“Ungoverning” is a term invented by Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political scientists respectively at Dartmouth and Harvard, to describe the project of “deconstructing the administrative state [conducted] by a reactionary movement.” This would include elected Republican officials and Supreme Court justices, aimed at depriving government of the ability to govern. But the individual they hold most responsible for this is former and future president Donald Trump, who brought decades of preexisting “hostility toward government to a crescendo.”
This nefarious endeavor “joins other assaults on the essential securities of liberal democracy” such as “constitutionalism, rule of law, and democratic norms.” It is rooted in two intertwined “conflicts”: the substitution of Trump’s personal will as president for the operation of “an imagined conspiracy, the malignant ‘deep state,'” and “a reactionary counterculture” aimed at turning America into a “Christian,” “white nation … that subordinates women” while divorcing itself from “‘the new world order.'”
Among the elements of ungoverning the authors portray are “degrading existing state capacity by derailing, displacing, hijacking, and circumventing administrative departments and agencies,” as distinguished from “targeted reforms”; “wholesale attacks on administrative experience” and “expertise”; and assaults on “regular administrative procedure.” While the authors acknowledge that deregulation, like the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, is sometimes justified, they contrast it with the unsuccessful endeavor of Ronald Reagan’s appointee as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch, to cut the EPA’s budget and staffing across the board by 25 percent, and to promote “voluntary compliance” with agency dictates rather than direct enforcement.
Even more radically, Muir and Rosenblum cite Trump’s executive order “requiring that for every new federal regulation … two must be rescinded.” Finally, the authors distinguish ungoverning from “the normal politics of obstruction,” as when opponents of the Affordable Care Act tried to block it “without offering a substitute plan,” even threatening to “shut down the government” rather than negotiate. Muirhead and Rosenblum attribute the underlying “vulnerability” of America’s political system to ungoverning to the “illegibility” of the bureaucracy to most citizens, who perceive it as tyrannical rather than appreciate its benefits, thus making them open to “conspiracism,” or the charge that civil servants constitute a deep state whose agenda is contrary to the public good.
The authors pursue their critique of Trumpian ungoverning through a consistently one-sided analysis. For instance, relying on a single New York Times article from April 2020, they allege that even in the COVID emergency, the Republican goal of “incapacitating government prevailed”—disregarding the remarkably rapid success of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership established by the Trump administration that developed effective vaccines by the end of that year. They also scold Trump for “imped[ing] the Centers for Disease Control … from issuing its own public guidance” on how to minimize COVID transmission. This ignores infectious disease czar Anthony Fauci’s subsequent admission that his six-foot distancing rule was something he arbitrarily invented; Fauci’s dogged dismissal, backed by National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, of the evidence that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, not a “wet market”; and the costs (to the economy and especially to schoolchildren) of extended, bureaucratically devised lockdowns.
With apparent horror, the authors fault Trump for nominating an advocate of privatizing weather forecasting to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, not explaining why such a policy would necessarily be mistaken. And they denounce Trump’s removal of “the scientist responsible for the National Climate Assessment, in an overt attempt to thwart the outcome of the work that shapes regulations to limit global warming”—as if the president were not within his rights to do so, and as if the threat of global warming, and steps needed to address it, were purely technical issues, to be resolved by designated scientists freed from supervision by democratically elected officers who would take account of alternative views on this controverted topic. Worse, they call the Trump administration to account for “disabling” the National Security Council by naming a commission to challenge its director’s identification of climate change as a “security threat”—a clear case of bureaucratic overreach.
In a different policy area, Muirhead and Rosenblum blame Trump for supposedly hijacking the Justice Department and FBI to ensure their leaders’ personal loyalty to him, so as to block investigations of alleged Russian interference in his election—disregarding the fact that the “Steele dossier,” on which that allegation was based, proved to be a partisan document ordered by the Clinton campaign. Nor do they refute Trump’s claim that FBI surveillance of his campaign had been generated by Democratic partisans, fortifying the suspicion that the agency had indeed succumbed to improper influence by an anti-Republican (and anti-democratic) “deep state.” That claim should further be contextualized by considering the subsequent prosecutions of Trump by federal and state justice departments, clearly animated by political considerations, such as the frivolous conviction for overvaluing a property for which he sought a loan, a practice that harmed no one.
