"I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it."
In anything even close to the present system, no way. No tweaks can fix this. You *might* be able to pass structural reforms just under the threshold of what SCOTUS deems requires a Constitutional Amendment like New Deal 2.0, but it would have to be change of that scale.
So, sure, maybe a President can nudge the course of the aircraft carrier a few minutes of a degree, ok. But anything meaningful is almost impossible without radical changes to the way things work.
He certainly cannot do it by 'himself' (i.e., the Presidency / Administration of poliitcal appointees.) He would need 60 Senators and five Supreme Court Justices to fully back his plays (in reality, not just fake public signals) or else be willing to go to total war on day one in a Constitutional-crisis-level game of chicken. For example, an actual prolonged government shutdown to include military and transfer payments.
Our present system - both in design and in practice - requires a minimum amount of comity and forebearance and simply cannot function in a two-party environment of permanent maximum hardball. At least, not in the way that would allow a Republican President to achieve outcomes despite the opposition of the bureacracy and courts.
A lot has change in the past five years. A lot of people's eyes have been opened. There is a much broader realization of the types of unelected bureaucracies that control so much power in the US and the types of dirty tricks that they use. There will be more skillful efforts to combat that. The future will absolutely be different. A lot of the dirty tricks deployed against Trump work when they are completely unexpected and unrecognized. They are less effective when their opponents expect them and are ready.
As Kling and others have said: it's not enough for populists to win elections. Populists have to convince professionals that they have positive ideas for change. And they need more skillful tactics at fighting and dismantling corrupt bureaucracies.
"There will be more skillful efforts to combat that. The future will absolutely be different. A lot of the dirty tricks deployed against Trump work when they are completely unexpected and unrecognized. They are less effective when their opponents expect them and are ready."
I completely disagree. What happened was exactly what the experienced and sophisticated* members of the administration anticipated would happen, and while they did everything within the 'business as usual' framework to try to deal with it, the whole problem is that it was wishful thinking that it might work, because in truth nothing could be done.
There is no longer any way to achieve many theoretically valid and legitimate outcomes using merely ordinary political maneuvers. There is now no way to be serious without also being radical. The experience of the Trump administration proved this once and for all, and left GOP establishment figures with an undeniably clear choice between being serious about actually accomplishing literally anything of worth and importance, on the one hand, and not being radical, on the other, and of course they rejected radicalism.
What on earth would be the point of any 'positive program for change' if it's a dead letter from the start because no one would ever be willing to do what was necessary to achieve and implement any such program?
The core issue is that in many fields, USG does not actually operate under the 'rule of law' in Fuller's or Hayek's sense of the concept. Thus, the laws and rules may say that a President does or does not have the authority to do something, but since the judges can ignore such rules, a mere legal analysis of the text has no clear correspondence to practical reality.
*Some prominent legal commentators who should have known better made complete asses of themselves at the time by making the utterly preposterous claim that judicial rejections of various regulatory moves by the Trump administration was evidence for a lack of savvy and expertise for measures which could have been accomplished had they only been done 'the right way', instead of what it obviously was, ultra vires abuse of judicial power for measures that would never be permitted under any circumstances. Naturally, these same people are making even bigger asses of themselves by identifying this as the cause of rejection of Biden administration initiatives, because it must simply be impossible to imagine that anyone in the Biden administration has anything less than the highest levels of competence it is possible for humans to have.
Nothing lasts forever. The current coalition of left-wing unelected bureaucracies who run this country won't last forever. You are saying the current reigning political coalition is invincible. That's just not true.
Serious reform efforts along these lines need to start at the universities. There is a growing, justified appetite for reasonable free market reforms.
The Trump Administration didn't campaign or ever seriously plan to pursue higher education reform.
Nothing lasts forever. The current coalition of left-wing unelected bureaucracies who run this country won't last forever. You are saying the current reigning political coalition is invincible. That's just not true.
Serious reform efforts along these lines need to start at the universities. There is a growing, justified appetite for reasonable free market reforms.
The Trump Administration didn't campaign or ever seriously plan to pursue higher education reform.
In the Hamilton vs Madison contest neither side had a great answer. Hamilton had no hope for representative government, other than it giving the people a veneer of democracy. His answer was to create an all-powerful administrative state that employed wise and intelligent people. Madison sold the idea that government would be self-controlled by the separation of powers. Hamilton failed, both in the short run and the long run. Madison's plan also failed. And so in the end, we got Hamilton's all powerful administrative state but it is run by criminals and morons.
