President Donald Trump has taken aim at the rot in the federal bureaucracy, but he will continue to face an entrenched deep state because the rules protect it, warns a radio host who once helped President Ronald Reagan combat the bureaucracy.
Americans may not know that radio host and author Hugh Hewitt once worked in the heart of the executive branch, serving as general counsel and deputy director at the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government.
Hewitt praised Trump’s work, but he also laid out the gargantuan task ahead of the president and others who would attempt to reform the administrative state.
“I just am very impressed with the first, now it’s 102 days,” Hewitt told The Daily Signal in an interview at the Job Creators Network’s Freedom Fighters Summit Friday.
“President Trump is resolved not to have this stand in his way, so I think flooding the zone is a very conscious strategy to overwhelm” the bureaucracy, he explained.
Hewitt laid out five reasons the deep state exists, and gave some hope that Trump would succeed in at least partly reforming it.
1. The Civil Service Reform Act
Some Reagan veterans praised the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 as a tool to restrain the federal bureaucracy, but Hewitt described it as a “nightmare.”
He noted that the law created the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Office of Special Counsel, among other entities: “It just like subdivides into a hydra and gets bigger and bigger and less and less effective.”
The Civil Service Reform Act created systems that allow a president’s “political” appointees to oversee the ostensibly nonpolitical “career” bureaucrats. While the law aimed to make government more accountable to the people’s elected representatives, Hewitt suggested that it insulated the bureaucracy.
2. Deep State Unions
Among other things, the act codified how unions could represent federal employees. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal expansion of the government, opposed federal government unions; but President John F. Kennedy first allowed them in 1962, and the Civil Service Reform Act established clear rules for them.
“Their job is to protect their members,” Hewitt noted of the public sector unions. “They take their union dues, and I don’t blame them.”
“I was a lawyer in the private sector,” he added. “Your job is to protect your client, if and you take your money from your union dues and you go off and you spend it on defending every single member of every single union to the Nth degree and make it miserable.”
“So, it’s their job to throw sand in the gears … and they’re very good at it,” Hewitt added. “The only way to change that is to change the statute.”
As I revealed in my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” public sector unions helped the left-wing nonprofits that staffed and advised the Biden administration. Now, public sector unions are acting like a deep state, teaming up with those nonprofits to sue Trump and block his reforms.
3. Tenure in Place
“The idea of ‘tenure in place’ is the worst thing that happened to the republic,” Hewitt argued.
He noted that federal regulations “keep you in place [on the job] absent an extraordinary set of findings and a series of appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board,” so it gets very hard to fire deep state bureaucrats.
Heads of executive agencies “don’t want to waste their time on firing a [high-ranking bureaucrat] who has not done his or her job for 10 years,” he noted. “They’ll move them down the hallway. There are so many hallways full of people who don’t know how to do their jobs.”
“Unless and until we can repeal [the Civil Service Reform Act], we will have a deadweight administrative state.”
4. Deep State ‘Burrowing In’
Hewitt also described the phenomenon of “burrowing in.”
While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for positions within the government who serve at the pleasure of the president, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in career positions. Political appointees often apply to switch to “career” positions in order to stay in government permanently.
“‘Burrowing’ is a term of art, and at the end of every administration, those who like the gig, you know, 35-hour work weeks and remote work forever … they convert from being a Schedule C or a Schedule A that’s been hired under a political authority to a career service GS-protected, and that’s called burrowing,” Hewitt explained.
“It’s not supposed to happen,” he noted. “It happens in a Democratic administration like crazy, like Day One. They get there, they start to burrow in from their positions.”
“They don’t have to do anything to frustrate an agenda,” Hewitt added. “So much of the failure to reform the federal government is the inertia of people who are not interested in changing their routine.”
The bureaucrats don’t have to take direct action to undermine a president’s agenda; they just have to be slow in responding to new orders and use bureaucratic explanations to cover for their inaction.
5. Need for a Realignment
Hewitt said “there’s no way” to make the government more accountable “until and unless you can fire people.”
If anyone asks him, “What’s your magic reform?” Hewitt said his answer is, “Just allow every head of agency every year the ability to fire 1% of its workforce, no questions asked, for any reason.”
“The idea of accountability will make the federal government spring to life,” he said.
Hewitt said many attempts at political realignment—where certain elections illustrate a sea change in public opinion—become “stillborn” because the leaders elected during that alignment may go too far for Congress’ willingness for change. Yet Trump represents something new.
“I think President Trump has consciously decided to go to the center to try and expand his majority,” he said. “And if that is the case, I’m the happiest person in the world because—absent realignment and a supermajority in the Senate—you really can’t get much done.”
Hewitt noted that only “supermajorities in both houses” of Congress enables a president to “change the legislative timber of the country in ways both fundamental and enduring.”
He suggested that if the Republican Congress can pass Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” in the budget reconciliation process and it helps the economy ahead of the 2026 midterms, Republicans may expand their majorities in Congress and Trump can root out the deep state.
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