The administrative state is starting to panic. Its bureaucrats thrive on remaining in the shadows, but in the last year, they’ve had a massive spotlight shown on them. Several presidential candidates have pledged to dismantle the deep state, and the conservative movement’s Project 2025 — a plan to gut the bureaucracy by making it easier to fire federal employees — could make their dreams a reality.

Consider the alarm bell recently sounded by one of the administrative state’s top bosses, National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon. In an opinion piece published by the Hill, Reardon warned that “the greatest challenge facing the federal workforce” is “the accelerating conspiracy to dismantle the merit-based civil service.”

Reardon is referring to the 2 million federal employees who are protected from being fired. Far from being merit-based, this workforce contains the worst of both worlds: a small left-wing expert class at the top (the deep state) and masses of unproductive, nonessential, unionized employees beneath them (what might be called the DMV state, after those who staff state motor-vehicle offices).

Reardon wants us to think this system is as American as apple pie. Referring to the Pendleton Act of 1883, he lauds our “140-year-old legal tradition of staffing federal agencies with nonpartisan career professionals.” What he doesn’t mention is that under the original act, just 10% of the bureaucracy was given civil service protections. Today, of the 2 million full-time federal employees, all but 4,000 enjoy some form of civil service protection. That means 99.8% of federal employees cannot be fired by their boss, the commander in chief.

To dispel the notion that this sprawling bureaucracy is a problem, Reardon defends them by making contradictory arguments: First, he insists that claims of bureaucrats thwarting the will of the president are unfounded. Second, he maintains that unelected bureaucrats are a necessary check on presidential power.

Reardon is attempting to have it both ways.

To prove that bureaucrat insubordination isn’t an issue, Reardon cites the 4,000 political appointments the president makes as providing “ample levers with which to implement [the president’s] agenda.” This is right, in theory. Under the law, the presidential appointees at the top are supposed to control the levers while the civil servants act as neutral cogs in the machinery. However, in practice, an expert class of bureaucrats at the top control the true levers of power while the president’s men have been relegated to a ceremonial role.

There are about 50,000 of these elite career bureaucrats who perform the function of political appointees while retaining their civil service protections. The ever-expanding web of rules and regulations that govern federal agencies has become so complicated that, in many cases, only these experts know how to navigate it. Because the president’s political appointees have to rely on them to get anything done, they are able to hide the ball, misrepresent the facts, and slow-walk the president’s policies until they die a bureaucratic death.

To even have a chance at successfully managing this system, the president needs an army of extremely knowledgeable, iron-willed, and highly competent political appointees. Which brings us to the next problem: The Senate won’t let the president have them. Republican-controlled Senates going back to the Reagan era have consistently refused to confirm anyone who actually intends to take an agency in a different direction.

In order to keep the deep state happy, our lawmakers have determined to confirm only people who “get the joke” that political appointees are supposed to play a ceremonial role. Former President Donald Trump, for example, had to threaten to adjourn Congress to get the Senate to confirm Michael Pack as the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and all because Pack wanted to reform one of the most corrupt, spy-infested agencies in our government.

But even if a president managed to get the right appointees in place, fire the left-wing expert class, and make the DMV state workers productive, in several agencies, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would be all for nothing.

That’s because there is no way to make agencies such as HUD work for conservative causes. Reardon is actually right when he says our proposals are “contradictory to the very mission of the agencies.” The mission of the welfare state agencies is inconsistent with conservative values. They were designed by liberals for liberal policy goals. There is no reform short of elimination.

Perhaps Reardon anticipated that no one would buy his notion of a politically neutral deep state because, in the same breath that he asserts “allegations of widespread, coordinated insubordination by career civil servants are unfounded and absurd,” he also argues that civil servant insubordination is the only thing preventing us from descending into dictatorship. Referring to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Reardon says, “I’m no historian, but the debate over whether the U.S. would have an executive with unchecked power was settled nearly 250 years ago."

If he were a historian, he’d know that the founders chose Congress and the Supreme Court as the check on executive power, not the president’s staff. In fact, they expressly decided against having any check on the president's power within the executive by rejecting proposals for an executive branch council.

Deep state defenders such as Reardon want to make us think we’re un-American for aiming to end this fourth branch of government. But the truth is that it’s not radical to want to cut nonessential bureaucracy, nor is it radical to restore the president’s control over the executive branch and eliminate agencies that have brought us closer to a dystopian socialism.

Democracy is in danger, as Reardon claims, but not from right-wing authoritarians. If the policies stay the same no matter who you elect, that’s when democracy is dead.

James Bacon is a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project. He served as White House director of operations for presidential personnel, 2020-21.