What remains is to get lucky and elect the right strong man. This won't fix government but a president with the right sensibilities can, at a minimum, temper the administrative state. Assuming he/she isn't first destroyed by it.
Hamilton's vision of powerful, centralized authority cannot fairly be called an "administrative state" in the modern American legal sense of the term and as emerged out of the New Deal era. Hamiton's personal views changed slightly over time and also were not quite the same as the arguments he forwarded in the Federalist Papers, but there is so little correspondence between the ideas he expressed in those essays and the modern structure and functioning of American government that one simply has to admit that we have moved too far away from founding-era thought to profit much from trying to assess to what extent our failures might also represent the failures of those ideas.
I think you wrong, very wrong, about what a U.S. President can do without the support of the bureaucracy. On March 16, 2020, I sensed that Trump had been ambushed by The Deep State and I had a big fight with my Californian son (he had been working with federal and state officials for 27 years in large engineering projects) and I bet him that Trump would be asking for terminating it after the first two weeks. They had lied to Trump with the nonsense projections prepared by the U.K. academic criminals and I bet that by the end of the two weeks he would know it. Let me remember you that Robert Mueller spent over 30 million dollars to support his lies long enough to influence the mid-term election and he is still out of jail thanks to The Deep State.
Regardless of your proposal to reform government, the Trump presidency was never go to succeed for the same reasons that Ross Perot couldn't succeed aggravated by the emergence of the barbarians frustrated by Obama's failures (yes, the senile President is the best evidence of how grotesque Obama's two-term presidency was).
I like your COO/CA model but being an old man I have observed that all institutions (government, religious, non-profit, corporations, etc.) evolve over time into self-centered bureaucracies. The large organization store their knowledge as "rules, policies, regulations, and procedures" and over time the creative individuals who developed solutions to problems are not necessary. Institutions with no competition and monopoly positions evolve into incompetence over time and all government and some private institutions are in monopoly positions.
As a young man, IBM owned the world (hardware and software) while expanding their internal bureaucracy to the point where it took 7 years to design a new computer and then some kids in silicon valley noted that Moors Law appears valid with doubling chip power every 2 years, making all IBM's machines obsolete before the designs were completed. Meanwhile, IBM top management shifted to sales, not technology as the central organization focus. IBM went from a monopoly to bankruptcy and failure in a decade or so from the same evolutionary pressures that allowed the CDC and FDA to fail so spectacularly when faced with Covid-19. Instead of true technical people who knew all the science that went into N-95 ASTM standards and testing we had bureaucrats making decisions based upon politics saying that masks don't work. Meanwhile, many of the working class people did know that N-95 masks would work as OSHA had been saying in regulations for decades and people detect BS from "experts" by such inconsistencies. Once they judge BS everything else from that "expert" source is not trusted.
Your COO/CA doesn't counter natural evolution of bureaucracy. You need a stronger failure mechanism to actually get progress in an evolutionary system. Note natural evolution does utilize accelerated mutations to speed up adaption to change.
Such a president would be assassinated in short order. The Rubicon was crossed a long time ago with the Administrative State. They are in firm control.
The Administrative State is in firm control until they aren't. The opposition to the administrative state is growing and their tactics are improving. The future will be different.
Trump was bamboozled but then he also was a bamboozler. Consider that when Gov. Kemp took the initiative to reopen Georgia, Trump himself criticized Kemp. And no matter what you think of "Operation Warp Speed", Trump had the authority to promote and authorize repurposed drugs and he dithered.
Granted, the entire "Deep State" was against Trump on the matter of repurposed drugs. But you are the POTUS!!! How bizarre is it that the POTUS can command missile launches that directly kill thousands but enabling and promoting creative use of inexpensive medical therapies is a bridge too far!
A peek behind the COVID response curtain reveals unspeakable evil and stupidity - millions of lives were ruined by powerful people who should have known better. Some people were intentionally wrong. Others were slow or absent to stop the self-destruction when they could and should have done something.
The fix for the administrative state is both easy and hard. Easy in the sense that congress could pass a law tomorrow to rein in the administrative state. Hard in the sense that congress is in a broken state and doesn't do much of its constitutional role well.
