How the ‘Deep State’ isn’t

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Casper, Wyoming (Chet Strange | Getty Images).

Another election day approaches.  Another campaign season rattles and hums.  The conspiracy theorists among us – from the mildly susceptible to the mortally addicted – are full of intrigue.  Take your pick.  Something new, like the opposition’s alleged invention of Taylor Swift and her pending endorsement of them?  Or something perennial, like the villainies of the “Deep State?” 

You’ve heard plenty about the “Deep State” –  a cabal of “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating … rogue bureaucrats,” our chief Cassandra Donald Trump has called it.  “Faceless bureaucrats (who) target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.”

Amid all the rattle and hum, it’s probably time to turn down the volume on the “Deep State” nonsense.  That alone would be a step toward clarity as the elections loom.  Let’s take a moment to explain how the “Deep State” isn’t.

It begins with a felt need.  The urge, for example, to ensure that the food on our grocery shelves is safe and the drugs in our pharmacies are effective.  It’s an understandable objective, not least because history tells us that safe food and effective drugs are not foregone conclusions.

In Washington, D.C.,  the felt need becomes a statute when Congress passes legislation and the President signs it.  In our example the legislation became the Pure Food and Drug Act, which nearly 120 years ago created the Food and Drug Administration.  Now the felt need is an agency’s obligation.

In pursuit of its mandate, the agency – let’s stay with our example – conducts scientific research to determine which groceries and pharmaceuticals should be on our shelves and which should not.  Afterward it writes regulations based on science.  There’s little to see here.  It’s just an agency, following congressional mandates, which were themselves following public yearning.

The FDA is only one of more than 100 agencies created by Congress.  Each one began with a felt need, which led to a statute, which created an agency that conducts research and writes regulations.  We often complain about these regulations (which I’ll get to in a moment) but they are, in fact, our main interaction with the government.  It’s not simply the FDA (which encourages confidence about groceries and pharmaceuticals).  It’s the IRS (which collects our taxes), the National Park Service (which manages Yellowstone Park), the post office (which delivers our mail), and the Federal Reserve (which prints our money and protects its value).  Montanans are particularly aware of the Bureau of Land Management (especially if they graze cattle on public land) or the Fish and Wildlife Service (if they fish, hike, or hunt).  And the state’s 95,000 military veterans are familiar with Veterans Affairs.

It isn’t difficult to imagine a society without these regulations.  A headline will do:  “Pittsburgh bridge should have been shut down years before.”  Or a prediction:  “Tsunami could kill thousands.  Can they build an escape?”  Or, just a joke: “Three congressmen walk into a bar.  The whiskey is tainted and they die.”  And yet we often whine about government agencies and their onerous regulations.  It comes, this whining, in several registers.  Here are three:

• Celebrity scofflaws.  The famously infamous defy government regulations and, together with their followers, celebrate their defiance.  The most prominent celebrity scofflaw of our times is probably Cliven Bundy, a Nevada-born rancher who grazed cattle on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management for decades while flouting grazing fees.  Fees that, by 2014, exceeded $1 million.  The BLM rationale was elementary: It was enforcing federal law.  So was Bundy’s: The land belonged to “sovereign citizens” or to the “sovereign state of Nevada,” but not to the federal government and its proxy, the BLM.  When Bundy ignored the fees and his cattle continued to graze the land, a notorious standoff ensued between his private militias and the feds.  And, arguably, Bundy’s celebrity developed legs.  Two years later his son, Ammon, led a similar standoff in Oregon.  And nearly a decade later publishers from Fox News to The New York Times were linking the Bundys and their militias to the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  Indeed, if anything, the celebrity scofflaw is one of the signal creatures of our time.

• Shadow scofflaws.  While Bundy and his ilk hog the limelight, shadow scofflaws scutter in darkness. By definition, they’re seldom seen.  Occasionally, though, we get a glimpse.  Think tax law flouters.  The Internal Revenue Service estimates annual losses exceeding $600 billion through tax evasion; $150 billion a year from America’s wealthiest tax cheaters alone. Or think big-box wages.  The National Labor Relations Board regulates labor-management issues to promote fair workplaces.  Big-box stores – and online behemoths, too – manipulate those regulations to control labor costs.  Nine decades ago the NLRB was using 40-hour workweek regulations to protect employees from overwork.  Now it’s understood that part-time employment is a way to control labor costs.  Adelle Waldman, author of “Help Wanted,” puts it this way:  “By employing two or more employees to work shorter hours, an employer can avoid paying for the benefits it would owe if it assigned all the hours to a single employee.”  Little wonder that more than 40 percent of Walmart’s workforce is employed part-time. Other shadow scofflaws?  The National Park Service regulates behavior in Yellowstone Park, but tourists continue to pet the bison and trespass the geysers.  The Fish and Wildlife Service regulates behavior in the forest, but hunters and anglers continue to poach and angle.

• Agenda benders.  Nowadays, however, cadres of a very different stripe are abroad in the land.  They aren’t scofflaws, neither celebrity nor shadow.  Rather, they’re folks who abuse regulatory agencies to pursue an agenda of their own.  Consider the current quarrel over mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortion procedures.  The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, after conducting tests and concluding that the pharmaceutical was safe and effective.  Enter the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a “prolife” organization established in 2022.  In November that year the AHM and similar pro-life groups argued in court that FDA approval of mifepristone had been improper, that “the FDA failed America’s women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States.”  Earlier this year, a federal judge agreed with AHM and invalidated FDA approval of mifepristone.  Inevitably, U.S. Food and Drug Administration vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. One person can be “prolife,” of course, even as the next person may be “prochoice.”  It’s difficult, though, to comprehend the fact that the quarrel isn’t about the FDA: It’s about abortion.  AHM & Co. are stridently “prochoice.” Their enemy is abortion. Their weapon, ironically, is the FDA.

In 2023, the conservative Heritage Foundation published “Mandate for Leadership:  The Conservative Promise,” an 887-page document proposes the remaking of the executive branch during Donald Trump’s second term in office.  It is, the foundation says, a “unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.”  The book doesn’t actually attack the “Deep State.”  As The New York Times puts it, “for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to ‘dismantle the administrative state’ … ‘Mandate for Leadership’ is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it.  The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

Which brings us full circle to Donald Trump’s complaint, quoted earlier:  “target(ing) and persecut(ing) …  at a level that nobody can believe even possible.”  The ironic short form: If you hate the “Deep State” now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Bruce A. Lohof is a native of Montana.  A former professor and a retired diplomat, he writes from Vienna.

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