Hello and good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's democracy 2020 webinar entitled destroying or deploying the deep state challenges to federal agencies the democracy 2020 webinar series is the project of the american democracy collaborative which brings together scholars of american and comparative politics to think about the state of the of democracy in the united states through a deep engagement with american history as well as with the insights that we can draw from around the globe our team is comprised of robert lieberman suzanne mettler jamila mitchner ken roberts rick valley and me you can learn more about the american democracy collaborative by visiting our website which is just american democracy collaborative.org and i invite you to check back frequently for updates to our programming and our publications now of course today's webinar wouldn't be possible without a lot of behind-the-scenes help and support and so on behalf of the american democracy collaborative i'd like to especially acknowledge the support that we've received from cornell university with particular thanks to the mario and audi center for international studies and to the institute for of politics and global affairs for their generous sponsorship uh and and other support now coming up we've got two more webinars already scheduled they're going to close out the democracy 2020 series the first of these on october 30th at this time 2 pm eastern we'll have a webinar on the role of political parties and social movements in american politics and on december 4th also at 2 pm we'll be hosting a post-election discussion about the future of american democracy mark your calendars these are going to be some pretty exciting events and we look forward to seeing you at both of them so without further ado i'd like to introduce our moderator for today's webinar suzanne mettler suzanne is the john l senior professor of american institutions in the government department at cornell and she's the author together with robert lieberman of an outstanding new book entitled four threats the recurring crises of american democracy this book actually emerged from the work of the american democracy collaborative and i think it represents one of the most exciting and thoughtful analyses of our current moment out there it's also i'll note uh an excellent and accessible read i highly recommend it for your holiday gift giving and also for your local socially distanced and socially responsible zoom book club um i'll turn it over now to suzanne who will introduce our speakers for today well thank you so much tom that was was lovely to hear i truly appreciate it and uh welcome to all of you here today whether you're joining us for the first time or whether you've come many times to our democracy 2020 series today we'll be talking about the american administrative state the complex of agencies and departments that make up the federal government those who work in these offices are charged with carrying out the laws regardless of which party controls the white house although polls routinely show that americans today voice little trust in the federal government generally nonetheless large majorities of americans across party have continued to rank specific agencies highly and to affirm government's role in the tasks they perform president donald trump came into office vowing to deconstruct the administrative state to disrupt what he termed the deep state and and to drain the swamp of the federal bureaucracy what has actually transpired and how could we think about it in historical or comparative perspective and what is the impact on american democracy we have a dream panel with us here to discuss these topics daniel carpenter is the ally s freed professor of government at harvard university and he is a prolific and writing about the administrative state for example his books include reputation and power organizational image and pharmaceutical regulation at the fda as well as the forging of bureaucratic autonomy reputations networks and policy innovation in executive agencies 1862 jamila mitchner is associate professor of government at cornell she studies the politics of poverty race and public policy in the united states and she's the author of fragmented democracy medicaid federalism and unequal politics as well as numerous scholarly articles and essays and popular outlets donald moynihan is the inaugural mccourt chair at the mccourt school of public policy at georgetown his research examines how to improve how government works he is the author of administrative burden policy making by other means with pamela hurd and behavioral public performance how people make sense of government metrics so welcome to our panelists my first question for you is a broad question contemporary presidents of both parties have typically entered office with ambitions to alter the federal workforce or specific agencies perhaps by trimming some parts and bolstering others how have president trump's efforts compared or contrasted with those of earlier presidents and what are you most struck or surprised by let's start out with dan uh thank you suzanne it's a pleasure and honor to be here with you with professor michener and with professor moynihan um i think let me make three points here two about these differences and then one about what i think it means for us normatively um i think what we've seen first off is that president trump's appointments and his management of the administrative state has been based much more on loyalty to the president's person than on ideology or even partisanship per se it's nice when we have a civil service that is managed according to neutral administrative standards um the history of american administration is full of cases where um partisanship clearly affected uh that you can look no further than the example of the post office department before it was a government service the postmaster general used to often be uh the fundraising chair of the um of the party uh of the presidency um uh but that said i think it's a little bit different now um number one we now have uh you know we're more than a century past civil service reforms uh including the pendleton act which have uh put a distance between those administrative agencies and the president's party we still have ideology political and philosophical commitments but much more in this administration it seems to be a commitment to trump himself that is first a um a criterion for selecting those individuals at the high level and second um a kind of standard of behavior that they're held to so one example would be the current postmaster general lewis de joy uh there was both an official uh vetting process and an unofficial vetting process for that job that included the secretary of the treasury stephen manukin um who was reported to have uh engaged in a set of questions about whether uh potential postmaster generals uh would in fact do what trump wanted them to do and as we know uh postmaster general de joy is a major trump campaign donor the second i think would be uh what we saw when the trade advisor peter navarro uh criticized uh the staff of the food and drug administration for not being on what he called trump time and the idea there was uh his concern was uh look uh the president not necessarily the party not necessarily a philosophical principle has this need to get this vaccine out and you uh at the food and drug administration the fda need to follow suit so again the first point would be loyalty to the presidential person rather than the presidential position or even party or ideology the second um difference and it's a difference of more degree rather than absolutes is the use of the umbrella structure of executive departments to control the agencies within them so an example of this would be for instance again the department of health and human services what i might call hhs as an acronym what we refer to as the center for disease control cdc or the food and drug administration fda those are within the department of health and human services and a lot of the control that's being exercised uh you know again in the service more of trump the person than of trump the president um is by those officials not at the fda or not at the cdc but of orders coming down from uh you know presidential appointees at the executive department of health and human services and we got a really good taste of that this past week um when michael caputo uh who was the spokesperson uh and actually i think a deputy secretary at hhs for those positions um engaged in something of a wild violent rant uh on facebook live and called um uh his own cdc