The state of states (1): An administrative state or a ‘deep’ one? Project 2025

Cover of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report

The US presidential election campaign is a curious affair, this year more than ever. The candidates are vying to gain the unofficial title of the “leader of the free world”, but their differences – rhetorically and emotionally, at least – raise tempers over an old issue: Who should decide? The answer has two facets, both sources of controversy, and each blurring into the other. One is whether it’s best to have centralised power or devolve power to state-like entities closer to the action. The second concerns who holds that power: the centre, or individual actor, or some “body" in between.

I’ll come back to the first in another post. Let’s consider the second one here.

Donald Trump appeals to those voices in society clamouring for government to get out of the way. Out of the way of citizens who want to carry firearms in public. Out of the way of corporations that want less regulation of their industry as they enjoy less competition from imports. Out of the way of those meddling experts who want to force us to have electric cars. Kamala Harris hasn’t said very much, not yet at least, but Trump paints her as the opposite: a fan of big government and centralised regulation. But isn’t this distinction just a bit too simple? Doesn’t it risk hoodwinking the electorate just long enough to have an election?

Regulation involves administrative-level decision-making. Power rests with those without a democratic mandate. This was the matter that led to the US Supreme Court’s decision in the Chevron Deference case in 1984, and its reversal of that ruling this summer. Administrators might well act against the will of the elected body, even the single body elected to lead the executive branch, the president. Trump, during his first term as president, complained about the “deep state” of administrators who thwarted his will. It’s what Donald Kettl (2023, p. 1) calls the “eternal paradox” of governance: “it is impossible to implement complicated government programs, from roads to national defense, without experts. However, expert knowledge inevitably creates its own political power and instability.”

Yet that administrative apparatus – the institutions of the state – are what the political theorist John Campbell (2023) calls its “guardrails”. They keep the state on the track, or from veering off the cliff. They guard against both anarchy and autocracy. They also guard against the use of blunt instruments, whether by central governments or devolved ones. An administrative state promises the straight and narrow.

In the current campaign, Trump’s language often echoes that of Project 2025, a group of thinkers based at the Heritage Foundation think-tank who wrote a “Mandate for Leadership” a year ago looking forward to the next administration. Their report urges a radical dismantlement of the civil service, making most senior posts in the federal government political appointments. The Democrats see the Project 2025 report as a warning of what Trump will do if he wins. And there are big issues at stake, for example, the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trump made initial steps in this direction during his 2017-21 presidency, when he used the term “deep state” to describe how hidden powers in the bureaucracy were attempted to thwart his will. By executive order, not through legislation, he implemented “Schedule F”, which converted some permanent civil service posts to political appointments. Joe Biden has since reversed that order. Project 2025 would like to see Schedule F reinstated and its use radically expanded.

In rebuttal, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama recently wrote:  

The problem, however, is the extreme complexity of the tasks that modern government is expected to accomplish. While some local issues could be settled on a local level, modern government does things like manage the money supply, regulate giant international banks, certify the safety and efficacy of drugs, forecast weather, control air traffic, intercept and decrypt the communications of adversaries, perform employment surveys, and monitor fraud in the payment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the Social Security and Medicare programs.

Complexity requires expertise, and expertise confers cognitive legitimacy on the experts’ decisions. But there are other ways to achieve legitimacy, democratically, through the ballot box. In a country wedded to democracy, the ballot box confers moral legitimacy.

Trump recently distanced himself from Project 2025, but only after critiques of its most controversial policies began to circulate. Is this distancing sincere or merely posturing ahead of the election?

If he returns to the White House, regulation might not just fall away. It would continue, but in the hands of people willing to do Trump’s bidding. If so, Trump would be sovereign, in Carl Schmitt’s (1922/2005) understanding of the term: The sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. Anything he chose to be interested in would be decided in his direction. If so, the free-for-all anarchy of a regulation-free state isn’t off the table. But autocracy, if which the sovereign can meddle anywhere he wants, is very much on.

The debate in this campaign revolves at one level around the question: How can experts be accountable, and to whom? Administrative vs. deep state. At another level how can we to prevent anarchy or autocracy? An administrative state promises the straight and narrow, but doesn’t always fulfil that promise. Kettl’s “eternal” paradox, perhaps. But if you have to decide, which do you choose?

Looking at responses to administrative regulation, organisation theorists Patrick Haack and Andreas Rasche (2021) have argued that the paradox of regulation is best seen as a tension between the demand diffusion of legitimacy through the population and the demand for impact from its implementation. Diffusion confers cognitive legitimacy; impact brings moral legitimacy. If demand for impact is high but diffusion is low, organisations will suppress the effort to regulate. If demand for diffusion is great but impact isn’t apparent, impact will be limited. Overcoming the paradox seems require building both cognitive and moral legitimacy together, through diffusion first then impact, then more diffusion and greater impact. That demands continuity in governance.

Do you want to leave the power with either the presidency whenever the president wants or, when and only when the president can’t be bothered, with every individual person or, more likely, every corporation. Do you prefer some buffer of expertise in between, even when it might turn against the person you’ve chosen to be president? Which approach to governing promises to build cognitive and moral legitimacy together and in the right sequence?

Campbell, J. L. (2023). Institutions under Siege: Donald Trump's Attack on the Deep State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haack, P., & Rasche, A. (2021). The Legitimacy of Sustainability Standards: A Paradox Perspective. Organization Theory, 2(4). doi:10.1177/26317877211049493

Kettl, D. F. (2023). Experts in Government: The Deep State from Caligula to Trump and Beyond. In Elements in Public and Nonprofit Administration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009276085. Retrieved from https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/52FB7A99AA7884DD7B4C74AB5E47D6DD

Schmitt, C. (1922/2005). Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.