The Crusade Against Expertise Part I
Battles for political responsiveness and proceduralism have undermined government’s ability to get things done.
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For nearly 150 years, the federal government has relied on experts to make government work. Trust in those experts has evaporated. As Tom Nichols notes in The Death of Expertise, “Many of the world’s most advanced democracies now have movements whose voters seem to have no fundamental principle other than a kind of generalized defiance toward established knowledge.” We’ve replaced that with a crusade against expertise, where pursuing personal values trumps building the capacity to get things done.
Demands on government are growing and we need experts to steer the government’s response. I used to fly into Chicago on United Airlines and listen into the air traffic control frequency on Channel 9. When the pilot was finding the way through crowded skies in snow that obliterated vision, I never heard any passenger stand up and demand a smaller government.
But rising distrust in experts is driving an even deeper wedge in the nation’s political polarization. For example, Democrats’ trust in scientists is low enough, with net trust dropping from 91 to 86 percent from 2019 to 2023. Among Republicans, however, it tumbled from 82 to 61 percent. It’s pretty hard to deal with big, inescapable problems without experts to help decision-makers puzzle their way through. It’s worse when we don’t trust what they say. And it’s impossible to build consensus for solutions if polarization gets in the way.
The attack from the right wing on experts flows from a deeply held belief that government’s experts lean left, try to quash ideas from the right, and kneecap conservative policies. If experts aren’t accountable, how can we rely on them? And why shouldn’t we launch a crusade to wring them out of key government positions?
The left has also contributed to the crusade. Growing political pressures have wrapped the process for getting and managing experts in a procedural web that makes it far harder to hire and lead them—and to remove experts if their performance falls short.
So from the right we have complaints about accountability. From the left we have proceduralism that hinders the ability of experts to get the people’s work done. This crusade is pushing the government away from expertise, which will only further erode the trust of people in government and make it impossible to get government’s work done.
It wasn’t always like this. Our story begins in Part I by looking at growing complaints about accountability on the right and the emergence of the campaign to slash the power of what it calls the “deep state.” Then, in Part II, I’ll closely examine the rise of proceduralism from the left.
The road to this crusade begins in the late 19th century, with the Gilded Age government beset by challenges on all sides. Monopolists kept competitors out and prices high. People were getting sick from contaminants in the food chain. The Gilded Age wasn’t gilded for factory workers, paid so poorly that they piled up in tenements. One part of New York City, in fact, had 330,000 people crowded into one square mile. Farmers were convinced that big bankers were choking off the ability to borrow money to finance their crops. People wanted the government to solve these problems. The government had neither the power nor expertise to do so.
Government agencies were hamstrung by the constant turnover of amateurs who flooded into important posts with every presidential transition. Grover Cleveland’s Interior Secretary, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (who possessed what might be the single most fascinating name of any cabinet secretary) complained about the miseries of his job. “I eat my breakfast and dinner and supper always in the company of some two or three eager and hungry applicants for office; go to bed with their importunities in my ears,” he said. Abraham Lincoln dealt with long lines of office seekers streaming down the White House stairs. Things got so hectic that he insisted on a secret door from his office so he could escape when necessary.
Americans were pathologically allergic to expanding government’s size but had come to expect more help with the problems they faced. Policy analysts at the time knew the government needed more experts and that the experts needed discretion if they were to be effective. History also taught that experts tended to create their own independent fortresses of power.
So they faced a tough choice: weaken the government’s expertise, which would diminish its ability to deal with the cutting-edge problems the country faced—or build that capacity, knowing that it risked increasing the ranks of unaccountable experts.
The Progressive movement of the late 19th century believed they could bridge this dilemma by creating a civil service, with experts chosen by merit and held accountable through the organization’s chain of command. Top officials would define the policy goals; the experts down the pyramid would figure out how best to implement the policy; and the experts would produce what the people wanted: better government without risking the tyranny of experts. The assassination of President James Garfield by a political office-seeker galvanized the creation of the civil service system through a remarkably bipartisan consensus that endured for more than the next century.
The labels here are fascinating. Many of these “Progressives” were Republicans, while many Democrats fought their plans because they didn’t want to expand government or surrender control. Over time, these Republicans faded from the scene and Democrats embraced the Progressives’ goals of a more muscular government. They became liberals, only to have Republicans attack them as proponents of “big government.” The party that helped nurture the original Progressive movement fell out of love with it; the party that opposed it embraced it tightly as the years went on.
The (original) Progressives believed they could create expertise without creating a threat to democracy. One of the movement’s early stars, a promising professor of political economy, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson, loved a simple metaphor about the connection between developing expertise and ensuring accountability. In 1887 he wrote,
If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots.
