The fourth is what for decades now has been called a "headless fourth branch of government," the administrative state.
As early as 1937, in a "Report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management," the authors write:
Without plan or intent, there has grown up a headless "fourth branch" of the Government, responsible to no one, and impossible of coordination with the general policies and work of the Government as determined by the people through their duly elected representatives.The problem of waste and lack of accountability in this fourth branch, the report notes, has "been clearly recognized for a generations and ha[s] been growing steadily worse decade by decade."
The Spoils System and the Permanent Bureaucracy
The report isn't wrong. By the late nineteenth century, "civil service reform" had ended the old system "spoils system" and the advent of lifelong "professional" civil servants, brought the establishment of a bureaucratic class which saw its interests and loyalties as separate from the elected civilian government. This detachment from elected policymakers meant the administrative state was not terribly concerned with either efficiency of responsiveness to the public. It became an interest group all its own, but with far more power than any ordinary interest group.
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4 comments:
And the 5th branch of the government is the Federal Reserve, and that is the most powerful of them all.
Deep State (intelligence) works for the Fed
President Trump gets re-elected. The SWAMP is in for big trouble.
Northwest Woodsman: It has always been this way. At least since I began government service in 1963 and it probably has gotten worse since. Corrupt and criminally intent politiciand as well as Marxist democrat radicals gain some sort of influential office and the first thing that they do is purge all of those employees that do not have the same philosophy. They then appoint like minded people into government jobs and those employees remain in place long after the political appointee is gone either from a trip to prison or voted out of office. They then form a sort of insurgency within the government that continues for the length of their careers. This is the deep state. Can you imagine the political views of government employees hired by Obama’s political pals after their appointments to high level government posts? This holds true down to state and local level. Essentially these people are there for an entire career and it is almost impossible to get rid of them.
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