"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.