Expertise, he believed, was politically neutral. How experts used it defined its political value, and as long as experts worked within the chain of command to top policymakers, their expertise would pose no threat to accountability. Frank Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association, believed that government required “any practicable means at hand” to get the job done, as he wrote in his 1900 book, Politics and Administration. Those means were separate from the ends. Policymakers could focus on the ends to hold accountable the experts’ use of the means.
The merit system the Progressives helped craft even provided a way to create “independent” regulatory agencies which were also politically accountable. They set sail in new organizations like the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887), the Food and Drug Administration (1906), and the Federal Trade Commission (1914). Congress even created the Federal Reserve (1913) and gave it independent authority to manage the money supply, just 17 years after William Jennings Bryan made the cost of credit the centerpiece of his “cross of gold” speech in 1896.
This was the core of the modern role of experts in government: building expertise within federal agencies; giving them discretion to exercise that expertise; creating the expectation that they’d do so within the policy guidance that elected officials gave them; and defining accountability on the balance between these three points. The balance, of course, was always difficult and uneasy, but it provided the strategy for equipping government with the capacity to deal with society’s emerging problems. It also set the stage for the right’s campaign against the “deep state” that followed a century later.
The Great Depression generated a vast range of new problems that stretched far ahead of government’s capacity to solve them. The Federal Reserve was clumsy in dealing with the financial collapse. State and local governments—and even more particularly, local nonprofit organizations—had always been on the front lines of problems like hunger and housing, but they had neither the money nor the administrative experience to get people off the streets and back to work. Herbert Hoover and his administration certainly weren’t heartless, but their existing playbook simply didn’t provide them with a guide for what to do.
Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office promising hope—and tossed that playbook aside. He wanted to spend a lot of money in a very big hurry, but he had to figure out how to get it into the hands of those suffering in their communities. FDR created big new federal programs through a veritable alphabet soup of agencies committed to everything from conservation to employment. He also embraced a strategy based more on pragmatism than principle.
His counterattack on the Depression began by expanding federal grants. From 1930 to 1940, the number of federal grant programs to state and local governments doubled. Spending through these grants grew more than 8 times, from $100 million in 1930 to $872 million in 1940. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration paid for the construction of 70 percent of the country’s new schools; 65 percent of new civic buildings, like courthouses and city halls, as well as sewage-disposal facilities; and subways, roads, and bridges across the country. PWA grants paid for the Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and LaGuardia Airport in New York; the original Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco; power plants and dams; and the 113 miles of highway connecting Miami to Key West.
Since the Northwest Ordinance of 1785, which provided land grants to the states to support local schools, grants had been in the federal arsenal. During the New Deal, however, grants grew enormously in importance because they got a lot of money out the door quickly and the feds could rely on state and local governments to do the administrative work. No one—New Dealers trying to run the programs, state and local government officials eager for money they couldn’t raise on their own, and millions of Americans suffering mightily in the Depression—wanted to say anything but “yes.”
The feds also relied on contracts with private companies to pump money out. Since the country’s very beginning, the feds relied on contracts for goods and services, especially for the military and for public works. George Washington, for example, favored chairs and tents purchased from a famous Philadelphia upholsterer for his headquarters during the Revolutionary War. During the Civil War, contractors supplied gunpowder, uniforms, and shoes. During the post-Civil War cavalry campaigns, two Connecticut companies (Colt and Winchester) supplied the “guns that won the West.”
The expansion of contracts during the New Deal, however, was truly epic. To improve the water supply and generate electricity, for example, the federal government decided to build a huge new dam across the Colorado River, a project that became known as the Hoover Dam. The project was larger than what the federal government or any single company could handle on its own, so the PWA signed a contract with a consortium of six private companies. It was a huge success, delivered early and on budget, “the first man-made structure to exceed the masonry mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza,” as the federal government still proudly proclaims. Over the course of the dam’s construction, the consortium provided jobs for 21,000 workers. Over the decades since, it’s powered untold numbers of homes and businesses and sustained jobs throughout the American West.
Hidden behind the headlines, however, was the profound challenge these projects posed for accountability. The Progressives (those Progressives) had a clear understanding about experts, discretion, and accountability. The grants and contracts in the New Deal were very different. For the Progressives, accountability came down the hierarchical chain of command from decisionmakers to program implementers. For the grant and loan programs, that was impossible since, by definition, grantees and contractors were outside the hierarchy. The Progressives had an explicit strategy for accountability. That was not a central problem for the New Dealers; getting the money out was. The New Dealers, therefore, faced the challenge of reinventing accountability.
