: the same employees are doing more work.
Do we want an efficient government? Of course. Could we have too many people working in the civil service? In some areas, certainly. Are procedures often overly convoluted and in need of revitalization? Many who do the work would likely respond with an emphatic yes.
But how many stories about a lack of food inspectors or air traffic controllers do you need to read to be convinced that our so-called deep state may be seriously lacking in depth? And, as with all things infrastructure in America, there’s no doubt that we need to modernize many of the systems we have.
Trump may intend to take the country back to the era when the Robber Barons had little fear of the law (and “nasty” independent-minded women didn’t have the vote), but Americans knew before the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed, in 1883, that the spoils system of political appointees was not what was needed for efficient government.
The Trump administration plans to replace our professional nonpartisan civil service with a different kind of deep state, a Christian nationalist one, to gut our Constitutional guarantee to the separation of church and state, which journalist and historian Garry Wills calls the one genius thing of our founding. They plan to force all citizens to live by the moral code of ideological and religious zealots like Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025 and now once again Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget (this time with a vengeance).
So much for addressing the rights and health needs of women or the vital things government scientists can tell us about the weather or about companies polluting our shared environment or our bodies with unsanitary food handling and tainted ingredients. Salon’s Matthew Rozsa recently wrote about American scientists who are already self-censoring and even considering leaving the country.
In undermining the nonpartisan civil service, the MAGA mob will make our world less safe, less healthy, more expensive, and less free.
By undermining the work of regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, in pursuit of opening up more health grifting in the name of “wellness,” or in gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects us from many kinds of consumer fraud, the MAGA mob is making our world less safe, less healthy, more expensive, and less free.
Trump wants to get rid of nonpolitical civil servants not for the sake of governmental efficiency but as retribution because many of them were brave enough during his first term to do what they could to protect us from a man who has his interests, not America’s, first in mind.
As others have pointed out, the America Trump and Musk are dismantling is the unique democratic republic that allowed them, mediocre men handed great wealth by their fathers, to improbably succeed beyond their wildest imaginations — Trump by the sheer chance of being rescued after multiple bankruptcies by a reality TV producer (who regrets casting him) and Musk by having zero qualms in taking credit for other people’s ideas and work.
I know I sound hopelessly naive at this point, writing about the work of nonpartisan public servants while Trump and Musk unleash their worst on America and ignore federal judges’ injunctions. Hoping Americans will rethink how they think about professional civil servants at a time of Trump’s “shock and awe” attempts to dismantle our democracy, when billionaires are even pushing for global feudal oligarchy, feels like it must to try to protect your house in a wildfire with a garden hose.
But one does what one can do. And some things must be said directly into the face of evil and stupidity. Perhaps others have pointed out that “shock and awe” was once directed at a perceived enemy of the United States — now, that enemy is all of us, even the working-class people who voted for Trump.
If you believe that we have too many nonpartisan civil servants who are experts in their critical areas of work, maybe you could put “owning the libs” aside for a moment and think of them as dedicated fellow workers — again, many veterans, some your neighbors, time-tested experts in various critical areas — who are trying to maintain the world’s largest democracy in a dangerous world and seeing after the many needs of all of us, including the reputation of American around the globe.
It’s tragic that the likes of Trump and Musk, working precisely to the autocrats’ playbook, conned many people out of feeling that way. It’s also tragic that Republicans in the Senate are refusing to honor the oath of office they took to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Most Americans who have participated in team sports in school know that coaches are thankful to have a deep bench. We should be, too.
And as your coach, especially when faced with an elite team coming from the richest part of town, would have said,
We have to believe we can beat these guys.
