Editor's Note
President Trump’s efforts to restore constitutional order in a system long controlled by unelected experts mark the opening of a new phase in the cold civil war. But, as Bruce Gilley notes, attempts at reform will prove fruitless if they do not include the corrupt and ideological educational establishments that form the foot soldiers of the enemy regime. This essay was published in The American Mind under the title “Denizens of the Deep State.”
Administration programs “to end anti-black racism” and “lead the charge for progressive social change and justice.”
The only note of caution came from the influential Donald Kettl, a long-time professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, who warned his fellow Deep State revolutionaries in a December essay that they needed to take more seriously the reason why Americans see them as inefficient and unaccountable shills for the Democrats. “Members of the public administration community might well want to fight a rear-guard action against this onslaught,” he wrote. But “it’s folly to dismiss the critique as false.”
The subversion of the intellectuals is deep, as deep as the Deep State itself. Since public administration as an academic discipline, and thus as a practice, is its origin, the solution to stopping the malign Deep State lies in reforming that discipline. Without massive change in the field of public administration, the university-to-bureaucracy pipeline will continue to deliver its ill-trained staff to our governments at all levels.
Here are four concrete ways to remake public administration.
First, there should be an immediate blanket ban on the federal hiring of graduates with degrees from NASPAA-accredited schools. The congressionally mandated National Academy of Public Administration should be overhauled and repurposed as the nation’s leading engine of new standards for public administration research, analysis, and training.
Secondly, as former FTC Chairman Charles Dunlevy has done with respect to law schools and associations, federal political appointees should be prohibited from holding leadership positions in groups like ASPA, NASPAA, and APPAM.
Third, there is a desperate need for the equivalent of the Federalist Society in the field of public administration that would advocate for a laser focus on democratic loyalty, government efficiency, policy rationality, and freedom. The Trump Administration should work with leading universities to identify a new host institution for such a group.
Finally, federal funds and support should be withheld from schools of public administration that do not get their houses in order with pluralistic programs, along with faculty and curricula that reflect a real diversity of viewpoints. Taxpayers should not fund intellectually stagnant institutions. Our “so-called free democracy” depends on it.
