The term “the Deep State” has been thrown around a lot in political discussions over the last few years. President Trump in particular liked to invoke it as the source of many of the problems he had with the federal government throughout his term. Leftists, of course, loudly denounced the whole idea of a Deep State as a right-wing conspiracy theory, which if you’re paying attention really should be a pretty solid clue that there’s something real going on there. (cf. Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” pushing the idea that her totally honorable husband was having an affair with a White House intern, the conspiracy theory that the NSA was spying on Americans, the raaaaaacist conspiracy theory that COVID-19 leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, Hunter Biden’s laptop having all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation plot, and so on. Again and again when Leftists tell us that something’s just a crazy conspiracy theory, it’s turned out to be absolutely true!)
The question is, what are people talking about when they use the term, and why should we care?
The Deep State Is Real
Wikipedia defines it thus:
According to an American political conspiracy theory, the deep state is a clandestine network of members of the federal government (especially within the FBI and CIA), working in conjunction with high-level financial and industrial entities and leaders, to exercise power alongside or within the elected United States government.
Aside from the utterly predictable labeling of it as a conspiracy theory, that’s not bad for a first-pass definition. The article doesn’t really go into detail about what the problem is or why it’s supposed to be a problem. But it does have a link to a very interesting article from 2017 by George Friedman, (published in Huffington Post of all places,) that explains the concept pretty well. The author explains that:
The so-called “deep state” is simply the unelected Civil Service
It’s not a shadowy secretive cabal at all, but just ordinary bureaucrats doing their jobs
It was established in 1871
Before 1871, the President was able to appoint and fire Executive Branch employees at will; the Civil Service was instituted to limit the President’s ability to do so
Protecting government employees from the whims of politicians is generally a good, stabilizing thing, but can be a real problem when said employees openly act against the President who’s supposed to be setting the high-level policies. (How this last point ever got published in HuffPo, during the Trump administration, is beyond me!)
Overall it’s a pretty good overview of the topic. The author doesn’t cite a source for the year 1871, and I haven’t been able to figure out where he got it from, but the change did seem to happen somewhere around there, give or take 20 years depending on which source you look at. But that’s a pretty minor nitpick; overall it’s a decent article.
The next year, in September of 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The author, cited simply as “a senior official in the Trump administration,” claimed that he and the like-minded people resisting were “not the popular “resistance” of the left,” but rather patriots frustrated by President Trump’s deviation from Republican norms:
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Well… yeah, that’s kind of the whole point. We elected him on a platform of “no more ‘business as usual’ Republican ineffectiveness, let’s actually get some good results.” A lot of that involved abandoning libertarian ideas with a long track record of failure and/or capitulation to the Left, such as the free-trade-free-markets-uber-alles ideology our anonymous writer is clearly supporting here.
This is what the Deep State is
George Friedman’s analysis is generally pretty good. But he leaves out one important point: the Constitution. These are the opening words of Article II of the Constitution, the one that defines the Executive Branch:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
Right up front, the very first thing it says, is that “the executive Power” is vested in the President. And “vested” is defined as:
fully and unconditionally guaranteed as a legal right, benefit, or privilege
This is some pretty absolute language. The executive Power is fully and unconditionally guaranteed to the President by right, under the Constitutional order. That means all of it. While the Legislative and Judicial branches exist as checks and balances against the power of the Executive branch, within the Executive branch itself, these words say that the President is essentially an absolute ruler.
Thing is, when you have civil servants in jobs that are secure independent of the President, then the person holding that job has their portion of the executive Power vested in themselves, and not in the President. Thus, any law establishing such conditions is facially in violation of the Constitution.
In his article, Friedman states that
The issue is not that there is a deep government, but that the deep government is no secret. It was created with the purpose of limiting presidential power, and in part, the will of the people. In separating politics from administration, the creation of the civil service weakened the political system and strengthened the administrative one. That is what was quite openly intended.
This is factually correct (what he says is true) and normatively incorrect (the lawmakers who set this up were wrong to do so.) Yes, they did it to solve some real problems that existed at the time, but that doesn’t mean that the solution that they chose is a good one. When the American people elected a Chief Executive to execute a specific agenda, and the workers under him who are supposed to be the ones actually executing that agenda refuse to do so, it’s not the will of the President that they’re thwarting; it’s the will of the nation.
This is the Deep State: people in government working against the policies they’re supposed to be enacting, who are legally shielded from accountability. It’s not a shadowy cabal, and it’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s something they openly brag about to the media in broad daylight.
Schedule F
President Trump had an idea of how to deal with this. He called it Schedule F, a system to reclassify a significant portion of civil service workers under a system with a lot less intrinsic job security. Unfortunately, it was quite literally too little too late: Schedule F was not implemented until October 2020 (too late) and it only affected certain workers (too little.) Under the Constitution, the entire thing should have been unnecessary; if he really wanted to shake up the Deep State, all he’d have to do is say, “Executive Power is vested in me, I can fire whoever I want to for any reason,” and then defend it against the inevitable court challenges. Honestly, I count his failure to do so as one of the Trump Administration’s largest mistakes; it’s particularly baffling when you remember that, before “Make America Great Again,” the catchphrase he was the most well-associated with was “you’re fired.”
And of course, one of the first things Joe Biden did upon assuming the Oval Office was to issue an executive order nullifying Schedule F. This is unsurprising; Leftists know the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy is on their side; why would they want to do anything to endanger its continuity?
In the New York Times article mentioned above, our anonymous resister (later identified as Miles Tayler, a not-so-senior functionary no one outside of DC had ever heard of) claimed that “This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of the steady state.”
Sorry to tell you, Miles, but the two are one and the same. When a President is elected specifically to put a stop to a broken system of “business as usual,” and you’re working to preserve a “steady state” of business as usual, well, if the shoe fits…