The authors also accuse Trump of substituting personal or familial rule for more “effective” reliance “on the agencies of the administrative state,” citing his delegating “Middle East foreign policy” to his son-in-law Jared Kushner—when it was Kushner, not hidebound or anti-Israeli State Department officials, who crafted the Abraham Accords between Israel and three formerly hostile Arab nations.
According to our authors, Trump’s MAGA policies originated in a “reactionary counterculture movement” formed by remnants of the anti-Obama Tea Party movement. Those movements are reactionary because they connect “the imagined goal of restoration with the social experience of grievance.” They embody a resentment of other people’s obtaining “recognition, benefits, and opportunities at their expense.”
Doubtless, in America’s history, black people and other ethnic minority groups, along with women, suffered unjustified denials in these regards, which merited correction. But it is hardly reactionary for Americans of all sorts to resent, and seek to overturn, such ostensibly progressive policies pursued by the Biden administration and its supporters as canceling college students’ loan balances (at the expense of others who never went to college or who paid off their loans), bestowing financial benefits on illegal immigrants, allowing violent criminals or professional shoplifters to go unpunished, mandating the promotion of transgenderism (including allowing self-identifying “females” to participate in women’s sports), or pressuring employers and colleges to favor applicants who belong to politically favored groups. On all these issues, the authors show themselves out of touch with, and even contemptuous of, a substantial portion of the American people, who indeed seek to restore a political system dedicated to the securing of all citizens’ equal rights and limited by the text of the Constitution. It is ludicrous to claim that most of Trump’s supporters are motivated by white or male supremacy or religious intolerance.
But the foregoing issues do raise the question of how far courts are obliged to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of their authorizing statutes, taking advantage of Congress’s post-New Deal habit of writing such laws in extremely broad terms, thereby weakening their administrators’ popular accountability (a habit decried 55 years ago by liberal political scientist Theodore Lowi in his classic The End of Liberalism).
In its 1984 ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court adopted the principle of “Chevron deference,” meaning that when a congressional statute is ambiguous, and an agency’s interpretation of it is “reasonable,” judges should defer to agency rulings. That doctrine became a key tool through which the Obama administration, as the authors recount, used the administrative state to achieve the president’s policy goals “in response to a Republican Congress bent on obstruction” (that is, a congressional majority didn’t agree with his policies). The Court then limited the practice through its decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Administration (2022), in which it limited Chevron deference by adopting the “major questions” doctrine, according to which Congress alone “can specify, by statute, the mechanisms of regulation, and on ‘major questions,’ broad delegations to authorize agency action should be treated with ‘skepticism.'”
The issue in West Virginia was telling. It concerned the claim by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a “pollutant”—something Congress certainly never had in mind when it enacted the agency’s enabling statute in 1972. In fact, to describe carbon dioxide, which human beings and other animals constantly emit, and on which all vegetation depends for its survival, as a pollutant is nonsensical. What the EPA was doing was using its mandate to promote clean air and water to enforce an entirely different policy, to which presidential and congressional liberals had been unable to secure popular consent: war against the internal combustion engine, oil and gas drilling and usage, cow flatulence, etc. Yet the authors treat the decision as entailing “nothing less” than eliminating “the state’s capacity to address critical needs as they develop.”
Throughout, the authors equate setting reasonable limits to the scope of the administrative state (when they agree with its expansion) with opposition to governing. This is disingenuous. While Alexander Hamilton described an “energetic” executive authority as constituting the very core of good government (Federalist 1 and 70), he nowhere stated that the more government expands, the more areas of our life it regulates, and the more authority that Congress and the president delegate to agency officials, the better governed we are.
In pursuit of his populist agenda, Trump and a number of his supporters and appointees have often resorted to embarrassing rhetorical exaggerations, which Muirhead and Rosenblum freely quote. Like Presidents Obama and Biden, and Kamala Harris, Trump has not infrequently displayed a lamentable disregard for the constitutional limits on his authority. (His endeavors to overturn the 2020 election result are inexcusable.) But in seeking to limit excessive regulation, counteract the tendency of contemporary bureaucrats to abuse their positions for partisan goals, and restore to government a deserved sense of legitimacy, the president-elect promises to renew Reagan’s legacy.
Notably, the authors misquote Reagan’s remark in his 1981 Inaugural Address that “government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem” by omitting its preface: “In this present crisis.” Reagan aimed to challenge the belief “that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.” Neither he nor Trump maintained that limited government, accountable to the people, such as the Founders intended, is equivalent to no government.
Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos
by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
Princeton University Press, 280 pp., $29.95
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus of political science at College of the Holy Cross.
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