Election 2020
Why President-elect Biden Needs Congress to Rebuild Federal Capacity and Restore Public Trust
Rebuilding the Administrative State
Would our federal government — what scholars call the administrative state — have withstood a second-term of the Trump presidency? In our recent book, Directing the Whirlwind: The Trump Presidency and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State, we argued that it might not have.
His frequent calls to “drain the swamp” were central to his agenda to deconstruct the administrative state. Trump’s political appointments were aimed at destabilizing agency mission. His rhetorical assaults on the bureaucracy deliberately sought to undermine the public’s trust in the expertise and power of the bureaucracy as a powerful resource in solving pressing public problems.
The limit to his approach was that when confronting the greatest crisis of his presidency — the pandemic — rather than mustering the bureaucratic resources at his disposal, Trump continued to make the federal government the target of public disdain. During the election, the president proclaimed victory over the virus, pivoting to what he termed the “transition to greatness,” he tried hard to the make the public believe that America had “rounded the corner.” The failed response of the federal government demonstrated the downside of a hollowed out and hamstrung bureaucracy. Post-election, Trump appears to have given up entirely, abdicating what little responsibility he had demonstrated with respect to managing the crisis.
The question now is how much additional damage can be done on Trump’s way out? And, will the delayed transition impede the Biden Administration’s task of rebuilding federal capacity and restoring public trust?
With Trump’s election defeat, a second-term purge may have been avoided, but the burrowing in of pro-Trump loyalists is underway. The reclassification of federal employees under Executive Order No. 13597 , creating a new Schedule F in the excepted service category, has already begun. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is finalizing recommendations to recategorize 88% of its employees and the Washington Post reports that “the list of affected jobs is under review by the personnel agency.”
It is important to note that the primary difference between existing Schedule C and the new Schedule F is that the latter allows non-competitive hiring of confidential policy ranks to survive presidential transitions. In short, careerists in these reclassified positions are no longer part of the protected service. They may be fired (or forced to depart if they decline the recategorization position) and potentially replaced before Biden takes office. Thus, schedule F was designed to ensure that Trumpism would either thrive in the event of a second term or else might live on in the administrative state through the burrowing of pro-Trump loyalists in key agency positions.
There is little doubt that the Biden Administration will be running triage to deal with a multitude of policy issues, including managing a pandemic that has worsened under Trump’s accelerated neglect. President-elect Biden has already signaled that rebuilding the administrative state will be central to his task of governing.
For public administration scholars, that change in view alone is a welcome relief, signaling the reinvigoration of the notion that government can and does matter. Biden’s announced cabinet picks reflect a return of the careerists — policy professionalism with deep expertise and an institutionally oriented loyalty to the agency mission over politics. Whereas Trump most-enthusiastically deployed federal resources to further his own (often very personal) agenda, Biden seems intent on returning the power of the administrative state to its more foundational purpose of serving the public interest broadly, starting with a coordinated federal response to the pandemic. The task is daunting — and requires the assistance of Congress.
First, Congress should take action to limit rather than expand the ranks of political appointments. There are already nearly thousands of political appointments, the staffing and appointment of which, in part, made delayed transition so problematic. The ongoing reclassification of protected ranks via Schedule F only throws an added wrench into the process as the outgoing Trump Administration seeks to reclassify potentially wide swaths of agency employees and push through deregulatory measures in the remaining days of Trump’s Administration. Congressional Democrats have already introduced legislation to suspend or nullify the executive order that eviscerates the long history of competitive hiring and firing practices in the federal civil service. A broad coalition of good government groups have called on the legislative branch to deny the necessary implementation funding.
While President Biden can reverse the executive order, the new Congress needs to do more to ensure that congressional intent behind the long-standing tradition of competitive service is secured, including clarifying presidential authority carve out exceptions to the protected service as warranted by conditions of “good administration.”
Second, Congress must seriously consider civil service reform in a manner which balances the need for greater accountability with the twin purposes of the system — to provide administrative competence that is responsive, but not blindly loyal, to presidential control. The impersonal federal bureaucracy is a conveniently easy target of and Trump’s rhetorical attacks on the so-called “deep state” have been relentless. Congress must reaffirm the value of the bureaucracy as integral to our system of separated powers.
Third, Congress must forcefully rebuff the unitary executive theory that undergirds the argument of administrative presidentialism. The irony, of course, is that Trump has steadily transformed the bureaucracy into the very thing he allegedly despised — a political apparatus. Rather than repurposing the bureaucracy toward a disciplined ideological orientation, Trump’s use of appointments, staffing, and civil service reforms was far more tailored to the narrow agenda of aggrandizing his own presidential power through a primary emphasis on personal fealty to the president. The costs of a politicized bureaucracy have been enormous — both in terms of public and democratic health. Congress needs to act to reclaim its own administrative authority; be willing to share the supervisory authority and do so before another president set on bending the administrative state to untrammeled executive control assumes power.
Rebuffing the unitary executive theory is important not just for the sake of a qualified, competent bureaucracy, but for the sake of American democracy. As Alexander Hamilton once noted, energy in the executive is a good thing. However, an overly energetic executive can be detrimental to a republic — when unitary, authoritarian regimes arise, it is most often because of the energy of a single individual, not career civil servants or the collective ambition of the legislature. Congress needs to take additional steps to prevent the politicization of the career civil service, ensure the peaceful transfer of power, and more clearly define the limits of executive action.
Directing the Whirlwind: The Trump Presidency and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State (Peter Lang 2020).
Lisa K. Parshall is Professor of Political Science at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. She is the president of the Northeastern Political Science Association and the author of Reforming the Presidential Nominating Process: Front-Loading’s Consequences and the National Primary Solution.
Jim Twombly is Professor of Political Science at Elmira College in Elmira, New York. He is the vice president of the New York State Political Science Association and the author of The Progression of the American Presidency and American Pop Culture: Sex, Power, and Cover-ups.
