Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration

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In Defense of the deep state

Francis Fukuyama

To cite this article: Francis Fukuyama (25 Aug 2023): In Defense of the deep state, Asia Pacific
Journal of Public Administration, DOI: 10.1080/23276665.2023.2249142
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2023.2249142

Published online: 25 Aug 2023.

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ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2023.2249142

EDITORIAL

In Defense of the deep state

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The term “deep state” originally referred to the hidden security bureaucracy; autonomy;
bureaucracies in countries like Turkey and Egypt with sinister over­ deep state; administrative
tones. The term has been applied by American conservatives to the state; delegation; Covid; EPA;
existing permanent US bureaucracy, which they argue is exerting trust
tyrannical control over citizens and needs to be destroyed root and
branch. The fact is that the US administrative state is highly trans­
parent and plays a critical role in delivering services and outcomes
that citizens demand. Modern government cannot function without
a high degree of delegation to bureaucratic agents; as such the US
“deep state” needs to be defended and not vilified. There are several
critical mechanisms for democratic principals to exert control over
bureaucratic agents. While there are instances of bureaucratic over-
reach, the US system provides a number of checks on agency power
that are under-utilised. A separate problem lies in under-delegation,
where political principals write detailed rules constraining bureau­
cratic autonomy in ways that hinder effective and timely government
action. Future efforts by conservatives to undermine the “deep state”
will result in grave weakening of American government and return
the country to the 19th century patronage system.

Introduction
This article seeks to defend the idea of an American “deep state”. The phrase “deep state”
originated in countries like Turkey and Egypt, where a complex of military and security
agencies manipulated the political system and operated in a completely non-transparent
way to affect politics. This phrase was then appropriated by American conservatives like
Steve Bannon and used to characterise the American bureaucracy; total destruction of the
“deep state” has become a central agenda item for many populists on the right.
The United States does not have a “deep state” in the Middle Eastern sense of the term.
It has a large and complex civil service at federal, state, and local levels that is responsible
for providing the bulk of the services that citizens expect from their government, what is
known as the “administrative state”. This administrative state is in fact highly transparent
when compared to those of other liberal democracies, not to speak of Middle Eastern
dictatorships, and it can be readily controlled by elected political leaders if the latter
choose to exercise their powers. That bureaucracy necessarily operates independently of
its political masters, however, since elected leaders cannot possibly specify the thousands
of daily decisions that are needed to keep the government running. They delegate
authority to bureaucrats, which is what we call bureaucratic autonomy.

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2023 The University of Hong Kong
2 EDITORIAL

Protecting a sphere of bureaucratic autonomy is extremely important if the govern­

ment is to function properly. In this article, I want to defend the continuing need for an
administrative state that is allowed to exercise a wide degree of judgement in its
implementation of the people’s will. We do not want elected politicians to make deci­
sions, for example, on setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out, to
determine schedules for Air Force aircraft maintenance, or to certify particular drugs as
safe and effective. When politicians start to make these kinds of interventions, the results
are almost always harmful because they do not have the expertise or knowledge to do so
effectively, and will be tempted to use these powers for their own narrow advantage. Nor
do we want those politicians to constrain bureaucratic decision-making excessively by
issuing thousands of ex ante rules; bureaucratic red tape is one of the great scourges of
government.
On the other hand, we do not want bureaucrats to make big decisions regarding
policy. In a liberal democracy, citizens elect leaders who are responsible for setting
the overall direction of policy: how much money to allocated to guns versus butter;
what kinds of social services the state should offer; or when and where to use
military force. This issue is a sore point for many conservatives, since bureaucrats
as a group tend to lean to the left in their political preferences. Finding the right
degree of bureaucratic autonomy is one of the biggest challenges in any modern
liberal democracy.