personnel seditious i'm i'm um paraphrasing here you can go online and get the exact remarks um but if you uh see also the um emergency you thought use authorization of convalescement plasma that made the news a few weeks ago by the food and drug administration the real push from that came a little bit less from trump himself although undoubtedly he wanted it to happen it came from uh not even from within the food and drug administration it came from political appointees at the department for health and human services so that second point is again the use of the umbrella structure of these executive departments to really drive the agenda and constrain what these agencies can do and then finally i'll just say the reason i think this is important is not because the independence of agency expertise is important just for good public policy but because this is the way that rule of law works none of these agencies would exist were it not for statutes that created them none of their powers would exist were not for statutes that authorized those powers and they wouldn't have any money to spend or positions for which to hire were it not for statutes passed by congress signed by previous presidents that funded those agencies and appropriations um and to me this is a fundamental issue about our democratic republican about our constitution it's not just about good government it's about the very foundations of our self-governing republic okay thank you dan now let's go to professor jamila mitchner um hi everyone you know it's it's difficult thinking about uh whether and how anything compares to the current moment often it's like everything feels so different you know i think about a core difference in my view between now and maybe the last time that there was quite this much fervor over or anxieties over something like the deep state which was um in the wake of watergate right and at that time there were there were actually a set of events that happened uh that made it reasonable for for these anxieties to exist that made it reasonable for a wide range of people to worry about what was happening in the administrative state and what its implications were for our democracy i think a major difference now is that primarily i mean anxieties like the ones that that we're seeing right now over the deep state are always political but but sometimes there are there's also a basis to those anxieties and i think right now the kind of political component of the further over the deep state is the primary component right it's in in ways that are almost uh you know hilarious if not for you know the potential withering of our democracy the deep state is used as a foil again and again so i think about an example from from new york the you know where where cornell is and and where where i am uh republican representative claudia tenney in an attempt to defend uh ben carson and and the department of health and um or know of housing and urban development uh who was under uh some criticism because ben carson had spent a ton of money on expensive furniture uh carson himself blamed his wife he said no no it's her fault right uh but claudia tenny didn't blame carlson's wife r carson she said this is all a conspiracy of the deep state you know it's not the furniture the expensive furniture in ben carson's office don't look there instead look over here at the deep state um and and this is consistently how this sort of um trope with the the deep state is being deployed now as really a distraction a distraction from all sorts of other things that are going on to erode democracy some of which involve a direct attack of the administrative state and so in order to distract us from that attack we start talking about the deep state it really is a foil i mean i'll just say one more quick thing about what really strikes me around the rhetoric and the discourse of the deep state right now and the assumptions we make about the way it operates which is that as we understand the deep state as it's been sort of um as as the language and discourse of the deep state has been deployed in the last several years under the trump administration the primary kind of victim of the deep state is president trump himself um and you know and by correspondingly ostensibly democracy is the victim because our duly elected president's will is undermined by rogue bureaucrats but historically when i think about at least you know recent historical examples it's often the case that when there's something like the deep state that is operating the victims aren't powerful people like president trump the victims are actually people who are at the margins when we think about something like cointelpro the fbi's counterintelligence program that operated between the 1950s and the 1970s and they were targeting folks at the margins they were targeting organizations and leaders of movements around um you know around uh civil rights folks like the black panthers feminist organizations women's organizations organizations they understood to have communist leadings and and that was actually the deep state it was covert it was illegal um and and it was deployed to harm people at the margin so this idea that like the primary problem with the deep state is that it's hurting the our extremely powerful president i think is very much out of sync with what to the extent that anything like the deep state is operating with what that kind of apparatus does okay thank you janilla now let's hear from professor donald moynihan uh thanks suzanne and it's a pleasure to be here uh i think i share many of the concerns that dan and jamilla outlined um and one point i want to pick up on is the sort of sense of perpetual confusion or being overwhelmed that i think a lot of us feel much of the time uh it's very hard for us to sometimes understand if a president's tweet is a meaningful indicator of change with the state it's it's unprecedented the language is shocking but does it mean something really different in terms of the actual ways in which governance works in practice and so i think it's helpful to think about this from a broader historical perspective i think when we do so some patterns become more apparent um the first of these is there is a normalization of norm breaking that you have to go really far back into u.s history to find equivalent comparisons to and it's occurring via political leadership not just the president but also the people that he's hired so dan mentioned mark caputo it seems like every other day we have a whistleblower accusing the president or a senior leader of something that would have been a weeks-long scandal and career ending for any other administration but now gets swept away after 24 hours so that does that normalization of norm breaking the second point is that if you look at the sweep of u.s history and the relationship americans have with government there's always been this element of discomfort but over time this historical sweep has sort of moved towards an acceptance that neutral competence and expertise really had some value in improving the quality of government so if you if you go back to alexander hamilton being accused as raising an army of federal bureaucrats by his critics or jackson heralding the spoil systems as a way to prevent a permanent class of bureaucrats you see evidence of that discomfort but then by the end of the 19th century this idea that having uh these amateurs who were very partisan come in every four or eight years and turnover was probably not a good thing for the quality of government had started to take hold and that argument had won the day for much the 20th century um and at some point we had a basic bipartisan agreement that protecting bureaucrats was probably pretty much a good thing for the quality of government and that starts to erode again and so this is i think my third point you you're seeing something different that didn't start with trump but started in the 60s and the 70s where there's a partisan shift in the attitudes towards bureaucracy where at a time when um what hofstadter described as the paranoid paranoid style of thinking starts to take hold in american politics where uh there are these mccarty-eyed attacks on career civil servants as communists that tread starts to become more and more of a feature of in particular republican politics and rhetorics about the bureaucracy and in the ensuing decades you see both parties but especially republican presidents using the power of the white house to gain more political control over the administrative state and i think trump has taken in some cases some of those tools that other presidents have used and he's just sort