The biggest economic success of the last 50 years is to expand the size of the upper-middle class. These people are by and large intelligent and hard working. And they want to keep what they've got. Convincing this group to rock the boat is a hard thing and it's probably the key constituency that needs to be convinced. Even most of the upper-middle class are rationally ignorant voters. Try explaining topics as different as the Jones Act or the FDA's invisible graveyard to an otherwise intelligent person and at best you'll get a quizzical look.
Radicalism from the executive branch is likely to convince a small number of hard-core supporters. It's good for TV but not making actual change.
Mencken was right about the nature of the relationship between democracy and citizens. The USA has American citizens and an American government. Not those of Estonia or Singapore.
Finally, Jeffrey Tucker is the libertarian equivalent of Rudy Giuliani. Always a bit eccentric (how many toilet or laundry detergent articles can one person write?), but now he's gone full loon due to the pandemic and "freedom". He's even added Naomi Wolf to the contributor list of the Brownstone Institute. There are plenty of other good sources for criticism of the administrative state.
Repeal the Pendleton Act and restart the spoils system. Turns out Andrew Jackson had the right idea about controlling bureaucrats. There is no other way for civil servants to be answerable to the voters.
There is a conflict between "populists" that wish to remove this unelected, entrenched institutional political power, and the anti-populists that side with the entrenched institutional political powers. This conflict doesn't align with the Progressive/Conservative/Libertarian taxonomy that Kling emphasized in his book, The Three Languages of Politics. Most of Kling's preferred conservatives, people like George Will and Jonah Golberg and McArdle, are much more recognizably anti-populist than they are conservative.
Kling is interesting in that he agrees with the core argument of the populists in his disdain for the "swamp" of unelected bureaucracies that wield enormous and unjustified power in government and society. On the other hand, Kling has strong disdain for the populists themselves, and sides with anti-populist pundits.
Angeolo Codevilla (RIP), offered a better version of the same critique Kling offers. Where Kling seems eager to reflexively insult Trump, Codevilla seems more concerned about the underlying issues, and offers both insightful praise and criticism of Trump.
I'd request Kling review or skim the 2010 book: "The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement" by Steven M. Teles, which touches on many of these themes. Specifically, that more power has moved away from elections and election outcomes and to unelected bureaucracies and networks of professionals. Kling has pointed this out in the past. Winning elections isn't enough.
I think Handle's answer is the conventionally correct one, but I also think there's a possibility that such a shift could have been done at a precisely correct moment.
In this interpretation, I don't think it was a matter of Trump's skill and determination, but, rather, his uncertainty. You (Arnold) gave the analogy of peacetime generals and wartime generals at the outset of COVID.
Trump, in a way, sidelined the "peacetime generals" and got OWS going. My contention is at that moment of crisis, he probably could have fired the lot of them. But he didn't, and at least at the CDC and FDA, they clawed their way back and the moment was lost.
Perhaps a similar situation happened at the outset of his presidency with the FBI and CIA. In both cases, Trump basically shied away from confrontation, and it ended up costing him big time, as well as, in the end, cementing their power. It's not unlike recognizing the moment to buy or sell in the stock market: fleeting, and you usually missed it.
Like most of the previous commenters, I disagree with your interpretation that "Trump lacked the skill." Trump may have lacked the skill but public sentiment constrains presidential power and, since Trump clearly lacked the power to control public health messaging, your hypothesis was never tested. It seems the course Trump's people felt they had available was to focus on accelerating vaccine development, and this was a pretty heavy lift by itself. It's doubtful that even the most skillful president has the power to completely control the public health policy, even in Sweden. Our presidency is increasingly powerful, but it still isn't that powerful.
The power of the American Presidency is like the speed of a sailing ship facing headwinds or tailwinds. If the other estates of the courts, Congress, bureaucracy, and media aren't willing to stand in the way, that power can expand to nearly imperial degree, as it did under Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. My bet is we're going to see what that's like again before 2050.
I'm convinced the only way we can get agency cost-disease and competency under control is
for a PE style operator to come in and torch the excess fat and tumors. So many negative marginal product jobs in agencies and so many terribly inefficient processes which persist because existing jobs depend on them. Top tier PE operators/managers have better knowledge of our economic systems and capability stacks than literally anyone else as their role enables them to rapidly process and grasp curated confidential information on the operations and advantages of thousands of companies. In their prime, the know-how gap between a Romney and a typical congressperson (both in their prime) is astounding.