Why delegation?
In democratic theory, the people are sovereign and have the authority to make decisions
regarding their own self-government. They are the principals in a principal-agent hier­
archy in which they choose representatives via elections, who then issue mandates to the
agencies and bureaucrats responsible for carrying out the people’s wishes. Democratically
chosen political principals should control bureaucratic agents.
The problem with this theory is that this simple normative hierarchy has never been
possible to implement in practice. As Herbert Simon and his co-authors (Simon, 1957)
pointed out many decades ago, authority in bureaucracies often flows in the opposite
direction. Bureaucratic agents often have the detailed knowledge and expertise that
political principals lack, and therefore end up instructing the latter on necessary policies
and their requirements for implementation. This reverse hierarchy was parodied in the
BBC comedy from the 1980s “Yes Minister” (subsequently “Yes Prime Minister”), where
Humphrey, the senior bureaucrat, is portrayed as playing his minister like a puppet
master.
There are other important reasons why substantial delegations of authority are neces­
sary for the functioning of any bureaucracy. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years
ago (Hayek, 1945), the vast majority of information in any modern society is local in
nature. Hayek in this article was concerned with price-setting in a market economy, but
his observation applies to bureaucratic decision-making as well. It is the low-level agents
and not their higher level bosses who have best access to local knowledge, and are
therefore best able to understand and interact with their environment. They are able to
react more quickly to changes in that environment, and, when the proper mechanisms
exist, can be held more directly accountable for the decisions they make.
 ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 3

These considerations are apparent in military organisations. One of the reasons the US
military has become one of the world’s premiere fighting forces has to do with its
adoption of the doctrine of “mission orders” or “commander’s intent” in the course of
its post-Vietnam reforms (Fukuyama & Shulsky, 1997). This doctrine, based on the German
military’s Auftragstaktik, maintains that military commanders should delegate authority to
the lowest possible command level consistent with the overall mission. Commanders set
broad operational objectives, but it is lower-ranking officers and NCOs in direct contact
with the enemy who are responsible for figuring out how to implement those instruc­
tions. The effectiveness of this approach to delegated authority can be seen in the success
of the US-trained Ukrainian military against their far more centralised Russian foes
following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
All political systems therefore need to delegate authority, and in many cases, the more
delegation, the better the bureaucracy will run. Delegation, however, comes with risks
that the agent will make mistakes, take needless risks, be corrupt, or use that authority for
purposes other than those intended by the political principal. One of the central issues in
administrative law is which authorities to delegate, how much to delegate, and what
mechanisms to use to control agencies. In general, the better trained and more profes­
sional the agent, the more authority can safely be delegated (Fukuyama, 2013, 2014),
though there is not necessarily optimal degree of delegation that works in all conditions.
Furthermore, all bureaucracies necessarily run on a degree of trust.

Trust bureaucrats?
The degree to which different societies are willing to trust bureaucrats varies widely. It is
safe to say that those in East Asia exhibit the highest degree of trust. One of the deepest
Chinese cultural traditions has to do with the training and respect given to bureaucrats;
meritocratic recruitment into the bureaucracy in China goes back a couple of millennia,
and the practice has spread to other societies in that country’s cultural sphere of influence
like Japan and South Korea.
At the other end of the scale are numerous low-income countries with corrupt or low-
capacity governments, which are often seen as predatory or serving the interests of
hidden elites. Among developed democracies, most European nations have relatively
high degrees of trust in government, though levels are higher in the north and western
parts of the region. The United States is something of an outlier among developed
democracies, given its deep tradition of anti-statism (Lipset, 1995). Many Americans across
the ideological spectrum are suspicious of government despite their dependence on the
state for many essential services. For this reason, the American state developed later than
its European counterparts, has been less extensive in scope, and has had to survive
numerous efforts to roll back its authority.
The concept of a modern state was articulated most notably by Max Weber at the turn
of the 20th century (Weber, 1968). In contrast to patrimonial states that were the out­
growth of the ruler’s household and were staffed by the latter’s friends and family,
a modern state is impersonal, treating subjects as equal citizens and serving public
interest rather than the private interest of the ruler. Weber understood the ideal type of
bureaucrat as a non-partisan, expert administrator, a public servant who was given
autonomy and oriented towards public interest.
4 EDITORIAL

