Is there a deep state?: Reformers
New to public policy
Neither schedule F nor status quo
Look, I have worked in government for fourteen years and I have seen both failure modes from the inside. I have watched a career official slow-walk a lawful directive because she disagreed with the policy. I have also watched a political appointee arrive with zero subject matter knowledge and override the people who had been managing a program for a decade. Both things happened. Both things were bad.
The deep state critics want to fire the career workforce into compliance. The institutional defenders want to preserve the architecture as is. Both positions are comfortable and both are wrong. Schedule F treats the entire permanent workforce as a political problem to be solved through at-will employment. The status quo treats institutional resistance as professional independence even when it functionally nullifies an election result.
What we want is boring. A Senior Executive Service with real accountability to elected leadership — not at-will firing, but meaningful performance review tied to the implementation of lawful directives. A reclassification of the 4,000 political appointments into a smaller number with longer terms and Senate confirmation, so the interface between politics and expertise is a door, not a revolving one. A transparency requirement for interagency disagreements — when career staff push back on a directive, the pushback and the reasoning go on the record.
The structural analysts have the diagnosis right: the system produces consistent outputs regardless of elections. That is the problem statement. The question is whether you fix it with a sledgehammer or a scalpel. DOGE is trying the sledgehammer. We expect them to discover what everyone who has tried to reform government from the top discovers: the knowledge that makes the system resistant to change is the same knowledge that makes it work.
Where we concede ground: Our proposals are complicated enough that people stop listening before we finish. That is a political failure, not a technical one.
What would change our mind: Schedule F producing a more responsive government without competence loss after five years of implementation.
Read the full synthesis: Is there a deep state?