I know this is hard to believe, but competency and efficiency are not the big problems at all. They are like psychological bait because easy to understand and one imagines, theoretically easy to fix with the right people doing the right things. But in the grand scheme of the real problem, it is a totally negligible distraction. You could replace existing USG bureaucrats with Singapore's best civil servants working 10x more productively and it wouldn't make any difference at all - really!
The absoulte top tier problem is alignment of personal interests and public outcomes. You cannot get individuals to make good trade off decisions unless the up and downsides for them personally are proportional to some policy goal. This cannot be accomplished at all without a system of accountability that is comprehensive, rational, tough, and fair, which is - I must emphasize - *absolutely impossible* to do if you separate authority from responsibility as thoroughly as we do.
There is no such thing as a turnaround specialist or world-class elite CEO who can manage effectively under such conditions and constraints. One of the reasons USG gets so many poor leaders is because any leadership capability above a very low ceiling has absolutely zero marginal product because there is nothing that can be done with it.
Sorry, don't understand, what do you mean here exactly? that incentive structures for employees within agencies aren't aligned with the public interest? That the missions of the agencies themselves don't have coherent missions aligned with the public interest?
Basic public choice. An individual decision-maker's interests are simply not the same as the public goal, and when too misaligned, the individual, not being a saint, will tend to decide things in his own interest to the extent he can get away with it, which he is an expert is so-doing.
To illustrate, consider a simple 2x2 payoff matrix. Let's say you are trying to decide whether to build an expensive flood wall in an area where floods are very rare. Let's say the wall lasts 10 years, and we are talking about that 10 year time horizon. So, the possibilities are:
1. Wall, No Flood
2. Wall, Flood
3. No Wall, No Flood
4. No Wall, Flood
Now, for the protected properties, the payoffs are:
1. Negative cost of wall
2. Catastrophic Flood Damage Prevented minus #1
3. Zero / Status-Quo
4. Catastrophic Flood Damage
But for the official, it's:
1. Personal effort and depletion of political capital required to acquire / shift resources to wall construction.
2. Maybe somebody remembers what you did that one time and slaps you on the back with an attaboy, good thing we had that wall, but also, minus #1
3. Zero / Status Quo
4. Blame, maybe you get fired. Eh, ok, let's not be crazy, probably reassigned or just watch your career stagnate.
When you multiple the 2x2 matrix by the probabilities in order to do figure out the rational decision, even if you are totally honest and accurate in your estimates of costs and benefits and the probabilities (which is almost always very far from the case), the personal vs. public cost-benefit analysis will land on different choices, because the public outcomes are not 'internalized' (or 'privatized') by the decision maker in some direct and proportional way.
Now, let's say that instead of paying your official a salary, you paid him in the revenues collected by mandatory flood insurance premiums, but also made him actually personally liable to pay for any flood damage. Instead of a bureaucrat, he is now - personaly - an insurance company. Now his decision to build the wall or not is directly aligned with the goal of building projects to prevent flood damage if the expected benefits exceed the costs.
The current USG system is structured in almost as exactly the opposite direction as it is possible to go, and anti-accountability engine of terrifying power.
Another common example: Government bureaucrats reward contracts with no personal accountability if the contract is executed properly. The amount of waste, fraud and abuse that follows has resulted in the government creating a policy to address "waste, fraud and abuse". No surprise. The investigation and resolution of "waste, fraud and abuse" is as effective as is the rewarding of contracts.
Which leads to the famous axiom: "The reward for government failure is more government"
I definitely agree that competent agency heads would need to be able to fire/hire with much much less friction and HR. Literally 1/3 of what makes PE work is optimized incentive structures, both monetary and non-monetary. If you take an agency which we assume to have a useful and clear purpose (as some clearly do not) one could absolutely create incentive structure inside that to optimize to said goals, if allowed the freedom. This could even be highly monetary, as the welfare ROI of a well-run agency would typically massively outweigh the comp requirements.
"I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it."
But first we have to figure out what we want the civil service to DO. Swamps produce ecological services. They need to be managed, not "drained." I don't know how to get CDC to make cost effective decisions but railing about their "arrogance" probably is not it.
"I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it."
In anything even close to the present system, no way. No tweaks can fix this. You *might* be able to pass structural reforms just under the threshold of what SCOTUS deems requires a Constitutional Amendment like New Deal 2.0, but it would have to be change of that scale.