of pushed them to the breaking point sometimes beyond the breaking point in terms of legality so if you look at things like uh um centralizing the way in which resources are allocated that's been sort of a classic ways in which white houses have gained power over time and trump has sort of followed that pattern but he's also done it to the point where he's broken the law as we saw with the impeachment uh um issue which was primarily about can presidents withhold funds that congress has already appropriated and so there's a pattern partly of continuity but then partly of really pushing those boundaries to to a new place i think under trump okay thank you don um now i do have one reminder for everyone who's listening in we would love to have your questions and feel free to type them right into the chat um and we will um continue this conversation among the panelists for a while but then we'll open things up and take uh as many of those questions as we can now i want to uh the panelists have already put a lot on the table before we dig into it further i want to quickly discuss one matter of terminology i'd like to know your reaction to the term deep state this is a phrase that was rarely heard before the trump era and as jamila notes it's used in a political way does it connote skepticism about the very idea of a neutral a political civil service or even a kind of conspiratorial fear of the administrative state and should we even be using this term would any of you like to jump in on this i can jump in um i mean so on the surface i guess kind of most straightforwardly i think of the deep state as an idea an idea that implies that there's some entrenched bureaucratic official done some shadow government that's operating in contra distinction to the will of the executive right to the will of on the on the national level at least the president so that's the idea of the deep state and i think it's important to keep in mind that it's an idea a concept not a reality per se it's not to say that some of the anxieties around what um reflected in the idea of the deep state may not be real in terms of you know what's happening in various bureaucratic agencies but at the kind of most basic level the deep state is an idea and like all ideas it's used for different purposes and uh the president trump is using it for a particular set of purposes that range from distraction to deflection to justification for shrinking the uh federal bureaucracy and so on and so forth um and then i guess i would just say one more thing which is when i first heard the term deep state just from a kind of like my own personal experiential perspective it didn't make any sense to me that suddenly we were calling the state deep and acting like that was a new thing i thought like yeah the state is deep the american state is very deep the administrative state and anyone who actually has to interact with that state anyone who actually has to experience it and navigate it in their daily lives especially people for example whose lives and well-being are dependent on the state in various ways knows that the state is deep its tentacles go deep run far and deep into all manner of people's lives right and sometimes that's in ways that are beneficial often that's in ways that are harmful and often there are decisions made at the hands of administrators across levels high-level administrators like the folks we've been talking about who lead these agencies and street-level bureaucrats right but the people who are who are confronting the state in their daily lives most often know that the state is deep so there's nothing new about the state being deep but now we're thinking about this in a in a different sense not in terms of what it means for everyday people but in terms of how um rogue bureaucrats inconvenient a president who wants to rest as much power for himself as possible um and to me that view of the deep state is is much less compelling uh as far as my attention than than the the extent to which i want to think about what the state means for people who don't have power dan would you like to weigh in on this yeah um first to just echo what uh jamilah said um that uh you know if if we mean deep in the literal sense of kind of a deep penetration into people's lives that's always been a feature of american government um especially of state and local governments uh in the 19th century and that's true today most of the public health power is being carried out uh under emergency powers um in the united states right now are really state governments right um and that's important to keep in mind um i'm not fond of the term uh deep state uh and that's no criticism to those who organize this fantastic event um i think it delegitimizes uh public service um and uh the reason uh that i worry about it is in part if you look at the origins of the term um it's taken from authoritarian rule in turkey and the kinds of investigations that happened under erdogan there and it seems to suggest that uh there are kind of um you know plotting subterranean this is the other sense of the term deep you know conspiratorially deep uh uh bureaucrats uh and administrators who are conspiring against the popular will and i guess that would go back to um you know this the point i made earlier is that you know the idea that that um uh administrators and bureaucrats would act in a way that's inconsistent with a current president or even a current presidential majority is not something that in a constitutional republic we should be necessarily worried about their uh their allegiance has to be to the statutes to the laws um a really important way that the rule of law works is where whereby administrators have as their first allegiance the law and not the currently governing politicians if they uh are being unfaithful to the law then that's a real problem but we also have a lot of mechanisms including judicial review inspectors general and other ways uh for our um you know for our elected officials to get at that to pick up on on dan's point really quickly i think if you substitute rule of law for the term deep state or expertise for the term deep state in many of trump's tweets or messages the sentences would make much more logical sense and in many ways that this is you know first of all it's a language of de-legitimization delegitimization um you know we've gone from previous presidential rhetoric where reagan said the government is not solution to our problem government is the problem or george h.w bush talking about good people trapped in bad systems where there was at least the benefit of the doubt given to the individual bureaucrat even by presidents who are suspicious of the state to now this much more conspiratorial mindset where trump seems to truly believe that the state is pursuing him um personally and trying to bring him down um and so you know he's talked about for example the deep state is the reason why um his political rivals are protected from prosecution and why he's been victimized by unjustified smears by a government that's similar to nazi germany that the language is is incredibly extreme and so i think it has in addition to attacking the individual public sector bureaucrats also this broader effect on the public where it becomes this trigger for both polarized thinking but also conspiratorial thinking and so this i'm putting my behavioral scientist hat on now where we use language to trigger people to start thinking in this sort of system one uh approach to the world where they they did go directly from seeing the phrase to fitting that with your political beliefs and i think deep state is one of those triggers that lets people not really think about what's the evidence here what's going on but simply to define people as friends or foes and make these really snap judgments where they decide i'm with the president therefore whatever these administrators are doing is wrong and the the third point which i think again echoes what jamilah says is even at the political appointee level you see this term being used to justify actions that in normal times they simply couldn't justify so you've seen white house officials use the term deep state to justify not giving attention to the recommendations of cdc scientists right for example so if they can dismiss their expertise simply by invoking the term and in that respect it has some of the power of the term fake news that people also like to use quite frequently in the trump administration great thank you by the way i misspoke earlier if you have questions please put them in the q a not not the chat we don't have the chat enabled okay well now i would like to turn