The Threat Of The Managerial State
Trump sought to bring about a Schedule F. This would have given the president the ability to control the managerial state through the executive branch by forcing the administrative state to actually be accountable to the executive or face firings.
Biden reversed it:
The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F
Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.”
It sounds boring. Actually, it would have fundamentally changed, in the best possible way, the entire functioning of the administrative bureaucracy that rules this country in a way that bypasses both the legislative and judicial process, and has ruined the checks and balances inherent in the US Constitution.
The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary.
The gradual rise of this 4th branch of government – which is very much the most powerful branch – has reduced the American political process to mere theater as compared with the real activity of government, which rests with the permanent bureaucracy.
Any new president can hire the heads of agencies and they can hire staff, which are known as political appointees. These 4,000 political appointees ostensibly rule 432 agencies (as listed by the Federal Register) as well as some 2.9 million employees (aside from the military and postal service) that effectively inhabit permanent jobs. This permanent state – sometimes called the deep state – knows the ropes and the processes of government far better than any temporary political appointee, thus reducing the appointed jobs to cosmetic positions for the press to hound while the real actions of government take place behind the scenes.
From 2020 and onward, the American people got to know this administrative state well. They ordered us to wear masks. They deployed their influence to close small businesses and churches. They limited how many people we could have in our homes. They festooned our businesses with plexiglass and told everyone to stay six-feet apart. They demanded two weeks of quarantine when crossing state borders. They decided which medical procedures were elective and non-elective. And they finally demanded compliance with vaccine mandates at the penalty of job loss.
None of this was ordered by legislation. It was all invented on the spot by the permanent staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We had no idea they had such power. But they do. And that same power which allowed those egregious attacks on rights and liberties also belongs to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest.
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On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.”
Few people realize that federal employees are not ‘at will’ employees. They have special, protected categories that they have fought for and won. Making it impossible to fire a fed is a feature designed by the managerial state, not an accident or a bug.
When people reference a “managerial”, “deep”, or “administrative” state, this is often the first thing I think of.
Whatever we call it—There is a fourth branch of government that is far more powerful than the other three, because they have no terms limits, no oversight, no accountability, no elections, and hardly no awareness that they even exist. They are the bureaucrats within the administrative agencies; the lifelong prolific career feds within all 400-some of those agencies [the exact number of agencies is unknown, which telling in itself].
These centralizers make the policies. As the above quote indicates—They directed the mask mandates, the vax programs, and similar covid-era policies. But they stretch far further. These agencies are the ones that encourage globalist economic policies, that curtail local business through environmental protections, that force states to submit to their federal agency mandates through funding programs, and enact just about everything insane that you see around you today.
In the modern day, the executive and the legislature do very little, if much at all. They are just there as a target for the disenfranchised grey masses to complain about. Whatever the executive/legislature does is already the established policy of this managerial state. If the managerial state wants it to be formalized, only then does the legislature or executive take action to not piss them off.
The real power is here in these agencies that control public opinion, culture, funding, intelligence, military, and every other department you can think of. They control or dominant nearly every single influential institution in this entire country. Hollywood bows to them, schools bow to them, Disney bows to them, et cetera.
I personally would find it hard to believe if any normal person could actually get to a position of power without the wilful allowance by these bureaucrats. They even control things like the CIA, FBI, and NSA. These agencies alone have dirt on every politician on the planet, including our own. To go up against them, especially as a single entity in the managerial state, would be nigh impossible.
The system has evolved in such a way as to prevent any actual meaningful change within it. Most importantly, it has prevented any real, tangible oversight by the people. We can choose the legislature and executive, but only from the small set that the unaccountable managerial state filter for us. This small handful of chosen individuals then get to choose the judicial, who are supposed to watch over the others but obviously have a conflict of interest in doing so and would rarely target their masters in the managerial state.
The entire system is a disaster. It’s why it is wise to be a dissident. This system cannot be fixed. There is no reform that would actually resolve the past issues that lead to this behemoth or prevent this in the future, along with the hundreds of other systemic problems we face. We saw how Trump tried to combat it for four years and did nothing but this Sch F at the very end. Then, Biden came in and immediately reverses it. This is not a sustainable system to work with. Even if we “drained” it, they would just refill it next cycle.
This system is eery in how similar it is to the Janissary degeneration within the Ottoman Empire.
The Janissaries realized their own importance during the reign on the Ottomans and acted as a significant influence within the government. Over time, they grew in power until they were one of the most dominant factions in politics. They directly changed and “protected” Sultans (Executive), made themselves rich and powerful, which counteracted any reforms (Judicial), dictated policy (Legislative), and were otherwise unaccountable within the system. The Janissaries also limited who could join their group through stringent qualifications and careful vetting of their own personnel.
The Secret Service, FBI, NSA, CIA, DOD, and all the other alphabet soup agencies do the same thing as the above.
The Janissary issue was only solved in the Ottoman Empire through the complete slaughter of every single Janissary. Even then, the damage to the empire was too thorough and complete. The empire still collapsed.
It’s no surprise, but history is repeating with the American Empire. The Janissaries acted in the exact same manner as our own federal agencies, which also are meant to “serve the executive”—which is exactly what the Janissaries were originally meant to do. Both eventually became the true power base in the nation-state, which allows for wholly unaccountable corruption and no oversight of the real political process.
There is some clue here about the collapse of societies regarding the executive losing the power of his dominion. Just as our president does not have control of the federal agencies (exactly the inverse, actually), the Sultan did not have control of his Janissaries, given enough time. One could say the same with Rome and Caesar’s rise and the administrative failures of the British Empire.
It is rare that the judicial or legislature falls. It is more likely that the executive does. There is a glaring weakness here, and something that we’ll have to correct if we ever hope to have a sustainable state.
I have quite a few thoughts on how to accomplish just that, but we’ll save that discussion for a future article.
For now, let’s end this one with the reminder that the American Janissaries are diligently working to make sure they retain their position and prestige at your expense.
Don’t let them. Break off as much as you can from their corrupt and evil system.
Read Next:
The Nation-State As A Living Organism
Intra-Dissident Conflict: Misplaced Anger
The Failure Of The Judicial Branch: Oversight In Republics
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