Rick Perry’s chief qualification to be secretary of energy was that he
called for the abolition of the department back in 2012. Thursday, at his
confirmation hearing, Perry not only flipped but said that, after being briefed
on the department’s “vital functions,” he regretted his recommendation.
Behold a case study in why, rhetoric and nominations aside,
President-elect Donald Trump can’t bring transformative change to the agencies
and departments that make up almost all the executive branch: The gravitational
pull of the bureaucracy is just too strong. Even before Trump’s appointees are
confirmed, they understand that their relevance and power depend not on
dismantling the bodies they run, but on enhancing their power.
This is mostly good news: Incremental change is much better than radical
change, both for government and for business. But there is also a dark-ish side
to the difficulty of change. Once bureaucracies have a hold, they’re almost
impossible to scale back. Even leaving senior jobs empty won’t do the trick,
because career bureaucrats are more than capable of rolling ahead on their own
authority if there’s no one above them trying to call the shots.
The Perry reversal is so blatant that it sounds funny. Like a candidate
caught in a gaffe, he tried to minimize every aspect of his earlier
statement. He said it was made not five years ago, when the then-Texas governor
was running for president, but “over five years ago” -- the kind of
distinction-without-a-difference favored by guilty apologisers the world over.
And he used the priceless phrase, “do not reflect my current thinking,” which
no human other than a politician has ever used.
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Yet Perry’s description of his change of heart is in fact revealing. He
reconsidered his views “after being briefed,” Perry said.
Tempting as it is to think so, that doesn’t mean Perry previously had no
idea what the Energy Department does. Rather, it means Perry sat down
face-to-face with the senior officials in the department, probably both career
civil servants and Barack Obama appointees.
At the briefing, Perry would have had no choice but to realize that the
people around him were his new constituency. And it’s a big one. The Department
of Energy had 14 443 full-time employees as of 2015. It’s not clear how many
contract employees the department has now, but in the George W. Bush
administration, that number was about 100 000. The department’s budget is $27.9
billion.
The logic of bureaucratic Washington is surprisingly simple. If Perry were
to try to dismantle the agency under his direction, he’d face the
tooth-and-nail opposition of his employees. Each time he weakened the
department, he’d weaken his own power in the government. And if he succeeded,
of course, he’d be out of a job.
Same applies
The same applies to Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, Ben Carson
at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and so forth. To reduce the
reach and authority of one’s own agency is to make oneself progressively more
irrelevant.
Intentional self-undercutting isn’t what most people would tend to do when
placed in charge. Politicians may be cannier about this than civilians like
DeVos and Carson, or just more craven. But it would take an enormous degree of
ideological commitment to go into work every day and fight against the
thousands of people who work for you.
The task of running an agency is made more complicated if you don’t have a
staff of senior political appointees who share your ideological objectives.
That’s the situation that will be facing essentially all of Trump’s cabinet
appointees, because Trump hasn’t yet presented nominees for those less
glamorous posts.
The upshot is that in many cases, the agency head will have to start work
surrounded by career bureaucrats and perhaps the occasional courtesy holdover
from the Obama administration, desperately trying to preserve past
accomplishments. That’s going to make change all the more difficult.
Real problem
As a general matter, it’s a real problem for the US system of government
that Trump is moving so slowly to fill government posts. As I’ve written, he’ll
probably have to end up relying heavily on veterans of the George W. Bush
administration or else on Republican congressional staffers punching above
their weight.
But if you think that Trump’s policies might be destructive, the delay in
filling senior political appointments may actually be desirable to you.
After all, without political appointees, it’s not as though government
agencies grind to a halt. To the contrary, many career bureaucrats see their
political masters as drags on their effectiveness. The career employees will
simply go about doing their jobs.
On the whole, the career bureaucrats will act to maximize their own power
- which typically means regulating rather than deregulating. The inertia of
the Obama administration’s policies will continue to exert force over the
direction of regulation until some external shock - like a Trump appointee’s
order - changes that direction.
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What’s more, career bureaucrats tend to skew liberal and Democratic. Many
entered their careers as idealists. If they didn’t believe in the power of
government, they might’ve sought private sector jobs that pay better.
Ultimately, government works better when it can respond to political
change. But when it comes to major bureaucracies, that change is extremely
slow. Congress has the capacity to do things much more nimbly, including
gutting agencies’ regulatory power. But that’s a story for another day.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial
board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg
View columnist. He is a professor of constitutional and international law at
Harvard University and was a clerk to US Supreme Court Justice David Souter.
His books include “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition” and “Divided by
God: America’s Church-State Problem - and What We Should Do About It.”
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