The early American state was not modern in Weber’s sense, particularly after the 1828
election that brought Andrew Jackson to power. Jackson is often described as the father
of American populism, having benefited from the expansion of the franchise to all white
males that occurred in most US states during the 1820s. It turned out that individualised
benefits like a bottle of bourbon or a job in the post office were the easiest ways to
mobilise masses of new voters; Jackson argued that ordinary Americans were qualified to
run the government, and that he should get to appoint them since he won the election.
Thus began the period of American history known as the “patronage” or “spoils” system,
under which virtually every federal employee owed his job to a politician (Skowronek,
1982). This system was modernised only in the 1880s with the passage of the Pendleton
Act, which established a US Civil Service Commission that sought to introduce merit-
based hiring and promotion. While this effort to professionalise the US bureaucracy was
largely consolidated by the time of the First World War and expanded with the New Deal’s
proliferation of federal agencies, political appointees continue to be much more common
in the US than in the democracies of Europe or Asia.
Indeed, the administrative state has been the target of conservatives for decades now,
who allege that the country is being ruled by secretive bureaucracy that has escaped the
control of democratically elected leaders (Hamburger, 2014; Metzger, 2017). Many pre­
sent-day American populists have defined their political objective as the total destruction
of the “deep state”. This agenda surfaced briefly at the end of the Trump administration in
2020, when the White House issued Executive Order 13,957 creating a “Schedule F”
category of federal employees who could be fired at will, and ordered administrative
agencies to move their employees into this designation. While this order was quickly
rescinded by the incoming Biden administration, it remains on the agenda of many
Republican lawmakers. Some conservative intellectuals maintain that the Pendleton Act
was unconstitutional (Howard, 2020) and seek to roll back hiring and promotion practices
to the kinds of clientelistic practices of the 19th century (Swan et al. 2023).
In light of these attacks, it is critical to defend the principle of bureaucratic autonomy,
and to define its proper bounds. There is in fact some justice to conservative complaints
about an “out-of-control” federal bureaucracy. But in other cases that same bureaucracy is
overly constrained, particularly by the masses of ex ante rules and procedures that it has to
follow. Those procedures were put in place out of distrust of bureaucratic authority, but
they have contributed to the de-legitimising of that same authority because they slow
down or block entirely the state’s ability to achieve desirable outcomes.

Delegation in US administrative law

Conservative legal scholars sometimes cite a supposed “non-delegation” doctrine that
limits the ability of Congress to delegate authority to administrative agencies. As
a constitutional matter, this is highly questionable; no such clause exists in the
Constitution (Chabot, 2021; Posner & Vermeule, 2002). Delegation has been practiced
since the first days of the Republic; the first US Congress delegated to Alexander
Hamilton’s Treasury Department the job of cleaning up the nation’s Revolutionary War
debt. It is a fantasy to think that the American people through their elected representa­
tives can manage a modern government without substantial delegation. They perhaps
have in mind the image of a New England town meeting from a couple of centuries ago,
 ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 5

where citizens could debate public affairs and play direct roles in local government. This is
the way that local government should continue to work today, but it doesn’t work for
a federal government that needs to provide services to a country that spans a continent
and is home to more than 330 million people.
In US administrative law, there are five basic mechanisms by which political principals
can control bureaucratic agents (Bersch & Fukuyama, 2023). These include:

(1) Ex ante procedures. The most important of these is the 1946 Administrative
Procedure Act (APA), which requires notice-and-comment for any new rule pro­
mulgated by an agency (Verkuil, 2020). In addition, there are organic laws defining
the procedures that agencies much follow in carrying out Congress’ wishes.
Examples include the Federal Acquisitions Regulations (FAR) that govern the way
the government purchases goods and services, or the voluminous rules regarding
Federal employment.
(2) Ex post review. There are numerous mechanisms to enforce bureaucratic account­
ability, the most important framework for which was established in the 1983
Chevron Deference decision by the Supreme Court (Gluck, 2014). The latter
imposes a two-stage rule for when the courts can intervene in reviewing bureau­
cratic decision-making, and limits that intervention on the grounds that the courts
in general do not have the expertise to over-rule agency judgements. Chevron
Deference has itself become a target of many conservatives, who have chipped
away at the ruling through avenues like the “major questions” doctrine. There are
numerous other ex post methods for reviewing bureaucratic decisions, such as the
APA’s Administrative Judges who can review agency decisions; in addition,
Congress frequently holds hearings in which bureaucrats must account for their
actions.
(3) Appointment power. In any government, the ability to control personnel is one of
the most important means of controlling the bureaucracy. No set of ex ante rules
can foresee all possible future states of the world, so human judgement is required
to carry out the people’s will in light of changed conditions. The US Constitution
specifies that the President may appoint cabinet officers with the “advice and
consent” of the Senate, and can set rules for the appointment of “inferior officials”.
(4) Removal power. One might think that removal power is comparable to appoint­
ment power, but it has never been the case in US law. The Founding Fathers held
a prolonged debate on removals, leading to the “Decision of 1789” wherein the
President was given wide latitude to dismiss senior federal officials. James Madison
himself argued that, in contrast to appointment power, the ability to remove
recalcitrant officials was fundamental to executive authority (Frug, 1976).
Removal power was weakened for lower level officials, however, in the post-
World War II period by the imposition of procedural rules regarding the dismissal
of federal workers. These procedures have led to complaints by government
managers that it is extremely difficult to hold poorly performing workers
accountable.
(5) Ad hoc interventions. There are other legal ways in which political principals can
intervene to limit bureaucratic autonomy. The US federal Constitution does not
provide for emergency powers, but some state constitutions do, and Congress has
6 EDITORIAL

enacted a federal emergency powers act. The president can use his pardon power
to override executive branch decisions of various sorts, as when former President
Trump pardoned Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher’s conviction by a Navy court.

Bureaucratic overreach
In recent decades, there have been clear cases of bureaucratic overreach, where agencies
have arguably gone beyond the statutory authority granted them by Congress. Some
examples include:

Sackett v. EPA. Michael and Chantell Sackett were a couple who bought a 0.63 acre lot for
a house they planned to build in Priest Lake, Idaho, that was several lots over from the nearest
body of water (Adler, 2011). At the start of construction, however, they were ordered to desist
by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, who asserted that
the lot contained wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act. These agencies employed
an extremely broad definition of wetlands and did not allow the Sacketts to contest the
judgment in an administrative hearing.

The original statute left unclear what constituted “waters of the United States”. The EPA
asserted an extremely broad definition: the land did not have to contain actual navigable
waters, but could include dry land that was used by migratory birds. Indeed, the birds did not
have to actually use the land; in the words of one commentator, it was enough that “a
wayward goose glanced longingly at a given parcel of land” for it to be considered under
federal jurisdiction. The Sacketts contested the EPA action in court in a case that went all the
way to the Supreme Court. The latter initially decided it in favor of the Sacketts, but on initially
on narrow procedural grounds. In May 2023 the Court ruled on the substantive question,
saying that the EPA’s definition of its authority was indeed too broad.

A second case of bureaucratic overreach is the expansion of the authority of Title IX. An
education bill passed in 1972 had a short clause that prohibited federal funding for entities
that discriminated on the basis of gender. In the first couple of decades of Title IX’s existence,
it was applied largely to varsity sports on campuses, but in the 2010s it was expanded to
cover sexual assault and sexual harassment. By the time of the Obama Administration, the
Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education was issuing hundreds of pages of
guidance on how schools and universities were to handle sexual assault cases. These new
rules should have been promulgated under the APA and put out for notice and comment. But
the OCR issued these rules in the form of “Dear Colleague” letters that were claimed not to
have the force of law and were therefore not subject to the APA. Nonetheless, thousands of
schools around the US set up Title IX offices according to the federal guidance, for fear of
jeopardizing their federal funding. (Melnick, 2018)

A third and more recent case concerns the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s
eviction moratorium during the Covid epidemic. At the beginning of the Covid epidemic,
the US Congress passed the CARES Act that included a rental eviction moratorium on
properties with federal funding or federally-backed mortgages that lasted through
July 2020. The CDC then imposed a new moratorium through the end of the year, based
on Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act. This was upheld by the pre-Amy Comey
Barrett Supreme Court. The Biden administration issued a new moratorium lasting from
August through October 2021 in counties with high Covid transmission rates, a ban that
was struck down by the new conservative majority on the Court. The latter argued that the
authorities delegated by the underlying statute simply did not encompass control over rental
housing.
 ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 7

