When Lincoln was elected, there were days he had difficulty getting from his room to his office -- the halls of the White House were full of people who came looking for a job from the president.
That was the old patronage system, where you elect a president and he can appoint thousands, maybe tens of thousands of jobs. All of these jobs had one major qualification: you had to be loyal to the president.
As much as we hate it now, for a long time the system worked well. When the government was small, there simply wasn't that much real power to pass around, and the U.S. Constitution was fairly clear that the president should be directly responsible for the executive branch. Nobody else. The founders discussed at length the idea of a complex bureaucratic system of state, like the Europeans had. They wanted no part of it.
But as we know, once the system grew during the Civil War and afterwards, it led to a terrible amount of corruption. Something had to be done. So the U.S. enacted Civil Service reform, where the president is allowed and expected to bring a bunch of partisan loyalists with him into office, but the lower levels of the bureaucracy were to be left alone to the professionals. In this way public opinion could have major impacts on national policy with each presidential election -- but elections wouldn't become such a feeding frenzy for people looking to make quick buck off the government.
Now it looks like we're seeing the endgame of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction: the deep state. As just some random internet dude, my suggestion to fix it would be to assert more executive control another level or two down, perhaps allow the managers at the next level, who are not appointees, more power over moving people around and letting them go.
If we do it right we'll probably correct too far in the other direction, and hopefully it'll take another dozen or so decades for yet another course correction to be made. Sadly, however, I expect much political wailing and gnashing of teeth during the entire process. Whether it's patronage or the deep state, there's a ton of money and political power being fought over.
I thought of that immediately after I wrote the comment.
It would work -- if the department heads were of the same party. Perhaps each candidate could provide multiple choices for major posts and voters could choose which one they liked on election day. But it needs to be a single vote, and with a single clear leader at the top. Otherwise you'd have the old Presidential/Vice Presidential system where each could be of a different party. That's no good. That's just the deep state on steroids.
Remember the purpose of the executive is that at some point voters require "single wringable neck" The problem is that the system is so ginormous that there's really no way one person can be responsible for it all. Oddly enough, the system was really still quite useful over the past several decades even when it was too big for one person to plausibly be in charge. This is because it provides the president as a guy you can blame when things go wrong. Our problems? It's all because of that guy! Get rid of him and see how well we do!
So the real danger of the deep state isn't just a system run amok. It's rubbing people's faces in the fact that this whole "electing a president" thing is just so much bullshit. The specifics of the leaks or whether they're in the interest of the country or not? Not as important as the long-term damage to credibility the entire system suffers.
As the system grows it's more and more evident the reason we are supposed to have a layered, federated system. If you can't have that single person anymore, you really no longer have an executive. If the president can't be the guy we blame for all this bad stuff, the Congress is ineffectual and the courts are jammed up, then where do we go for peaceful redress of our grievances?
Well, for something like this, the President would probably be elected by the elected cabinet members, sorta like a parliamentary system for the executive branch.
As an Australian, I think a president system is much better than having leader's you can't vote for directly and can be replaced whenever the polls don't look great.
That was the old patronage system, where you elect a president and he can appoint thousands, maybe tens of thousands of jobs. All of these jobs had one major qualification: you had to be loyal to the president.
As much as we hate it now, for a long time the system worked well. When the government was small, there simply wasn't that much real power to pass around, and the U.S. Constitution was fairly clear that the president should be directly responsible for the executive branch. Nobody else. The founders discussed at length the idea of a complex bureaucratic system of state, like the Europeans had. They wanted no part of it.
But as we know, once the system grew during the Civil War and afterwards, it led to a terrible amount of corruption. Something had to be done. So the U.S. enacted Civil Service reform, where the president is allowed and expected to bring a bunch of partisan loyalists with him into office, but the lower levels of the bureaucracy were to be left alone to the professionals. In this way public opinion could have major impacts on national policy with each presidential election -- but elections wouldn't become such a feeding frenzy for people looking to make quick buck off the government.
Now it looks like we're seeing the endgame of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction: the deep state. As just some random internet dude, my suggestion to fix it would be to assert more executive control another level or two down, perhaps allow the managers at the next level, who are not appointees, more power over moving people around and letting them go.
If we do it right we'll probably correct too far in the other direction, and hopefully it'll take another dozen or so decades for yet another course correction to be made. Sadly, however, I expect much political wailing and gnashing of teeth during the entire process. Whether it's patronage or the deep state, there's a ton of money and political power being fought over.