The Deep State

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch:

Which brings me, briefly, to my subject: the so-called Deep State.

There is no such thing. As with the Vikings, it is a name invented to make sense of a bunch of different people with different ambitions in different places in different times. There are long-term, unelected government functionaries who naturally develop their own sets of economic and political interests after decades in the same agency or in the same general administrative realm. That employers and employees often have different and fundamentally rivalrous interests is a fact of life known to anyone who ever has had the responsibility of managing people in an organization. But the notion of a unified set of interests acting in concert across dozens of agencies over the course of years or decades is, simply put, preposterous. For one thing, the agencies and the factions within them have rival interests rather than shared interests—the FBI and the CIA famously do not get along, but you’ll also find petty turf battles and political maneuvering placing Defense (to take one example) at odds with Energy, or Agriculture (to take another) at odds with Health and Human Services.

Bureaucratic self-interest is a real thing—the Deep State is an imaginary cabal.