The final case was the one decided by SCOTUS in West Virginia v. EPA in the summer of 2022.
The EPA sought to regulate carbon emissions in its 2015 Clean Power Plan, which drew
authority from Section 111 of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The plan envisioned “generation
shifting” to lower emissions sources, e.g. from coal to natural gas and from natural gas to
alternative energy. This would require new investment in clean energy, or in emission
allowances under cap-and-trade. Although the Clean Power Plan was rescinded by the
Trump administration, it was ultimately withdrawn because market forces on their own
were motivating a shift to alternatives without the need for government regulation.
Nonetheless, the Roberts court rejected the plan under the “major questions” exception to
Chevron Deference, on the grounds that the original statute did not envision giving the EPA
authority over greenhouse gas emissions.

The liberal minority on the newly conservative court dissented from the decision on two
separate grounds. The first was on the basis of a substantive reading of the original statute,
whose language they argued did delegate authority over greenhouse gasses. The second was
a procedural one raised by Justice Kagan in her dissent: she argued that the “major questions”
exception was a poorly defined concept that the conservative majority was using to insert the
court’s public policy preferences in place of those of the expert agency. While the Supreme
Court was not explicitly overturning the Chevron decision, it was in gutting its essence by
asserting not legislative dominance, but that of the Court itself.

These individual cases underline the real possibilities for excessive autonomy, and
there are many others (especially on a state level) that could be added to this
indictment. However, it would seem hard to make the case that Americans are living
under a tyranny led by out-of-control bureaucrats. America’s Constitutional system of
checks-and-balances provides remedies for executive branch overreach, which were
ultimately applied by the courts in three of the four cases cited. Progressives may
denounce the substantive outcomes of these decisions. The West Virginia v. EPA
decision in particular has set a poor precedent for dealing with the urgent problem
of carbon emissions. But procedurally, it was clear that the system could check
bureaucratic power.

A question of balance
It should be clear that any well-functioning liberal democracy should balance bureau­
cratic autonomy against the need for democratic accountability; neither extreme of
unchecked state authority or thoroughgoing politicisation is appropriate. Finding that
balance is, however, can be very challenging.
Take the case of public health during the Covid pandemic. In the early stages of the
outbreak, public health authorities, even in red states, were given considerable latitude in
setting policies regarding social distancing, shutdowns, masking, and the like. Indeed, the
California state constitution granted county health officers final authority in these matters
(Lewis, 2021). In the first months of the pandemic, there was a widespread view among
liberals that it was illegitimate to even consider the existence of a tradeoff between public
health and other social goods like jobs or economic growth. As the pandemic evolved,
however, public attitudes began to shift. The costs of strict enforcement of shutdowns
became more evident, particularly to parents who were frustrated by state-level decisions
to keep public schools closed. Covid itself had evolved into less deadly variants, and large
parts of the population had been vaccinated. By the end of 2022, China’s “zero-Covid”
8 EDITORIAL