So, sure, maybe a President can nudge the course of the aircraft carrier a few minutes of a degree, ok. But anything meaningful is almost impossible without radical changes to the way things work.
He certainly cannot do it by 'himself' (i.e., the Presidency / Administration of poliitcal appointees.) He would need 60 Senators and five Supreme Court Justices to fully back his plays (in reality, not just fake public signals) or else be willing to go to total war on day one in a Constitutional-crisis-level game of chicken. For example, an actual prolonged government shutdown to include military and transfer payments.
Our present system - both in design and in practice - requires a minimum amount of comity and forebearance and simply cannot function in a two-party environment of permanent maximum hardball. At least, not in the way that would allow a Republican President to achieve outcomes despite the opposition of the bureacracy and courts.
A lot has change in the past five years. A lot of people's eyes have been opened. There is a much broader realization of the types of unelected bureaucracies that control so much power in the US and the types of dirty tricks that they use. There will be more skillful efforts to combat that. The future will absolutely be different. A lot of the dirty tricks deployed against Trump work when they are completely unexpected and unrecognized. They are less effective when their opponents expect them and are ready.
As Kling and others have said: it's not enough for populists to win elections. Populists have to convince professionals that they have positive ideas for change. And they need more skillful tactics at fighting and dismantling corrupt bureaucracies.
"There will be more skillful efforts to combat that. The future will absolutely be different. A lot of the dirty tricks deployed against Trump work when they are completely unexpected and unrecognized. They are less effective when their opponents expect them and are ready."
I completely disagree. What happened was exactly what the experienced and sophisticated* members of the administration anticipated would happen, and while they did everything within the 'business as usual' framework to try to deal with it, the whole problem is that it was wishful thinking that it might work, because in truth nothing could be done.
There is no longer any way to achieve many theoretically valid and legitimate outcomes using merely ordinary political maneuvers. There is now no way to be serious without also being radical. The experience of the Trump administration proved this once and for all, and left GOP establishment figures with an undeniably clear choice between being serious about actually accomplishing literally anything of worth and importance, on the one hand, and not being radical, on the other, and of course they rejected radicalism.
What on earth would be the point of any 'positive program for change' if it's a dead letter from the start because no one would ever be willing to do what was necessary to achieve and implement any such program?
The core issue is that in many fields, USG does not actually operate under the 'rule of law' in Fuller's or Hayek's sense of the concept. Thus, the laws and rules may say that a President does or does not have the authority to do something, but since the judges can ignore such rules, a mere legal analysis of the text has no clear correspondence to practical reality.
*Some prominent legal commentators who should have known better made complete asses of themselves at the time by making the utterly preposterous claim that judicial rejections of various regulatory moves by the Trump administration was evidence for a lack of savvy and expertise for measures which could have been accomplished had they only been done 'the right way', instead of what it obviously was, ultra vires abuse of judicial power for measures that would never be permitted under any circumstances. Naturally, these same people are making even bigger asses of themselves by identifying this as the cause of rejection of Biden administration initiatives, because it must simply be impossible to imagine that anyone in the Biden administration has anything less than the highest levels of competence it is possible for humans to have.
Nothing lasts forever. The current coalition of left-wing unelected bureaucracies who run this country won't last forever. You are saying the current reigning political coalition is invincible. That's just not true.
Serious reform efforts along these lines need to start at the universities. There is a growing, justified appetite for reasonable free market reforms.
The Trump Administration didn't campaign or ever seriously plan to pursue higher education reform.
Nothing lasts forever. The current coalition of left-wing unelected bureaucracies who run this country won't last forever. You are saying the current reigning political coalition is invincible. That's just not true.
Serious reform efforts along these lines need to start at the universities. There is a growing, justified appetite for reasonable free market reforms.
The Trump Administration didn't campaign or ever seriously plan to pursue higher education reform.
In the Hamilton vs Madison contest neither side had a great answer. Hamilton had no hope for representative government, other than it giving the people a veneer of democracy. His answer was to create an all-powerful administrative state that employed wise and intelligent people. Madison sold the idea that government would be self-controlled by the separation of powers. Hamilton failed, both in the short run and the long run. Madison's plan also failed. And so in the end, we got Hamilton's all powerful administrative state but it is run by criminals and morons.
