Yes there IS a Deep State

Timothy Birdnow

Yes, there IS a Deep State.

From the Washington Gazette:

Whether intentional or not, bureaucracies seem to be unresponsive to the will of the majority.

The first finding is that the makeup of US federal bureaucracies tends to have an anti-conservative bias. Democrats made up around 50% of bureaucrats from 1997-2019, whereas Republicans made up only 32% in 1997 and fell to 26% in 2019. Further, as you look at more senior positions, bureaucratic over-representation of Democrats increases.

The study also finds evidence that this isn’t clearly the result of some conspiracy. Rather, more educated Republicans tend not to become bureaucrats, whereas more educated Democrats do. Further, even Republicans who do self-select into bureaucratic jobs tend to voluntarily exit more frequently.

However, the reason for the biased outcomes doesn’t alter the fact that bureaucrats do tend to lean left, and this does have important implications for policy.

Another finding of the study is that US bureaucrats are indeed somewhat unaccountable to democratic outcomes.

From the data analyzed, the authors find no clear increase in exit from bureaucracies in the Clinton-to-Bush transition, the Bush-to-Obama transition, or the Obama-to-Trump transition. In other words, bureaucracies don’t change composition significantly when the president changes.

At first, this may not seem bad. If everyone quit or got fired whenever the president changed parties, it's possible some important knowledge could be lost in transition.

However, one last finding in the research makes this unresponsive bureaucracy worrisome.

The authors find bureaucrats tend to perform worse when they are "politically misaligned” (when the bureaucrat is of a different party than the president). When that happens, projects tend to be more costly and this leads to the authors’ conclusion that "political misalignment is detrimental to contract performance.”

Therefore, whether intentional or not, bureaucracies seem to be unresponsive to the will of the majority. If bureaucrats are unaccountable for ineffectiveness, less effective under a president of the opposite party, and most bureaucrats are Democrats, it seems conservative concerns are warranted, at least to a degree.

This of course just deals with the bureaucracy. It does not even touch the far more dangerous and now politically active intelligence community, which clearly chose sides against Trump in the election of '16 and through his Presidency.

Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the dangers of a massive espionage system in his farewell address. Eisenhower was prescient to a degree far beyond his own imagining.

There clearly is a Deep State and they are working for the political interests of the plutocrats, the Democrats, and the radicals.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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