The Loyalty Trap

"Throughout his campaign and presidency, Donald J. Trump railed against many of the core functions and attributes of the administrative state including regulatory power, expertise, and evidence-based analysis. He promised to "drain the swamp," and sought dramatic changes to policies concerning the environment, trade, foreign affairs, and criminal justice, and appointed several high-profile critics of federal agencies to head those very agencies. Media accounts of dramatic change in political leadership and resistance from within stand in contrast to received wisdom that the state apparatus is unwieldy and filled with non-partisan, technocratic career civil servants. With Trump now out of office and a return to a bureaucracy-as-usual Biden administration, what are we to make of the apparent conflict within the federal government during the Trump administration? Should it be understood as resistance or as something else? In The Stable State?, Jaime Kucinskas examines how career civil servants responded under the conditions of a budding autocracy during the Trump administration and its unprecedented efforts to dismantle the administrative state. She conducted 127 interviews with politically centrist and progressive mid-level managers and high-ranking career civil servants over three waves in 2017, 2018, and 2019-20-included 66 high-ranking career civil servants who worked across executive and contested independent agencies. She argues for a conceptual difference between "resistance" and "complicity" under repressive forms of political leadership and contends that we need to better understand the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in their immediate work environments, negotiating multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms, obligations, organizational cultures, and their own circumscribed efficacy. She concludes that despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration and powerful efforts to stifle dissent within their ranks, most career bureaucrats sought to comply with the directives of political leadership because their work is narrowly defined within the scope of their mandates. Resistance, she concludes, is possible but largely in forms that cohere with institutional and professional imperatives at the individual level. In the modes of organizational change made famous by Albert Hirschman, there is limited room for voice and exit becomes the most reasonable option over time"--