to the question of downsizing many presidents have come into office over the past many decades um saying that they want to scale back some part of government or um or agencies how has the administrative state held up in these past four years in in that respect and if you believe that that harm has been done how would you characterize it is it in terms of size resources professionalism reputation morale or something else and it would be interesting to hear if you think that there are some agencies that have suffered the most harm others that have perhaps been strengthened and uh or have remained unscathed um let's uh who shall we hear from first this time dan do you want to jump in on this um so yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't say downsizing is necessarily um uh the um descriptive term i would use i i would say erosion of the state um in part with capacities but i would really say with respect to norms and and reputation so uh dyno don moynihan earlier mentioned this kind of normalization of norm breaking and uh you know norms are built up slowly but can be broken and erode very quickly i think that's something that we learned very commonly in the behavioral and observational social sciences and there have been a number of such norms that have been broken uh go back to again michael caputo and the way he both um you know talked about his uh uh fellow uh civil servants this past week uh the language he's used towards journalists some of which has come out in public some of which uh i can say has not um and uh and and some of the really belligerent um kind of anti-journalistic behavior that one has seen i also um you know some of the things that have begun to happen at the department of justice where there are kind of dismissals of career prosecutors or heads of um doj offices um in part because not you know not because of performance issues but because uh it might be the case that some of these career prosecutors are getting perhaps too close to something that might involve the president um in terms of reputation i think uh i think you can see this very clearly uh the reputation of the uh centers for disease control and the reputation of the food and drug administration have suffered badly probably the best example of the latter is that um you know when the fda approves a drug um we're not supposed to have to doubt its efficacy we think it's going to work and yet um you know we started already with a world in which there are a lot of vaccine doubters now we can add to that population a whole set of people who are going to doubt what the fda approves because they think they've done it under the thumb of trump and that is a really dangerous world to be in i've argued elsewhere that it not only affects uh the degree of uptake of the vaccine which is going to affect all of our public health it's going to affect the next round of investments if you will the kind of financial ecology of investments in um you know biotech r d which is also going to be a deep problem so um i would again uh just emphasize that i think in terms of the erosion of the state right now it's kind of those norms and reputations that have been most eroded that's not to say there aren't resource issues but i'll leave it to my fellow uh panelists to reflect on that yeah i'll jump in here um and and speak to directly that the kind of the resource end of this especially from um just within my wheelhouse from a health policy context and not only is it in my wheelhouse but it's now in all of our real houses because we're now all living through a global health pandemic that in particular on the domestic level we've handled quite terribly and it's worth pointing out the connection between that something that we're all experiencing in our daily lives right now and choices made around the administrative state and certainly the erosion of the administrative state in some of the ways that dan points out with respect to reputation and norms but also in a really concrete and material way with respect to things that matter for public health so some of the agencies that have fared worse under under the trump administration have been agencies that are connected to health right so if we think about the health resources um and services administration hersa hersa has been uh has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and and you know carsa does super controversial things like think about child and maternal health and try to lower rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality um you know this is the kind of organization that's losing funding under the kind of banner of downsizing the government uh our public health service corps has decreased by about 40 since um the trump administration and very self-consciously it's not as though these things are just happening or they're just a function of budgets these are things that trump set out to do at the sort of initiation of his presidency and has consistently been doing right um uh trump also proposed cutting 40 of all public health professionals so the doctors the nurses the folks who are part of the kind of the federal arm of public health um those folks have been losing their jobs they were losing their jobs before the coronavirus um and made us sort of less equipped and and less well prepared to deal with and address the pandemic as it began to attack our country and so and and the last thing i'd point out along these lines is that uh you know who loses when these kinds of these forms of material retrenchment occur you know you can think of something like federal downsizing and it doesn't sound that bad and it's like oh well this is maybe this is efficiency and we're cutting the red tape and we have all of these euphemisms and all of these tropes that we trot out to make it seem like all of these things are a good idea but when it comes to agencies like the health resource and services administration and uh the cdc and the public health corps like these are people's lives we're talking about people who are not going to be protected in the same way that they would have because these agencies are weakened and don't have sufficient resources okay don before you jump in let me jump in um because i in the interest of time i want to broaden the question a bit we uh we build this uh panelists thinking about whether the administrate administrative state is being destroyed or deployed or to what extent maybe some of each of those things might be happening and so i'd like you to think as well as these about these issues of erosion um to what extent might the trump administration be weaponizing the administrative state or parts of it deploying its power uh for the president's own political purposes or uh derailing and redirecting the mission of agencies do you see much much evidence of this um and uh if so does it strike you as something new and different from what other presidents have done or not so i do i do see evidence of that and so that there are a couple of things happening at the same time but one thing to understand about trump is that he's been a very unsuccessful president when it comes to legislative achievements he had two years with a republican congress and basically they got tax cuts done and very little else in terms of legislative achievement so he's a president whose achievements are really limited by his capacity to manage bureaucracy one of the reasons we haven't seen a large scale downsizing of the federal bureaucracy is that he would not be able to get civil service reform passed he has done some stuff with executive orders to make it easier to hire people he has some things like move part of the research arm of the usda to kansas city to try and get the bureaucrats working in that unit to leave and most of them did but he's been very much limited to his executive power and there are places where that has not really made much of a difference and there are places where i think he's been quite successful and so jamella and i are both familiar uh with parts of hhs the health human services that creates rules for states about how medicaid and medicare provide services i think there they have set up a framework to really encourage states to make it harder for people in effect to get access to health care i think the most striking example for me is the area of immigration so the department of homeland security is one of those examples that has been an absolute priority for trump he's giving them resources he's brought them to the center of his administration and arguably has been quite successful if your goal is to limit immigration both legal illegal refugees who are applying they have