Part 1 of the story behind the Trump administration's battle with the U.S. administrative state.
The Systematic Unraveling of the Administrative State | Brownstone Institute | Jeffrey Tucker:
July 13, 2025 - "In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the legislation. The case for passage: government needs professionals with institutional knowledge. Technicians were changing the world, so why not government too?
"Science and engineering were the rage – electricity, steel bridges, telegraphic communications, internal combustion, photography – so surely public affairs needed the same level of expertise. Who could deny that civil service could do a better job than the cousins and business partners of professional politicians?
"That’s how it started. What was once called government of, by, and for the people was derided as the hopelessly corrupt 'spoils system,' a phrase that reflected genius marketing. So it was overthrown in favor of 'merit-based' hiring in the executive, a staff not yet permanent or huge, but the proverbial camel now had its nose under the tent.
"Through two world wars and the Great Depression, and then the Cold War, what landed on the other side was something the Constitution’s Framers never imagined. We had huge governing systems in giant bureaucracies staffed by employees who could not be fired. It was left to them to implement, but really create the operational framework for the whole of civil society. It was a state within a state, one with many layers, including that which was and is classified.
"Industry and media long ago caught on that the civil service was a more reliable source of information and institutional continuity than the elected or appointed branches of government. Serving in government became a mark of credibility in industry, and so the revolving door was in constant operation. Media and the deep state, including its military and intelligence sectors, developed a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed for the manipulation of the public mind.
"The best thing about the new system was that hardly anyone in public life really understood it. The schoolkids were still taught that there are three branches of government with checks and balances between them. Public life has been long dominated by elections with fierce ideological battles that eventually became more like window dressing, the results of which did not matter much for the practical affairs of state. It was the illusion of democracy.
"Once the machinery was revealed, and some critical attention was applied to its legitimacy, the unraveling was inevitable. The reason is rather obvious. The entire thing is inconsistent with the idea of a people’s government. The Founders fought a war to overthrow bureaucracy, not establish one. The Declaration of Independence plainly said: it is the right of a people to overthrow any government and establish a new one. That idea is the most embedded postulate in the whole of American civic life. It has far more legitimacy in the public mind than the claims of the civil service or the demands that its plots and machinations must remain secret from the people.
"Strangely, throughout the whole period of administrative state gains, the Supreme Court was never called upon to render a clear judgment on its legitimacy. There were small decisions along the way that shored up its functioning, but nothing that plainly said: this is or is not consistent with the law governing a free people.
"This year, and mostly because the Trump administration decided to challenge the entire model, the machinery has begun to malfunction and melt away. There is a very long way to go, but we finally have the answer to the question of this fourth branch’s legitimacy. Plainly, it is not legitimate. It never has been.
"The opening salvo was arguably Phillip Hamburger’s Is the Administrative State Unlawful? (2014), which gradually set off a huge literary debate for and against, plus a growing army of podcasters who figured it out in the course of the events that followed. It was a classic case of raised consciousness: once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
"The active confrontation began in Trump’s first term. He arrived in Washington, D.C., expecting to be the boss of the executive branch, probably because that’s what the Constitution says in Article 2, Section 1. He quickly found out otherwise. Everything he wanted to change was declared to be off-limits. So far as he could tell, the whole of the city agreed that the job was entirely ceremonial.
"That did not sit well with him. The tradition in the deep state of ignoring the president unless he annoyed them rubbed him wrong. He finally got fed up with the plots, schemes, and attempts to undermine presidential authority – which he saw as like unto a CEO, but no one else agreed – that he decided to run a test. He fired James Comey as head of the FBI. Washington freaked out.
"The man to whom the job of firing fell was Justice Department attorney Rod Rosenstein, whose sister worked at the CDC. She was Nancy Messionier, who called the first press conference on the matter of a new virus from China that she said would necessitate dramatic changes in American life. Her role was first revealed by the New York Times reporter, who later said he was tricked.
"No one at the CDC bothered to check with Trump. By the time he was asked to sign off on lockdowns, a month following the initial CDC announcement, the deed was pretty well done. He chose to get out ahead of the issue rather than be eaten alive by a media prepared to blame him for every death. He spent the next eight months issuing edicts via social media – initially bad but increasingly better – but he was almost entirely ignored by the administrative state he had unleashed.
"Just before leaving office in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that would have reclassified a portion of the civil service as holding jobs subject to termination. Every venue that covered federal affairs had a meltdown of panic about what this would mean for the future of the 100-year racket they had been running. The order was quickly repealed by the new president upon taking the oath of office – an action that set up the great battle of the future: permanent Washington vs. the public."
[continued in part 2]
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