What remains is to get lucky and elect the right strong man. This won't fix government but a president with the right sensibilities can, at a minimum, temper the administrative state. Assuming he/she isn't first destroyed by it.
Hamilton's vision of powerful, centralized authority cannot fairly be called an "administrative state" in the modern American legal sense of the term and as emerged out of the New Deal era. Hamiton's personal views changed slightly over time and also were not quite the same as the arguments he forwarded in the Federalist Papers, but there is so little correspondence between the ideas he expressed in those essays and the modern structure and functioning of American government that one simply has to admit that we have moved too far away from founding-era thought to profit much from trying to assess to what extent our failures might also represent the failures of those ideas.
I think you wrong, very wrong, about what a U.S. President can do without the support of the bureaucracy. On March 16, 2020, I sensed that Trump had been ambushed by The Deep State and I had a big fight with my Californian son (he had been working with federal and state officials for 27 years in large engineering projects) and I bet him that Trump would be asking for terminating it after the first two weeks. They had lied to Trump with the nonsense projections prepared by the U.K. academic criminals and I bet that by the end of the two weeks he would know it. Let me remember you that Robert Mueller spent over 30 million dollars to support his lies long enough to influence the mid-term election and he is still out of jail thanks to The Deep State.
Regardless of your proposal to reform government, the Trump presidency was never go to succeed for the same reasons that Ross Perot couldn't succeed aggravated by the emergence of the barbarians frustrated by Obama's failures (yes, the senile President is the best evidence of how grotesque Obama's two-term presidency was).
I remember Ronald Reagan was going to get rid of both Energy and Education.
Reading the comments, it seems to me we need more candle lighting and less darkness cursing. :)
I like your COO/CA model but being an old man I have observed that all institutions (government, religious, non-profit, corporations, etc.) evolve over time into self-centered bureaucracies. The large organization store their knowledge as "rules, policies, regulations, and procedures" and over time the creative individuals who developed solutions to problems are not necessary. Institutions with no competition and monopoly positions evolve into incompetence over time and all government and some private institutions are in monopoly positions.
As a young man, IBM owned the world (hardware and software) while expanding their internal bureaucracy to the point where it took 7 years to design a new computer and then some kids in silicon valley noted that Moors Law appears valid with doubling chip power every 2 years, making all IBM's machines obsolete before the designs were completed. Meanwhile, IBM top management shifted to sales, not technology as the central organization focus. IBM went from a monopoly to bankruptcy and failure in a decade or so from the same evolutionary pressures that allowed the CDC and FDA to fail so spectacularly when faced with Covid-19. Instead of true technical people who knew all the science that went into N-95 ASTM standards and testing we had bureaucrats making decisions based upon politics saying that masks don't work. Meanwhile, many of the working class people did know that N-95 masks would work as OSHA had been saying in regulations for decades and people detect BS from "experts" by such inconsistencies. Once they judge BS everything else from that "expert" source is not trusted.
Your COO/CA doesn't counter natural evolution of bureaucracy. You need a stronger failure mechanism to actually get progress in an evolutionary system. Note natural evolution does utilize accelerated mutations to speed up adaption to change.
Such a president would be assassinated in short order. The Rubicon was crossed a long time ago with the Administrative State. They are in firm control.
The Administrative State is in firm control until they aren't. The opposition to the administrative state is growing and their tactics are improving. The future will be different.
Trump was bamboozled but then he also was a bamboozler. Consider that when Gov. Kemp took the initiative to reopen Georgia, Trump himself criticized Kemp. And no matter what you think of "Operation Warp Speed", Trump had the authority to promote and authorize repurposed drugs and he dithered.
Granted, the entire "Deep State" was against Trump on the matter of repurposed drugs. But you are the POTUS!!! How bizarre is it that the POTUS can command missile launches that directly kill thousands but enabling and promoting creative use of inexpensive medical therapies is a bridge too far!
A peek behind the COVID response curtain reveals unspeakable evil and stupidity - millions of lives were ruined by powerful people who should have known better. Some people were intentionally wrong. Others were slow or absent to stop the self-destruction when they could and should have done something.
Hahaha. Please read about the history of U.S. government. And pay attention to what is going on today.
The fix for the administrative state is both easy and hard. Easy in the sense that congress could pass a law tomorrow to rein in the administrative state. Hard in the sense that congress is in a broken state and doesn't do much of its constitutional role well.
