On Donald Trump’s first day in office in 2017, his press secretary announced that
the crowd watching him take the oath of office was the largest ever to attend an
inauguration. Several hours later, bureaucrats at the National Park Service retweeted
photos showing that Trump’s crowd was clearly smaller than the crowd at President
Obama’s inauguration in 2009. White House officials immediately ordered the Park
Service to stop issuing tweets, but questions about crowd size at the inauguration (and
the subsequent Twitter ban) became a distraction to the new administration during its
first weeks in office.
The Park Service’s tweets illustrate what has been an often-contentious
relationship between President Trump and the federal bureaucracy. During his first
two years in office, Trump has often accused the so-called deep state (career members
of the bureaucracy) of ignoring his policy agenda—or worse, of fighting to delay or
kill Trump’s initiatives. Many of these accusations targeted officials in the Justice
Department (including the FBI) and their investigation of Russian involvement in
the 2016 elections, but Trump has also complained about bureaucrats in the State
Department, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many other
government offices.
Evaluating Trump’s complaints requires us to move beyond what bureaucrats
are doing to assess the reasons for their behavior. After all, as we discussed in
Chapter 12, while Trump wields considerable power as president, he cannot simply
order bureaucrats to do whatever he wants. Bureaucratic actions that anger Trump
may stem from opposition to his agenda, but they may also reflect constitutional or
legislative directives that leave bureaucrats with no choice but to pursue policies that
are contrary to Trump’s wishes.
Trump’s description of the bureaucracy as a more or less autonomous “deep
state” raises more serious questions about how American politics works. Up to now,
we’ve described the policy-making process in terms of three steps: citizens electIn response to inaccurate claims by
President Trump’s press secretary
that the crowds at his inauguration
surpassed those of any other
president, the National Park Service
retweeted photos showing that
there were clearly fewer attendees at
Trump’s inauguration than Obama’s.
In response, the White House ordered
the Park Service to stop tweeting,
demonstrating the often-contentious
relationship between President Trump
and the federal bureaucracy.13
What’s with all this red tape?
“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid
fumbling.”
Robert A. Heinlein, American writer“Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable
complement to it.”
Joseph A. Schumpeter, American economistThe Bureaucracy
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