policy (an even stricter version of US shutdowns) was widely mocked in the US for failing
to take into account the economic and social costs of the policy.
These choices then got caught up in the broader political polarisation. There was
a backlash against earlier deference to public health authorities and, among some
conservatives, conspiracy theories about their underlying intentions. Many red state
politicians then moved to the other extreme, passing statutes dictating detailed restric­
tions on what kind of public health measures could be taken in future outbreaks. These
new rules will hobble the ability of public health authorities to flexibly deal with a future
crisis.
A proper response to the Covid crisis should have involved the highest political
authorities carefully balancing different social goods. Public health authorities should
have had significant inputs into this decision, but they should not have been the final
arbiters of the tradeoff, since they will typically prioritise maximisation of health over
other interests. Unfortunately, under the Trump presidency we did not have a political
leader at the federal level who was able or willing to make this decision based on the best
available evidence; rather we had a politician who looked primarily to his own re-election
interests above all else.
The West Virginia v. EPA decision reflected a similar political failure. The case in my view
was procedurally correct but led to a bad outcome, i.e., the failure to regulate, at least in
principle, carbon emissions. The fundamental problem lay not in the Supreme Court, but
rather in Congress’ failure to legislate on this issue and provide the EPA with proper
statutory authority in this domain. In light of this failure, it was understandable that the
executive branch tried to extend its authority unilaterally, but also proper for SCOTUS to
cut back that authority. Justice Kagan may be correct that the current conservative court
was substituting its judgement in place of the expertise of the EPA and Congress, but the
courts have been used extensively in recent decades to achieve outcomes that could not
be achieved legislatively. Since Brown v. Board of Education, this has largely been the work
of progressives, but conservatives have now shown that they can make use of this judicial
power as well. In the American system, it is much better to have the elected representa­
tives in Congress make fundamental decisions about tradeoffs between social goods, and
then hand off implementation to expert agencies. But the legislative branch has been
failing to exercise its proper powers, with bureaucracies and courts then seeking to fill the
vacuum.

Under-delegation
In addition to the problem of over-delegation, the United States also suffers from
a problem of under-delegation. As noted above, Americans typically don’t trust their
bureaucrats, and have consequently wrapped the bureaucracy in layers of procedural
controls to hold them accountable. This began with the APA but over the years has
extended to virtually all public decisions. Major infrastructure projects, for example, are
subject to extensive environmental reviews and public hearings under the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), many of which are then duplicated and extended at
a state level. Alone among advanced democracies, the United States frequently employs
a “right of private action” to enforce its laws, in which individual citizens can act as “private
attorneys general” and initiate litigation against parties accused of violating a law
 ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 9

(Farhang, 2010). This has led to a common-law process in which litigation through
(mostly) state courts has steadily expanded the reach and scope of government rules
independently of any legislative action.
This steady expansion of procedural checks has led to an outcome I labelled “vetoc­
racy” (Fukuyama, 2014), in which veto power is so widely distributed among stakeholders
that it becomes extremely difficult to make and implement decisions that serve collective
interests. As Nicolas Bagley has pointed out, excessive proceduralism has hobbled gov­
ernment and prevented progressives from using government effectively to achieve their
aims (Bagley, 2019). On the right, Philip Howard (1996, 2014) has inveighed against
excessive bureaucratic red tape that defies “common sense” in government decision-
making. This logically implies that bureaucrats ought to be given more discretion in
implementing legislative mandates, where they can use “common sense” to get to
desirable outcomes.
If we are to permit greater bureaucratic autonomy, we still need to put in place strong
accountability measures to make sure that autonomy is not abused. One method might
be to replace ex ante procedures and the mountains of red tape they impose on bureau­
crats, with stronger ex post review as a method of holding agencies accountable. Ex post
review can be just as obstructive as ex ante procedures if they are allowed to proliferate
endlessly, so we need to find ways of streamlining them. For any bureaucratic system to
work, the society would have to make adequate investments in the training and profes­
sionalisation of public servants.

Conclusions
The US bureaucracy suffers from any number of dysfunctions, problems that have been
analysed at length in a number of detailed studies (Kamarck, 2016; National Commission
on Military, National, and Public Service, 2020; Schuck, 2014; Volcker et al., 2003). For
example, removal power has indeed been hobbled by layers of procedural protections for
public servants that have accumulated over the years, making it difficult to discipline
poorly-performing workers. Whatever the proper solution, it is not the wholesale destruc­
tion of the professional civil service in the manner envisioned by many conservatives
today. Schedule F will not solve the problem of political bias in the bureaucracy but will
exacerbate it, and will come at the expense of government competence and
effectiveness.
Currently, an election and change in administrations leads to the replacement of
between 3000–4000 senior officials throughout the Federal government. This is a far
higher number than in any other developed democracy, where political turnover leads to
a few dozen replacements at most. It is nonetheless normatively in line with democratic
theory. The backers of Schedule F envision increasing the number of political appointees
to tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. In their view, the will of elected political
principals is being stymied by the left-leaning bias of ordinary civil servants, and con­
servatives are compiling lists of politically sympathetic candidates to replace them.
This plan will run into several insuperable problems. Ordinary civil servants are today
not overtly selected on the basis of their political leanings but on supposedly objective
merit criteria. Any political bias exhibited by those selected reflects biases in the under­
lying populations: people wanting to be public school teachers or are qualified to be
10 EDITORIAL

