Dictatorship by the Administrative State

In an earlier post, I wrote the following:

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law (Applying Principles, p. 328; see also, pp. 117-21).

Bureaucracy and administrative state are essentially the same thing. Bureaucrats are unelected administrators and policy makers who run the various governmental bureaus—about 432 in the United States to be exact. (Another, more recent term to disparagingly describe these bureaus is “deep state,” though it is broader including think tanks, military leaders, and the national media.)*
 
In contrast to the administrative state, as I continue in the above earlier post:

A truly free society . . . says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others.

And according to defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, criminal law during the early days of this country was simple enough to be read and understood while running!
 
What we have discovered in recent years, however, is that excessive law, vague and overly broad law, and complicated law that cannot be “read and understood while running” are not the only obstacles to a truly free society.
 
Many top bureaucrats in the administrative state are highly partisan, and in some cases, power-mongers who have little respect for their duties as administrators and policy makers, often following the progressive mantra of  “logic, consistency, and truth be damned.”
 
In our American bureaucracy, to administrate means to execute or implement the policies of the sitting president. As policy makers, the obligations of the various bureaus are to make recommendations to the current administration. Nothing in the job description says that bureaucrats may refuse to comply with the Executive’s orders.
 
“Refusal,” however, is the least of what occurred in our previous presidential administration.
 
James Sherk, domestic policy advisor to the President Trump, states that there are about 4000 “at will” political appointees in the bureaucracy, but a total of 2.2 million—essentially tenured—bureaucrats, because it is nearly impossible to fire them. The “at will” appointees, in contrast, can be fired by the Executive. Delegation of work to be done is usually handed down to those senior, unfireable bureaucrats.**
 
It is the higher echelons of this semi-permanent deep state that are the ones who can cause problems for a sitting president. For example, Sherk summarizes what such career bureaucrats have often been guilty of:

• Withholding information;
 
• Refusing to implement policies;
 
• Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;
 
• Deliberately underperforming;
 
• Leaking to Congress and the media; and
 
• Outright insubordination.

Among the worst of bureaucratic subterfuge and insubordination were the self-appointed dictators of public health who led the charge to establish, and continue to rule over, the past two years of covid totalitarianism. Refusal to listen to, implement policies for, or cooperate with the sitting president was worse than palpable. Deception, manipulation, and glaring incompetence due to lack of medical qualification are now being bragged about in post-covid books (see analytical reviews by Lerman and Tucker).
 
Not reading the science or respecting the judgments of such people as Dr. Scott Atlas was typical. Atlas, for example, would walk into meetings of the coronavirus task force with arms full of recently read and analyzed scientific studies—only to be greeted with blank stares and sometimes explicit statements that said, “We don’t care about that.”
 
And Dr. Paul Alexander reports that the bureaucrats he dealt with told him that neither he nor the President had any power, which meant he should toe the line of the deep state or resign. When he was threatened to have his career destroyed—initially, the bureaucrats at Health and Human Services, who hired him, refused to pay him—he resigned.
 
To counter the disingenuousness of these career bureaucrats, Sherk spearheaded the development of executive order Schedule F, signed into law a couple of weeks before the 2020 election, but rescinded almost immediately by the incoming administration. The order focused on making it easier to remove ill performing or insubordinate career bureaucrats. Sherk comments: when the deep state caught wind of the order, “it lit their hair on fire.” Hence, the immediate cancellation.
 
The source of the growing bureaucracy began with the Pendleton Act of 1883 that eliminated the “spoils” (crony) system, though the difficulty of firing bureaucrats did not begin in earnest until the 1940s.
 
The solution to getting rid of this approach to dictatorship is to start closing down government agencies. As columnist Jeffrey Tucker said, talking about the US Department of Education:

Pull the plug on the whole thing and sell the real estate. . . . New CEOs do it all the time. They shut down whole divisions, let go thousands of employees, end relationships with suppliers, sell off properties, and do anything possible to save the company. They do it in order to survive. The company in this case is the United States and it too needs saving.

Send the bureaucrats packing to find honest jobs in the marketplace where their primary task is to satisfy paying customers. Most have likely never held such a job. They have no clue what working in business is really like.
 
Once accomplished, the government may then get back to its constitutional function of protecting individual rights—rather than violating them.
 
 
* Regulatory agencies in particular are unconstitutional because they combine the executive, legislative, and judicial into one governmental organization, violating the separation of powers. The progressive supreme court of the 1920s and ‘30s disagreed, allowing the alphabet soup of agencies to grow seemingly exponentially (see Philip Hamburger, The Administrative Threat; also Applying Principles, pp. 81-83; and here).
 
** The bureaucratic process of trying to fire someone allows for a variety of appeals, requests for reconsideration, and, ultimately, arbitration, which after several months or years often ends in declaring it unjust to fire the employee. Not unlike the academic world.