found every possible means to change the administrative machinery to simply make it harder for people to enter the country and i think that reflects partly that this is a policy area where trump has gotten a lot of discretion from congress and maybe all presidents have too much discretion from congress in this area but also he has a very skillful policy entrepreneur and stephen miller who knows the policy levers quite well and can find aspects of the administrative machinery to make those policy outputs happen dan could you weigh in on this briefly to um to what extent is should our concern be uh that the trump administration has weaponized the administrative state um i you know uh generally agree i think uh don moynihan's um diagnosis is exactly correct what the trump administration has not been able to do by vehicles of legislation and statute it has tried to do and in many cases succeeded via administrative fiat um and uh in part that's where the norm breaking comes from because if there are policy goals that you have and you can't attain them through statute uh then you try to push uh levers of administration and there may be either laws or norms uh basically as we as political scientists study them as institutions that constrain that and that's exactly the friction uh if not the real abrasion that you're starting to see um i i guess you know i don't want to get ahead of ourselves but if i had to think um going forward of you know one of the things that we're going to be in need of um in not just the years to come and not just about uh as a response to the trump administration um but more generally is i think there's a a growing bipartisan sense that we need a strengthening of congressional capacity and especially of congressional oversight now there are times when congressional oversight can very much get in the way of effective administration yes that's that's absolutely correct um but the problem is now is i think we're entering this period and it began well before trump um where were were you know entering a world in this country at least at the national level where there's increasingly a presidential monopoly on those tools of administration and the ability of congress to constrain those is is ever more limited um and part of i think what we're also going to need is a strengthening of the inspectors general um in their role uh and that that's that is in part what congress has in terms of its of its oversight um but there are some aspects of what inspectors general can do to refer matters either to the department of justice uh or to congress that i think maybe we want to routinize and even protect further in the years to come okay great thank you i'm going to ask each of the panelists for an answer to one more um rather large question and then we will go to the questions from our audience what is the impact of the changes you observe and what is to be done and you get two minutes um what is the impact in terms of um making the united states vulnerable in various ways and for democracy um is there harm to the idea of having a professional civil service that's above partisan politics that can defend the broader public interest um and to the extent damage has occurred how can it be repaired uh let's hear first from jamila sure the big question and first for me thanks susan normally joking i think we've uh you know we've picked up on some of this throughout our discussion so far um and so i would sort of uh reiterate some of that and say i think that the impact has been multifaceted and it's been um generally negative right so that's both in terms of um you know the kind of like uh the reputation of the administrative state and of these different agencies uh and and on two levels one is with respect to like just trust in in the public more generally right um i think that it in fact and i mentioned this earlier but um a lot of people um from many different communities are consistently interacting with various facets of the administrative state and so um it's a part of the kind of experience of citizenship in a democracy and i think to the extent that people are sort of bringing um negative impressions and expectations to those uh experiences and interactions that's not good and and in general i think it erodes already wavering and quite low confidence in um uh in democracy and that can have a a range of ripple effects uh and then i think that it has implications also for the relationships between the different branches of government in the us context and some of what dan said uh pointed to this but um there's a a a set of um relationships in a often tenuous and very difficult to find equilibrium between the precise role that um the administrative state is playing the role that congress is playing the role that president the president is playing and every presidential administration you know this changes it's a dynamic set of relationships but there is a kind of um uh there's some sort of equilibrium that is positive for democracy is the goal and i think that uh what's happened over the last several years has completely thrown that off in a way that i think undermines the ability of these different branches of government to work uh together in um towards ends that are ostensibly gonna be beneficial for um the american people so i think that's a major problem i have lots more thoughts but i'm going to stop because i want to give us enough time for q a and hear what dan and don have to say don would you like to jump in on this yeah so uh dan mentioned something like this earlier which is we study government and a lot of the time it's very hard to quickly connect deinstitutionalization and declines in capacity with observable outcomes and so much of the time we sort of sound like the boy who cried wolf but we are seeing with the covet 19 response a real time demonstration of the quality of government mattering in people's lives in very demonstrable ways and the way in which poor political leadership has hurt our ability to corral this extraordinary pandemic and we just saw a story yesterday about the white house blocking the plan that the usps had in april to send out face masks to every household in in america so there's some really tangible examples there of governmental failure is making a difference to the united states as well as to our reputation abroad i think as as a a country that has its act together um one tangible change i would like to see is simply fewer political appointees this has been a standard good government proposal since at least the first a volcker commission back in the late 1980s uh and every so often we bring it to the table and nothing happens we have something like 4 000 appointees and a lot of them were simply not people who should have been in any public sector job um but got positions of high responsibility in the trump administration so passing legislation that would cap that number to something like 1500 or 2000 would be a big investment in improving the quality of government um i hope that if there is a change in administration the biden administration if it comes to pass will be looking closely at day one fixes that they can implement and so i gave the example of immigration earlier where they could look for specific changes that have been made the executive order or a level beneath executive order where formal guidance has been given to agencies like customs and border patrols to wind that back but i think for some of those agencies you're going to have something you're going to need something akin to a truth and reconciliation committee or a blue ribbon commission that can really go in to see what happened because for some of those agencies we don't know what's happening in terms of the use of state power and we're unlikely to know unless we have some outside actors in addition to the inspectors general to help shine the light on on what happened dan let's hear your thoughts on this i'm not sure i can improve much on what jamila and don just said that that was just really excellent um let me just give you one example of i think where it's actually affecting us i mean covet is a perfect example right i think it was on september 11th maybe another day canada had zero deaths nationwide um from from covet whereas we're averaging about a thousand a day um and yes there are other differences than differences other than public administration that work there i recognize that um but it's it in part suggests uh something about uh the fact that uh an economy uh which is many size the times of canada's uh does not shield us as a nation from uh the brunt of this um also you know the post office i mentioned earlier um you