The death of expertise-based civil service

[Burke Bro]

Donald Trump is the Andrew Jackson of our time. Between the imminent death of Chevron at the hands of the Supreme Court, project 2025, and the likelihood that if Trump wins, he will pardon himself or otherwise waive away the January 6 charges, we are in for a huge expansion of presidential power.  The federal civil service system, for all of the good it’s done in reorganizing post war American society, is too depersonalized and incompatible with the values of rural/small town America. Universities, which are at the heart of the system, are now losing power.  I truly think that expertise-based civil service is on its death bed. We are in for a return of the spoils system, except instead of loyalty being rewarded for political party membership, loyalty to individual presidents will be rewarded. Political realignments will no longer span multiple presidential administrations. Instead, each administration will feature a huge shift in policy as each individual president will reconstruct the entire federal bureaucracy to be compatible with their cult of personality. With each successive administration, previous norms will be disregarded and the presidency will gradually devolve into a dictatorship.

How do you feel about this assessment of the current state of American politics?

[Burke Bro]

The reason for this is way too much power for concentrated in these institutions and they started to overstep their authority. For example the EPA tried to implement a cap and trade system even though congress rejected such a system which is a clear sign that the EPA had moved away from just enforcing laws to creating them .

If you are gonna centralize power like this then yes it’s only fair the president gets their way because at least they are elected unlike all these bureaucrats. Of course their are some exceptions but the civil service should not act like it’s own branch of government under any circumstance.

It was inevitable that large federal agencies were going to overstep their authority at some point as they became immovable parts of the American government. But centralizing authority doesn’t return that authority to Congress, where it should be. It just makes the president more powerful. All of this kind of reinforces traditional conservative/Goldwateresque arguments about why small government is important and why big government is a danger to democracy.