President Trump – Personnel is Still Policy

There is no such thing as neutral public management of a political enterprise.

We were the Reagan Revolution. Movement conservatives, battle-hardened in the fierce campaigns of 1976 and 1980, who followed Ronald Reagan to Washington, committed to overthrowing the established liberal order of both political parties.

After eight brutal years of work, the war was left un-concluded. For all his significant and hard-won policies that heralded an economic miracle and President Reagan’s determined and relentless pressure that ultimately crushed Soviet communism, much work remained un-started or unfinished.

The primary reason was that too many liberal or “establishment” Republicans on the Hill and in his Administration were playing the Washington game we have come to know so well. Many key policy positions ended up in the hands of people who had fought the Reagan Revolution tooth-and-nail in both Presidential campaigns, many openly disparaging him as a simpleton and washed-up actor.

However, President Reagan’s legacy lives on with vibrancy and power in the public mind because it left lasting lessons on what can be accomplished with committed conservative leadership and a lot of sweat. It wasn’t always pretty, but the nation thrived despite the obstacles.

Like President Reagan, Donald J. Trump came to Washington and could count his real friends on his fingers and toes. The difference, perhaps, was that President Reagan knew it from his previous campaigns, and one wonders if the incoming President Trump understood how hostile his own party would be in 2016.

If Mr. Reagan was greeted with muted disdain in “official Washington” – which he was – Mr. Trump was met with an open loathing by a Washington bipartisan elite – the very people who had driven the Republic into the ground, decimating middle America, driving American jobs overseas, weakening the military, reintroducing racial politics, and courting enemies of freedom against which Mr. Trump had railed as a candidate.

Yet, after four grueling years of Washington’s open bi-partisan warfare against him and the Chinese coronavirus unleashed on the world in his final year, President Trump left a legacy of prosperity and peace. Like President Reagan before him, one can only imagine the successes his Administration could have achieved if folks who actually supported him had staffed the appointments in key agencies and policy positions. For all his significant and hard-won policies, much work remained un-started or unfinished.

Perhaps none of those lessons is now more important—and more relevant for the hopefully second Trump Administration—than the fact that personnel is policy. It’s true for the simple fact that government is politics. The idea of a neutral government where kind things just happen is an illusion. Politics drives Washington; therefore, politics drives the government up and down the line agencies.  

No one has done more to show us in word and deed how this works out in the real world of government than Donald J. Devine, one of the intellectual leaders and brave-hearted warriors who followed Ronald Reagan to Washington and served four years as his Director of Personnel Management (OPM).

Mr. Devine, originally a college professor, economist, social scientist, historian, and author who advised Mr. Reagan in both national campaigns, wrote a book on his tenure as the head of OPM in 1991, originally titled  Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword: An Insider’s Story of Abuse and Reform within the Federal Bureaucracy.

In 2016, Mr. Devine did the conservative movement a great favor by publishing an abridged second edition of his classic re-named Political Management of the Bureaucracy: A Guide to Reform and Control (available here in both e-Book and paperback).

As Morton Blackwell, founder and President of the nationally prominent Leadership Institute and himself a veteran of the Reagan White House in both personnel and policy positions, wrote in his forward for this second edition:

“For the first time since 1981, our county has a new presidential administration that appears to be serious about curtailing the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy. Reform is in the air, but [most people] who write about the pace of President Trump’s appointments and his plans to re-shape and improve the federal workforce are talking through their hats! They don’t understand the process [or know] the actual problems and opportunities.”

But Donald Devine does.

Political Management of the Bureaucracy is an essential primer for anyone interested in not just the proper and effective management of the federal government – but in controlling and reforming the vast administrative or deep state. It is no accident that the powerful administrative state has become a self-protecting, self-perpetuating fifth branch of government that curtails, short-circuits, or waits out proposed laws, policies, and directives that do not fit its self-appointed agenda.

Professor Devine takes any unacquainted readers back to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who – along with Barack Obama and Joe Biden – the most radical President in US history. Wilson openly despised the Constitution and its divided responsibilities. Mr. Devine explains it was Wilson who saddled the White House with its administrative state and began the process of bureaucratizing (or weaponizing) the government. This process was to turn government from the politically driven representation of the people’s vote – to a supposedly “professionally” managed and “value-free” organization mainly indifferent to the citizen’s will. Mr. Devine writes of this change in the White House:

“Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, those who have believed in his theory of nonpolitical administration of government have asked for two reforms that they claimed would lead to better and more efficient government: an Executive branch which was (1) centralized in a presidency composed of powerful White House staff offices to mobilize Congress and the bureaucracy to carry out the president’s mandate; and (2) staffed by a professional bureaucracy that followed neutral rather than political principles of administration, with leadership provided by career civil servants rather than by political appointees.”

The result of this change in a government organization that was eventually accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike is that the White House staff and the line agencies are constantly at war with each other. There has been a diminution of the Cabinet system, where the President’s appointees are entrusted with carrying out the stated agenda, to a powerful White House, populated mainly with “nonpolitical” staffers who can and do act outside the line agencies themselves. The White House staff effectively controls the agenda or lack thereof. Worse still, the staff is often unwilling or functionally unable to conduct the President’s policy or control specific events that can only be accomplished by the resources of the line agencies.

Mr. Devine wistfully notes that the White House had 37 paid staff in 1937 and fought the Second World War with less than a hundred staff. Now, the modern White House employs several thousand. He also provides many examples of how this model of bureaucracy directly interferes with stated policy and protects the administrative state at all costs.

However, the real value of Mr. Devine’s keen insights is that they take us back to an essential reality: “I have never been able to understand why the simple truth that politics is political is so little understood in the American government.”  There is no such thing as neutral public management of a political enterprise.

Presidents, especially transformative presidents like President Reagan and, hopefully, a second President Trump, must prioritize political background, philosophy, and loyalty over the incidental qualities of the political appointees in the Administration. Business executives, Mr. Devine notes, “can control policy using the bottom line, but top government managers cannot delegate without doing so with policy.”

Hopefully, in time, the wisdom and common sense of managing the government through the agencies and the President’s top appointees can replace the idea that an army of bureaucrats can be neutral agents of a political “change” agenda.

That need was demonstrated every day with President Trump, as it was with President Reagan nearly four decades ago, in the irrational vitriol and outright hatred shown to the President, being compounded by the constant illegal leaks, outright insubordination, and a contempt for the voters who elected them.

The swamp is real and growing, not shrinking a lick. The only way to drain it is with radical and deep reforms.