know dejoy's postmaster general dejoy's management changes which at some level and i think there was a federal court decision basically confirming this yesterday uh just made no sense from a management perspective like even a supply chain perspective the idea that a truck had to go out um even if all the mail was not ready to be put on it just had to go out at five o'clock or had to go out at a certain time um you know any kind of adaptive supply chain management uh model from the public or private sector would suggest that you just avoid that kind of rigidity and now you have people getting their medications late um i know of some researchers who are starting to look into basically what's going to happen with medication adherence um using these postal delays which are now statistically documented uh as uh an example as as you know and many people now rely upon uh the postal service for for their medications um uh you know i've already mentioned a couple of of points that i think can be done on a second don's point about limiting political appointees i think increasing congressional capacity and oversight um i think we're going to be at a place in the next few years and i think it's going to come from i don't want to say entirely across the spectrum but from more than one party um or from some republicans as well where there's going to be a pressure for an increase of public employment and i think it's important to remember that you know these public servants are also people um don uh uh mentioned uh rightly that there's been a turn since the 1960s just happens to coincide with people of color gaining more and more of an entry into the federal civil service uh you see that especially at the local and state level now you see it in the post office uh what is it you know african americans represent about 12 of the private workforce about 28 of the postal service um and uh you know i think it's important to keep in mind that um in many ways uh the civil service and the military service have actually been on the leading edge of uh you know forces for equality and integration in the united states um and uh there's some good to be done there um i i'll conclude by saying um i just finished a lecture this week on the roman republic thinking about the history of representative government the roman republic had all sorts of public construction and works programs uh with which it employed many of its citizens much of its economy was based upon public employment um i don't think we should be afraid of thoughtful constrained experiments in that direction in the years to come not least for purposes of economic policy okay terrific now we have i think we've had 32 questions um put into the queues and they're fantastic questions so i'm actually going to give you a few of them to be ruminating about and uh at a time and then you know don't feel you need to answer all of them you might you know choose a particular one each one of you to be answering um now a couple of the questions are along the lines of of um what dan and don have just been discussing about where do we go from here uh dd quo asks will trump and trumpism provide an opportunity for bipartisan reform of the administrative state like a new pendleton act and what might that look like and a related question comes from steven pimpara we know that we have seen a hollowing out of the federal bureaucracy especially in the state and justice departments in which career civil servants have left the agencies while vacant positions remain unfilled do you have any sense of the scale of this across the federal government and what can you say about the challenges that biden harris administration would face in rebuilding competence um let's make answers to these really brief because we have so many so many questions and you don't all need to um weigh in on each of these i'll really briefly respond to the first question i don't think there's going to be a government-wide piece of legislation to improve government in the next congress if trump is defeated i just don't think there's a political alignment of republicans and democrats who agree enough about the future of the public service to create that legislation there may be policy areas such as within say the postal service where there are new commitments to fixing specific problems but the reality is republicans are democrats really disagree about the nature of the public service and the way it should be governed and i don't think trump has brought them closer together yeah i guess i would just chime in and say um especially to the kind of latter part of stephen campari's question about what lays ahead as far as rebuilding the competence of um the administration the administrative state and you know assuming for example that there's another we're in another administration i don't think that um a new administration gets us out of some of these challenges so first of all really quickly i think that some of these challenges are like pretty fundamental and core like i don't think that there is an agreement and and don got at some of this when he talks about the how how views of the kind of role of um public administration has changed over time but i don't think that there's a there's any core consensus or agreement on what the role of the administrative state is what precisely um uh those agencies and the people who make them up should be doing and how that relates to democracy and so there's a constant kind of tension and set of anxieties there that have never really been resolved and perhaps can't be resolved they're just a part of you know on governance but those things have been worsened and i think that means from anyone who wants to sort of take up this mantle from this point going on is going to be even more difficult and i think the salience of the idea of the deep state is going to make it more challenging more people are paying attention more people are suspicious and conspiratorial in their understanding of the administrative state so any improvement any building is going to be under the limelight and i think that's going to make it much more challenging given how deeply polarized we are okay i'm going to give you a question now that that comes from one of us in the american democracy collaborative and that is ken roberts in the study of comparative politics especially in developing regions scholars would borrow from weber to say that trump has a highly patrimonial conception of the state and political authority meaning a conception of the state is serving the personal interests of the ruler both political and economic how does this square with the conventional notion of the administrative state as as it has typically been understood in american politics dan would you like to weigh in on that yeah i think that's um an excellent observation by professor roberts um the key is that uh he's trying to build this patrimonial enterprise on the scaffolding of another of weber's uh concepts which is the actual bureaucratic state right these are in weber two different modes of what he called domination or hair shaft and um that uh you know the the and so you know how do you do that well you don't have the existing patrimonial institutions with which to do it um and you don't even have which is kind of a hybrid kind of you know patronage institutions with which to do it um it's it's essentially a mix kind of a kit bag of different arrangements one is of course these relied heavily on what don moynihan has rightly criticized which is the ample opportunities uh for a political appointees in these agencies and we saw that with caputo caputo is a political appointee not clear just given the individual's mental health issues that he should be in government office many other uh capable civil servants republicans uh have served in many administrations so that's really not about uh partisanship there um the other would be i think personal networks um you know patrimonial regimes rely heavily upon um you know a set of networks that connect the ruler and the ruler's family i think it's worth keeping in mind in these older dynastic settings uh the ruler's family uh with a set of actual and potential state officials and you're starting to see that right now so where did caputo come from caputo came from his alliances uh with uh as we know uh roger stone and caputo worked uh in russia as an image manager for vladimir putin i don't know whether that amounts to a part of trump's family network or not um but i think it says a lot about those kinds of those those kinds of settings and um i think the only other thing i would add there is i think it's kind of fascinating that some