university professors tend to lean left; those wanting to be policemen, firemen, or prison
guards tend to lean right. Finding enough people who meet political loyalty tests and
have appropriate skills will be hard and will severely compromise the quality of public
servants. Moreover, conservatives need to think ahead to what will happen if they lose
a subsequent election: their proteges will lose their jobs and be replaced not by neutral
non-partisan civil servants, but by liberal appointees meeting explicit liberal political tests.
This was the nature of American government under the 19th century patronage system
prior to passage of the Pendleton Act.
Distrust of government has existed for as long as governments have existed, and in
many cases was fully justified by government behaviour. But many contemporary popu­
lists have taken this critique to extreme lengths, attacking not just specific abuses of state
power, but the very idea of a government built around merit and expertise. They have
taken to heart Andrew Jackson’s view that “any ordinary American” could perform the
functions of government. This was scarcely true in the 1820s when the federal govern­
ment did little other than deliver the mail and operate customs houses. But most ordinary
Americans today are not capable of managing monetary aggregates, running large-scale
predictive weather models, controlling air traffic, teaching at state universities, under­
taking employment surveys, or supervising randomised trials for new pharmaceuticals.
Selection of bureaucrats on the basis of merit has been threatened not just from the
right, but from the left as well. There are progressive critiques of meritocracy that argue it
is a technique used by existing elites to preserve their power and influence; well-educated
parents get their children into the right schools and give them a leg up on entering the
world of power and influence (Sandel, 2020). Progressives have sought to introduce
diversity criteria into federal hiring practices to ensure representation of racial and ethnic
minorities, women, and other marginalised populations.
From either perspective, abandoning meritocratic hiring and promotion in the US
government will have huge consequences for government effectiveness. A recent cross-
national study by Perry et al. (2023) shows that there is a strong relationship between
meritocratic recruitment and promotion and government performance across a wide
variety of agencies and countries. The United States could decide to de-prioritise govern­
ment effectiveness in favour of greater political control, but it is not clear that this is an
outcome favoured by a majority of citizens who are already unhappy with the way the
government works.
If people with the requisite skills to run a modern government have political biases, the
solution is to mandate different policies, and correct specific instances of overreach rather
than demonising the idea of expertise in general. Populists today are simply not aware of
the mechanisms available to them to control the “deep state”. Their problem lies in the
fact that most of these mechanisms run through a Congress that they do not fully control.
As a result they will seek to use executive power to undermine the executive branch itself
through a mass purge of civil servants deemed not to be sufficiently loyal to their agenda.
The United States is today engaged in a long-term competition with China. The
latter constitutes a civilisation unto itself that for many centuries has been built
around high-quality bureaucracy and respect for expertise. What it lacks are institu­
tions that can check its powerful state, like a rule of law and democratic account­
ability. The United States sits at the other end of the spectrum, with powerful check-
and-balance institutions, an expansive but often ineffective state, and a political
 ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 11

culture that is very distrustful of state authority. The developed democracies of

Europe and East Asia occupy a position somewhere in between, closer to the
American than to the Chinese side, but still building on long traditions of state
authority. It is hard to see the United States prevailing in this global competition if it
prioritises the dismantling of its existing bureaucracy and the replacement of experts
by political loyalists. What it needs to strive for in the end is balance, a balance
between bureaucratic autonomy and political control, and between procedural
compliance and effective outcomes.

Notes on contributor
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy,
Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford’s Masters in
International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science. This article is
based on the annual Donald Stone lecture given to the American Society for Public
Administration on March 21, 2023. He can be reached at f.fukuyama@stanford.edu; Twitter
@FukuyamaFrancis; website www.francisfukuyama.com.

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Francis Fukuyama
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, USA
f.fukuyama@stanford.edu