POLITICS
The Surprisingly Popular Bureaucracy
New survey shows wide support for the political independence of the federal government
Shortly after the 2024 presidential election, President Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head some type of advisory commission for “government efficiency.” Musk and Ramaswamy laid out their vision for the Wall Street Journal, arguing Trump had “a mandate for sweeping change” in the federal bureaucracy (Musk and Ramaswamy 2024).
Is that the case?
New data suggest just 1 in 10 survey respondents want the President to have more power over the federal government, the opposite of what you’d expect if Musk and Ramaswamy were right, and that holds for Democrats and Republicans.
Before we get to those new findings, it’s important to reiterate the conservative concern regarding the federal bureaucracy emerged long before Trump. In his book, The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, Henry Olsen describes the populist-appealing view that “the academic, business, media, and political elites who govern us have stopped caring about whether their dreams and whims benefit anyone other than themselves” (2017, XX). He cites Reagan describing “the emergence of a permanent government never envisioned by the framers of the Constitution: a federal bureaucracy that was becoming so powerful it was able to set policy and thwart the desires not only of ordinary citizens, but their elected representatives in Congress” (Olsen 2017, 35).
In this regard, Musk and Ramaswamy (2024) articulate familiar themes of a long-running conflict. They write, echoing Reagan: “most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections. This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision.”
Nevertheless, Trump is a singular president, and it appears that his administration is promising to pursue this traditional goal with novel and more extreme methods. Ramaswamy has suggested slashing 75% of the federal government’s employees (Weisman 2024). To support this approach, Musk and Ramaswamy (2024) claim Trump’s mandate is “decisive” and that “they expect to prevail.” Yet, political scientist Julia Azari, author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (2014), recently observed that the language of mandates have been “increasingly employed by politicians in weak positions” and could be a “recipe for overreach” (Azari 2024).
While Republicans will hold power in all three branches of the federal government in January — both legislative chambers, the presidency, a friendly Supreme Court — the small margins of electoral victory do not represent a strong position for fundamentally reshaping the national government. The popular vote victory for Trump was a surprise, perhaps, but not overwhelming. It is not 1936, when FDR won over 60% of the vote and won the electoral college 523–8.
Did Trump win because of promises to increase presidential control over the bureaucracy?
Theodore White, in The Making of the President, 1960, describes an election as “a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole” until the final results are released (White 2009, 3). Yet, even after the totals are public, the explanation behind those results, the motivating force, still remains secret. It is the business of survey researchers to ask people to reveal those secrets.
I included several questions about political reform on this year’s poll at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government. The results contain some warning signs for the new Trump Administration.
We worked with YouGov to conduct our Rose Poll from Oct. 7–17, and had results “largely in line with other recent surveys showing a highly competitive contest for the national presidential popular vote, with either candidate plausibly winning a majority in the Electoral College” (Sinclair and Miller 2024). The poll included 6,500 respondents: 1,500 in a national sample and state oversamples of 1,000 each in CA, NY, FL, TX, and PA — with an overall margin of error of 2 for the weighted registered voter data.1 Among the registered voters, Harris was ahead of Trump 48–44, with the rest undecided or voting for third-party candidates. Now that we know Trump won the election, you can pencil in a few extra points for Trump’s positions, but the larger findings here hold, even if the data slightly underestimated Republican support.
We asked respondents this question: “For the federal government in Washington, D.C., which view comes closest to your own?” Options: (1) “The president should have more power to direct federal agencies.” (2) “Federal agencies should be more independent of politics.” (3) “We should amend the U.S. Constitution to permit the direct election of major department/agency directors.” (4) “The Congress should have more power to control federal agencies.” Or, (5) “No changes needed.”
Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about the first option — presidential control. Henry Olsen’s Reagan quotation emphasizes congressional frustration. Constitutional amendments to allow direct election of department heads, mirroring state constitutions establishing multiple elected executive branch officers, would be a third kind of political control. If voters truly despise agencies and bureaucrats, we should expect to see them support one of those answers — not support independence or the status quo.
What are the results? Overall, only 11% of the respondents wanted the president to have more power over federal agencies. Only 12% selected Congress, and another 12% preferred direct election. That makes 35% in favor of some sort of increased political control, but with only 1-in-10 voters preferring that the power go to the president. Of the remainder: 16% preferred no change, and 49% of the respondents preferred agencies to be more independent of politics.
It’s not the case that Democrats and Republicans have contrasting views, ether. The same percentage — 11% — in both parties preferred increasing presidential control. There are some slight differences between agency independence and congressional control — 54% of Democrats favored independence, compared to 45% of Republicans; 8% of Democrats preferred congressional control, compared to 18% of Republicans. Still, this looks like broad support for independence and limited support for increases in executive power.
Notably, those results hold not only for related questions the Rose Institute asked in 2020 and 2022, but also throughout the rest of this 2024 survey. On a similar question about governors at the state level, voters in both Republican and Democratic-leaning states expressed skepticism about increasing gubernatorial control over state agencies.
Additionally, these attitudes also show up on other questions about specific reforms. Respondents were invited to select all reforms they supported from a list of alternatives. For the bureaucracy-related options:
· “Allow presidents to switch career civil service jobs to political appointments” — selected by only 6% of registered voters, and 9% of Republicans.
· “Replace public employees/agencies with outside contractors” — 11% overall, 18% of Republicans.
· “Limit the policymaking power of government scientific experts” — 23% overall, 38% of Republicans.
· “Make it easier to hire/fire government employees in general” — more popular, but still only checked by 43% of registered voters and 57% of Republicans.
Of course, many people are interested in improving existing systems, and Democratic as well as Republican administrations have sought improved efficiency. This data does not, though, suggest a mandate to rip up the federal bureaucracy, root-and-branch.
If not for this, why did Trump win? I think the answer may be found in our free-response “most important problem” question, which many Trump voters filled in — in all caps — with “INFLATION.”
Delivering meaningful results to voters through bureaucracy reform is difficult, particularly in time for the midterm election. Furthermore, while some voters may agree in the abstract with reducing the workforce or cutting programs, having to name specific people or programs may reveal that cuts are even less popular in practice than in theory. While it is hard to know how all this ends, the survey data highlights the incoming administration risks misinterpreting their own electoral success.
- The oversamples let us write about those states individually; I’m writing a book about reform in CA and NY.
J. Andrew Sinclair is an Assistant Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and the polling director for the Rose Institute of State and Local Government
Azari, Julia R. 2014. Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://www-jstor-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt5hh0ft (November 23, 2024).
Azari, Julia R. 2024. “Presidents Often Claim Mandates − Especially When They Want to Expand Their Power or Are on the Defensive.” The Conversation. https://tinyurl.com/2h36etxv (November 23, 2024).
Musk, Elon, and Vivek Ramaswamy. 2024. “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.” WSJ. https://tinyurl.com/3ahsuzss (November 23, 2024).
Olsen, Henry. 2017. The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism. First edition. New York: Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Sinclair, J. Andrew, and Kenneth P. Miller. 2024. National Poll Results: Narrow Margin and High Stakes in Presidential Election. Rose Institute of State and Local Government. https://roseinstitute.org/2024-poll-national/.
Weisman, Jonathan. 2024. “Vivek Ramaswamy Returns to Push His Plans to Slash the Government.” The New York Times. https://tinyurl.com/3sumy43h (November 23, 2024).
White, Theodore H. 2009. The Making of the President, 1960. First Harper Perennial Political Classics Edition. New York: HarperPerennial Political Classics.
