Ryan Small

March 13, 2023

In September 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed that lit the realm of American politics ablaze. The author, identified only as a high-ranking Trump administration official, declared that he was operating as “part of the resistance” against the intentions of his boss. This anonymous figure divulged that not only he, but several other senior administration officials, were “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” all in an effort to “preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses.” Questions and accusations abounded following the article’s publication. While the White House’s failure to identify the anonymous author stole the headlines, many were astonished by the ability (not to mention the chutzpah) of a high-level bureaucrat to publicly reveal a plan to disobey the sitting President. Two years would pass before Miles Taylor, the former Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security, exposed himself as the author. Taylor, a virtually unknown government official who had occupied a similarly obscure position in the Trump White House, fit like a jigsaw piece into his boss’s narrative about a “deep state,” a supposed conglomerate of shadowy bureaucrats nefariously working against the public interest. Though its author is unmasked, the bombshell New York Times piece continues to beg a salient question: How much latitude and influence should the Miles Taylors of the world be allowed to exercise in our present-day democracy?

To understand the tree, we must work upwards from its roots. Over the past century, American institutions have ballooned in both size and scale. From the start of the twentieth century to today, federal spending has swelled from seven percent of our GDP to almost 40 percent. In 1917, the largest American corporation earned an inflation-adjusted $27 trillion in revenue; today’s top corporation rakes in over 20 times this amount. But to survive and manage this transformation in size, institutions oversaw an accompanying enlargement in scale, bringing on millions of new employees. Naturally, the burden of steering these institutions would fall to all of the new hires: administrators, managers, and other such bureaucrats trained in specific expertises.

In the private sector, the massive enlargement of corporations has driven a wedge between ownership and control. While Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and other Gilded Age barons typically owned and controlled their own companies, the share of megacorporations today owned by just one entrepreneur is slim. While Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Buffett may be the faces of Amazon, Meta, and Berkshire Hathaway, none own more than a fifth of their respective enterprises. What’s more, majority ownership of modern corporations is typically dispersed among millions of disconnected stockholders. This splintering of ownership is an effect of the massive enlargement of the American firm: more to be owned translates into more owners. As a consequence, the multitudes of specially trained employees, great in number and no longer constrained by a lone power player at the top, can exercise most of the control over the corporation.

In the public sector, the New Deal era alone birthed about 70 new federal government offices, each containing their own army of technocrats. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s  spawned more and more layers of bureaucracy, and nearly all successive presidents since, whether Democrat or Republican, have presided over an expansion of the federal government. Today, it comprises almost 500 agencies, enlists over two million career civil servants, and deals extensively with the parallel bureaucracies of the private sector. It is this coral reef of institutions, departments, and their employees which serves as the basis of the “deep state” narrative decried by Trump and other staunch conservatives. But while terms like “bureaucracy” and “deep state” carry unsavory connotations, is this managerial class rightfully or unjustly demonized?

In his piece, Miles Taylor writes that the bureaucratic mutiny against Trumpism “isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.” But depending on who is reading, the word “steady” assumes different meanings. Some may see bureaucrats as a “steady state” insofar as they are firmly fixed to Washington D.C., free from term limits and often immune from election cycles. Others may view them as “steady” by upholding an unchanging set of liberal democratic principles, offering much-needed stability to the vicissitudes of elected governance. These two diverging views are not mutually exclusive: while one can applaud the bureaucracy’s general commitment to democratic principles and norms, they can also criticize the facelessness of the system, which increases top bureaucrats’ power while diminishing accountability. Whichever position you take, it is clear that the ever-broadening role bureaucrats play in shaping our society remains criminally underdiscussed in our political discourse. Because so little focus has been given to this “bureaucratization” of American life, it is hard to identify the true effects of this sea change in American society. Hopefully, the Miles Taylors of America will one day receive more of a spotlight, if nothing more than to cause a shift in the national conversation.