of the older networks such as the reagan and bush party officials that trump would have relied on simply aren't there and it goes into the rift so so i would focus you know if if we get a second trump administration or there's you know there's going to be another trump in in the in america's future as president or as presidential candidate either you're going to see deep ties among those family and enterprise networks uh which include global ties i'm not trying to make a you know conspiracy point here that's just the world we live in um uh that that might be marshalled for that kind of rule okay um i'm i'm going to turn now to a question from uh doug yoder um running against the bureaucracy as being inefficient is not new but this iteration is characterizing the behavior of the deep state as seditious and is abandoning facts and science as the basis for policy how for career civil servants this is different how should employees respond i think this is a really interesting question and it reminds me of rosemary o'leary's work when she wrote about what she called guerrilla bureaucrats in the reagan administration in the epa who resisted what they were being told by political appointees i'm really interested in your thoughts about this what should career civil servants do i think we're seeing some examples of careers civil servants using to go to go back to an earlier framework the the hirschmann exit voice and loyalty framework using a combination of those strategies so some have left we know there was an increase in turnover immediately after trump was elected and if he was reelected i would expect you'll see a similar bump um and some of them have exited and combined their exits with voice so there's a whole string of op-eds and washington posts from disaffected bureaucrats who have complained some of these are now political appointees so i think it's hard for me to recall an administration whereas many whistleblowers emerged using that combination of exit and voice to draw attention to problems the the solution however depends upon congress taking those complaints seriously and being willing to act upon them and you know as we saw with the impeachment proceedings uh at least the senate is not willing to fully pursue uh the end results of of uh responding to whistleblower complaints um so i think you're certainly seeing a lot of effort by some career civil servants to say this is a moment of crisis and we're going to pull back the curtain and explain what's going on but ultimately they're dependent upon their elected officials just as the rest of us are great thank you now i'd like to raise a question from austin aldag and i'd like to direct this one to jamila do all of these phenomena take hold only at the national scale what about state and local governments yeah i think that there's you know this is this is across levels and and i think that's an important question in part because of course what's happening at the state and local level is connected to what's happening at the federal level and so federal state local these levels are connected to each other and so and there's naturally we're going to see reverberations across them i think that don pointed to a useful example earlier when he talked about um you know some of what was happening around medicaid for example and i think that uh what we see is a lot of variation in terms of how states and localities are reacting here on on the one hand i think that um you know uh states can be a little bit of a uh they can sort of buttress some of the the more harmful consequences that we've been talking about about throughout this conversation right um by uh you know allowing kind of state level versions of these agencies to continue to um implement things in a way uh that reflects um you know either reflects what scientifically sound or reflects what's best for their populations or what have you um and so you know even if the federal government is saying that is giving agencies um uh leave to do things that that otherwise are not um potentially uh are especially beneficial state governments can sort of um say well no we're we're not gonna do that so i think that the discretion that federalism gives to states and localities can be useful here and pushing back against some of the more negative things happening at the federal level but the opposite is also true right yes the opposite is also true so certainly their states and localities are implicated but i guess i would say that there's no that doesn't have any clear valence right that can be good or it can be bad that can sort of amplify and um exacerbate some of the patterns we've been talking about at the national level or um it can sort of be a bit of an antidote to them and that really depends on politics on those levels right and on the kind of intergovernmental politics that occur occurs across those levels so that that that makes the picture a lot more complex in ways that i think that we need to attend to okay now i'm going to raise a question uh that comes to us from niels nielsen in the private sector we applaud and reward those who disrupt industries and markets driving innovation in some very positive and constructive ways is disruption ever valuable for federal bureaucracies if so when and how who might like to take that question dan yeah i'll i'll take it um i i think the first thing i would put is put out as a cautionary note um disruption is a is a very appealing and alluring metaphor um but i would uh strongly recommend uh jill lapore's essay on um disruptive innovation in the new yorker from some years back as well as a study done by the tuck school of business at dartmouth that casts a fair amount of doubt on the effectiveness of disruptive innovation as a strategy it's certainly the case when we find that systems are sclerotic uh we might want to reform them and disruption might be a good metaphor um but i i don't think it's a consensus and it's definitely not a consensus in the management literature that disruptive innovation uh is is is the way to go that said i you know it's one of the things that i would say um you know among the things that that you know arguably need to be disrupted and when we're talking about the administrative state um i would say are you know several fold one what uh don moynihan referred to earlier as norm breaking uh there's you know that there's a pattern that's become entrenched very recently uh of that and i think it's it's uh you know problematic um and i think it needs to be looked at um there have been ongoing issues this was actually a problem under the obama administration with i.t design and procurement uh that a lot of people have looked at and i think uh there's definitely some room for um uh uh you know examination and reflection there and the final thing i'll say and we really haven't talked about this because it's been largely about the administrative state at the federal level but a big part of the black lives matter movement is about disrupting the administrative model of american policing right um and and and that's um you know okay we've talked about state and local government that's more in professor michener's wheelhouse and i'm not an expert on that um but of course the same kinds of questions that are being raised about american policing also are being raised about ice and its detention practices a number of other administrative practices of the federal government and i actually think it's maybe you know helpful to to examine it's a much more multifaceted movement than i can possibly um you know explain or touch on here um but if we want to think about what healthy disruption might look like maybe some of that's going on as we're looking at uh you know the the forces of local and state coercion in our society i just wanted to add to that question it's a great question partly because it gets at the heart of a sort of pro-private anti-government ethos that shapes a lot of our discourse about public administration and i'm all for disruption in the in the private sector because that'll generate some gains and efficiencies and companies that do well and the ones that do badly will go out of business the problem with the public sector is it doesn't go out of business and so disruptions that become embedded and are harmful continue over time and i think we are seeing an illustration of that point now where people who are taking public money and are nominally accountable to the public and congress are disrupting the public sector in a way that's creating a very large mess and it's going to take us a long time to fix and so i think the metaphor doesn't quite work because we're not in