The biggest economic success of the last 50 years is to expand the size of the upper-middle class. These people are by and large intelligent and hard working. And they want to keep what they've got. Convincing this group to rock the boat is a hard thing and it's probably the key constituency that needs to be convinced. Even most of the upper-middle class are rationally ignorant voters. Try explaining topics as different as the Jones Act or the FDA's invisible graveyard to an otherwise intelligent person and at best you'll get a quizzical look.
Radicalism from the executive branch is likely to convince a small number of hard-core supporters. It's good for TV but not making actual change.
Mencken was right about the nature of the relationship between democracy and citizens. The USA has American citizens and an American government. Not those of Estonia or Singapore.
Finally, Jeffrey Tucker is the libertarian equivalent of Rudy Giuliani. Always a bit eccentric (how many toilet or laundry detergent articles can one person write?), but now he's gone full loon due to the pandemic and "freedom". He's even added Naomi Wolf to the contributor list of the Brownstone Institute. There are plenty of other good sources for criticism of the administrative state.
Repeal the Pendleton Act and restart the spoils system. Turns out Andrew Jackson had the right idea about controlling bureaucrats. There is no other way for civil servants to be answerable to the voters.
There is a conflict between "populists" that wish to remove this unelected, entrenched institutional political power, and the anti-populists that side with the entrenched institutional political powers. This conflict doesn't align with the Progressive/Conservative/Libertarian taxonomy that Kling emphasized in his book, The Three Languages of Politics. Most of Kling's preferred conservatives, people like George Will and Jonah Golberg and McArdle, are much more recognizably anti-populist than they are conservative.
Kling is interesting in that he agrees with the core argument of the populists in his disdain for the "swamp" of unelected bureaucracies that wield enormous and unjustified power in government and society. On the other hand, Kling has strong disdain for the populists themselves, and sides with anti-populist pundits.
Angeolo Codevilla (RIP), offered a better version of the same critique Kling offers. Where Kling seems eager to reflexively insult Trump, Codevilla seems more concerned about the underlying issues, and offers both insightful praise and criticism of Trump.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/what-is-trump-to-us/
I'd request Kling review or skim the 2010 book: "The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement" by Steven M. Teles, which touches on many of these themes. Specifically, that more power has moved away from elections and election outcomes and to unelected bureaucracies and networks of professionals. Kling has pointed this out in the past. Winning elections isn't enough.
I think Handle's answer is the conventionally correct one, but I also think there's a possibility that such a shift could have been done at a precisely correct moment.
In this interpretation, I don't think it was a matter of Trump's skill and determination, but, rather, his uncertainty. You (Arnold) gave the analogy of peacetime generals and wartime generals at the outset of COVID.
Trump, in a way, sidelined the "peacetime generals" and got OWS going. My contention is at that moment of crisis, he probably could have fired the lot of them. But he didn't, and at least at the CDC and FDA, they clawed their way back and the moment was lost.
Perhaps a similar situation happened at the outset of his presidency with the FBI and CIA. In both cases, Trump basically shied away from confrontation, and it ended up costing him big time, as well as, in the end, cementing their power. It's not unlike recognizing the moment to buy or sell in the stock market: fleeting, and you usually missed it.
Like most of the previous commenters, I disagree with your interpretation that "Trump lacked the skill." Trump may have lacked the skill but public sentiment constrains presidential power and, since Trump clearly lacked the power to control public health messaging, your hypothesis was never tested. It seems the course Trump's people felt they had available was to focus on accelerating vaccine development, and this was a pretty heavy lift by itself. It's doubtful that even the most skillful president has the power to completely control the public health policy, even in Sweden. Our presidency is increasingly powerful, but it still isn't that powerful.
The power of the American Presidency is like the speed of a sailing ship facing headwinds or tailwinds. If the other estates of the courts, Congress, bureaucracy, and media aren't willing to stand in the way, that power can expand to nearly imperial degree, as it did under Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. My bet is we're going to see what that's like again before 2050.
I'm convinced the only way we can get agency cost-disease and competency under control is
for a PE style operator to come in and torch the excess fat and tumors. So many negative marginal product jobs in agencies and so many terribly inefficient processes which persist because existing jobs depend on them. Top tier PE operators/managers have better knowledge of our economic systems and capability stacks than literally anyone else as their role enables them to rapidly process and grasp curated confidential information on the operations and advantages of thousands of companies. In their prime, the know-how gap between a Romney and a typical congressperson (both in their prime) is astounding.