a market system when we're talking about government it's it's simply a different thing there are other paths to innovation and there's a whole literature on innovation in the public sector so some of this occurs more slowly more incrementally but i think the idea of trump as a disruptor who you know disrupted the casino business and then without business and it was taking those skills to the public sector is sort of a misleading way for thinking about what he can offer to government can i quickly just add on to that i think just to connect don's point to my earlier point about rule of law um there's an extent to which um we don't want disruption for disruption sake or even necessarily disruption for efficiency's sake to happen in the public sector unless it occurs by means uh unless it occurs by you know smaller republican institutions uh by the rule of law um and so uh you know if if the argument is oh well you know um uh you know a democratic republic is inefficient and and separated powers are inefficient that's entirely something else then we need to disrupt our constitutional framework but i would be very worried about just bringing in disruption to the private sector by means of a managerial agenda that wasn't accompanied by appropriate and and well-deliberated statutory reforms can i add something very quickly which is to say i agree with the with the sort of the caveats and the caution around disruption and with the idea that that notion doesn't translate as easily in the public sector as it does in the private but i will say one underlying kind of threat of that question that i appreciate is that it's oriented towards how um the administrative state can be deployed in ways that are sort of positive and democracy enhancing and i think a lot of this conversation has been around um how the state is or the administrative state is being weaponized how it's being used as a foil how it's being used in all of these negative ways and part of that is because you know we're very much thinking about this through the lens of the last several years into the lens of trump but i think moving forward a really productive way to try to engage and think about the possibilities of the administrative state is to think through the ways that it can be used to enhance democracy particularly i think there's possibilities for this on the state and local level and i think some of that is what dan was gesturing towards when he talked about um thinking about policing and black lives matters and the ways that folks are trying to reorient the state um towards with an eye towards what's good for people in communities and especially as i mentioned at the beginning the people who are most vulnerable and who are most marginal who actually have the most at stake when it comes to thinking about the deep state as we've been talking about it okay great thank you um well i'm i'm sad to see that we only have a few minutes left as usual we've had many many more fantastic questions than we have time to ask i'm going to raise one more question and give the panelists a chance to weigh in on it and to make any final comments they would like to make this question comes from isabel pereira i wonder if the panelists can help us unpack a paradox extremists for example q anon locate the deep state in powerful intelligence agencies and they tend to view president trump as an anti-establishment response to that kind of surveillance at the same time the trump administration has deployed precisely this and similar tools for electoral financial and other ends and yet is not accused of deep statism for doing this how do you make sense of this well i think um it's not uh as much of a mystery as as we might believe uh trump is hypocrites about many things so he will use language and and do exactly the opposite in his political or private life um and i think he's partly owned the term deep state in a u.s context and in doing so has sort of protected himself against accusations here i will say that i'm really concerned about what uh donald rumsfeld once described as unknown unknowns and and we're all sort of policy or government nerds here and so we know aspects about how the state works this idea of an almost parallel religion that's developing around uh beliefs about q anon in which the deep state is enmeshed is is really troubling to me because i don't know what that means and practice for the future of how we govern if this becomes and we know there'll be some congress people in the next congress who hold some of those beliefs but if this becomes a significant part of our uh political life then it's really troubling because some of those beliefs are incredibly extreme and would justify doing incredibly extreme things if you hold if you held those beliefs and so it's this blind spot i think that we have that that we're struggling to deal with right now okay camilla uh yeah i think i actually think that don said a lot just now but i guess i don't read this as much as a paradox in part for for reasons that don just laid out it makes perfect sense given the kind of uh the development of of this notion of the deep state over the last several years that it wouldn't necessarily be turned on trump and used against him but i i guess more more broadly than that i would say it underscores the extent to which the deep state is not a real thing that we can sort of objectively identify and say oh there's the deep state and there's the deep state and there's the deep state and if we could do if it were a real thing that we were just objectively identifying then we would be just as likely to see it as it was operating in the trump administration as we would be to see it operating elsewhere but that's not what it is it's not a real thing it's a trope it's a it's a tool it's a it's it has a political work that it is doing and so it's going to be used in ways that reflect uh who wants to use it and for what political purposes and reflect things like our ideological intentions that reflects sort of who it is that we want to other um who we want to accuse and so on and so forth so i don't expect that the deep state is something that is an accusation that will be rendered equitably right that's just not the nature of what that idea is is doing all right and i'm going to give dan the last word always a dangerous thing to do suzanne uh thank you it's again an honor to appear on this panel i would say just a couple things um i can't really improve on what uh jamila and don said i think we just need to dump the term deep state uh i don't think we'd be that worse off in just about any dimension if we did i think it's largely misleading um i also think uh just to extend on what jamilah said and what don said about the dangers of this kind of language conspiratorial language often engages in what you might call organizational attribution it imagines a set of forces that are nefarious and imagines them far more coordinated than they actually are and so what did actually uh trump appointee christopher wray say yesterday he's the head of the fbi about this organization that we call antifa because well there are maybe people who identify under that label that they're not organized it's not a you know well examined network um are there potentially uh actors in the federal government um who have tried to resist the trump administration's initiatives are there others who try to resist the obama administration's initiatives you know individually yes but i actually do think we have a set of institutions for dealing with that the notion of a deep state you know conjures a world where these people have a set of tools that are invisible both to us and largely to trump and are using them in some kind of concert that is undetectable to anybody but the people making this accusation um and i just i think it's it's worth pointing out that that's the way a lot of conspiracies work uh you know we we imagine a group of enemies and we imagine they're far more coordinated than they could possibly be um and i just i i think that's uh one of the many many problems with the term and i hope that one result of this awesome panel is that we uh ditch that phrase okay terrific well thank you so much to all three of you to uh professors carpenter michener and moynihan you've all given us so much to think about and uh thank you all for attending today this democracy 2020 event we hope to see you again uh next time which is october 30th we'll be talking about political parties and social movements uh then and then again on december 4th when we'll have a post-election discussion of the future of american democracy thank you so so much goodbye everyone.