I know this is hard to believe, but competency and efficiency are not the big problems at all. They are like psychological bait because easy to understand and one imagines, theoretically easy to fix with the right people doing the right things. But in the grand scheme of the real problem, it is a totally negligible distraction. You could replace existing USG bureaucrats with Singapore's best civil servants working 10x more productively and it wouldn't make any difference at all - really!
The absoulte top tier problem is alignment of personal interests and public outcomes. You cannot get individuals to make good trade off decisions unless the up and downsides for them personally are proportional to some policy goal. This cannot be accomplished at all without a system of accountability that is comprehensive, rational, tough, and fair, which is - I must emphasize - *absolutely impossible* to do if you separate authority from responsibility as thoroughly as we do.
There is no such thing as a turnaround specialist or world-class elite CEO who can manage effectively under such conditions and constraints. One of the reasons USG gets so many poor leaders is because any leadership capability above a very low ceiling has absolutely zero marginal product because there is nothing that can be done with it.
Sorry, don't understand, what do you mean here exactly? that incentive structures for employees within agencies aren't aligned with the public interest? That the missions of the agencies themselves don't have coherent missions aligned with the public interest?
Basic public choice. An individual decision-maker's interests are simply not the same as the public goal, and when too misaligned, the individual, not being a saint, will tend to decide things in his own interest to the extent he can get away with it, which he is an expert is so-doing.
To illustrate, consider a simple 2x2 payoff matrix. Let's say you are trying to decide whether to build an expensive flood wall in an area where floods are very rare. Let's say the wall lasts 10 years, and we are talking about that 10 year time horizon. So, the possibilities are:
1. Wall, No Flood
2. Wall, Flood
3. No Wall, No Flood
4. No Wall, Flood
Now, for the protected properties, the payoffs are:
1. Negative cost of wall
2. Catastrophic Flood Damage Prevented minus #1
3. Zero / Status-Quo
4. Catastrophic Flood Damage
But for the official, it's:
1. Personal effort and depletion of political capital required to acquire / shift resources to wall construction.
2. Maybe somebody remembers what you did that one time and slaps you on the back with an attaboy, good thing we had that wall, but also, minus #1
3. Zero / Status Quo
4. Blame, maybe you get fired. Eh, ok, let's not be crazy, probably reassigned or just watch your career stagnate.
When you multiple the 2x2 matrix by the probabilities in order to do figure out the rational decision, even if you are totally honest and accurate in your estimates of costs and benefits and the probabilities (which is almost always very far from the case), the personal vs. public cost-benefit analysis will land on different choices, because the public outcomes are not 'internalized' (or 'privatized') by the decision maker in some direct and proportional way.
Now, let's say that instead of paying your official a salary, you paid him in the revenues collected by mandatory flood insurance premiums, but also made him actually personally liable to pay for any flood damage. Instead of a bureaucrat, he is now - personaly - an insurance company. Now his decision to build the wall or not is directly aligned with the goal of building projects to prevent flood damage if the expected benefits exceed the costs.
The current USG system is structured in almost as exactly the opposite direction as it is possible to go, and anti-accountability engine of terrifying power.
Another common example: Government bureaucrats reward contracts with no personal accountability if the contract is executed properly. The amount of waste, fraud and abuse that follows has resulted in the government creating a policy to address "waste, fraud and abuse". No surprise. The investigation and resolution of "waste, fraud and abuse" is as effective as is the rewarding of contracts.
Which leads to the famous axiom: "The reward for government failure is more government"
I definitely agree that competent agency heads would need to be able to fire/hire with much much less friction and HR. Literally 1/3 of what makes PE work is optimized incentive structures, both monetary and non-monetary. If you take an agency which we assume to have a useful and clear purpose (as some clearly do not) one could absolutely create incentive structure inside that to optimize to said goals, if allowed the freedom. This could even be highly monetary, as the welfare ROI of a well-run agency would typically massively outweigh the comp requirements.
"I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it."
But first we have to figure out what we want the civil service to DO. Swamps produce ecological services. They need to be managed, not "drained." I don't know how to get CDC to make cost effective decisions but railing about their "arrogance" probably is not it.