Conservatives believed that was impossible because FDR had stretched the federal government’s power into unrecognizable contortions. They filed a series of suits in the federal courts and won most of them in the first years, notably with the 1935 decision in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. U.S., which dealt with regulations managing the sale of chickens. In the National Industrial Recovery Act, Congress permitted the federal government to regulate industries by allowing business groups to set their own codes of conduct. That, the Court led by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes concluded, was “without precedent,” especially because Congress did not prescribe what the standards should be. Congress had delegated away decisions that properly ought to rest with lawmakers, the Court ruled. The Tenth Amendment long ago held that “powers not given to the federal government are reserved for the states or the people,” and FDR’s political opponents used it to challenge his efforts. In U.S. v Butler (1936), the Supreme Court agreed, holding that agricultural policy was an area reserved for the states, thus ruling the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional.
The Court’s holding—that Congress had delegated too much power and that as a result the executive exercised too much discretion—was a theme to which the justices returned repeatedly, to the point that New Dealers began to despair that the right in general and the Court in particular were intent on dismantling the New Deal. FDR tried to counter-attack by launching his court-packing plan, but it harmed him more than the Court and went down in failure.
Leading the battle against the New Deal was a coalition of anti-New-Deal justices nicknamed “The Four Horsemen.” They worked together, even to the point of riding to work together (but in a car, not on four steeds). In 1937, however, one of the Horsemen, Willis Van Devanter, retired. Another justice who sometimes voted with the Horsemen on New Deal cases, Owen J. Roberts, sided with the left-leaning justices on a minimum wage case. That removed the right’s obstruction to the New Deal and opened the door for a second phase of New Deal legislation. The switch might have removed Roosevelt’s political problems, but it did not resolve the administrative questions about accountability in the expansion of these governmental tools.
How to restrain executive power? Fast forward to the 2020s, and the political right is advancing many of the same arguments. The bureaucracy has acquired vast new powers, especially as the tools developed during the New Deal expanded. Right-wing activists looking for constitutional and legal constraints on executive power often reach back to the 1930s. As Paul Verkuil, one of the nation’s best administrative law scholars, notes, “They long for a past that is passed.” A confluence of four threads has come together in the new right-wing strategy for redefining accountability.
The first thread was the Court’s 1984 decision limiting administrators’ discretion in interpreting the law. In Chevron v. NRDC, the Court made administrative expertise king. Laws were often vague and the technical issues were complex. In Chevron, the Court held that the courts needed to defer to a “reasonable interpretation” by administrators of what the law meant. But in the Loper Bright decision of June this year, the current Court overturned the Chevron precedent and held that government experts need to follow the law precisely as Congress wrote it. If there were ambiguities or uncertainties, Congress could clear them up by making the law clearer and the Courts could step in to clarify legal interpretations.
On its face, Loper Bright might seem reasonable. After all, Congress writes laws, and it’s the job of the executive branch to execute the laws as Congress writes them. In practice, however, laws typically have huge gaps that beg for interpretation. Congress cannot possibly anticipate and solve all problems in legislating because it just doesn’t have the same expertise as the executive branch agencies. Members of the House and Senate have a combined staff of about 13,000, and nearly half of them work in the members’ districts to deal with constituents. Of the ones working in Washington, there’s a growing army of media relations professionals. The relatively small number of congressional experts can’t possibly cover issues in the same detail as the 2.2 million experts across the executive branch who deal with the details every day.
Even if members of Congress actually could know enough details to write explicit guidance, they don’t have the incentives to do so. Congress is a world of compromise, and the more detailed a legislative draft, the more things there are for other members of Congress to object to. The need to build enough compromise to win votes and pass inevitably leads to fuzzy legislation. Members of Congress know that administrative experts can fill in the gaps, and the cannier members know that they can rely on back channels to nudge implementation by those experts to benefit their individual goals.
In Chevron, the Court ruled that administrative experts should be given deference if their interpretation was reasonable. In the 2024 Loper Bright decision, the Roberts Court concluded that “reasonable” wasn’t good enough. Agency experts had to stick strictly to what the law explicitly said. If there was ambiguity, it was up to Congress to fill in the gaps. If there was a difference in interpreting the law, the courts would decide the issue.
What the Court asked of Congress was something that Congress could not—and will not—do. Congress is neither technically savvy enough nor motivated enough to do what Loper Bright demands. Government’s experts have been hooked to a much tighter leash on which the right is only too happy to tug.
The second thread of right-wing strategy weakened the power of administrative adjudicators. During the 1930s, the Supreme Court ruled not only that administrators could decide the force of regulations but also impose penalties for violating them. In June’s Jarkesy decision, however, the Roberts Court went back to the early days of the New Deal to unwind that penalty-setting power. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated George Jarkesy for violation of securities standards and found him guilty. The SEC then set a penalty for the violation. In making its decision, the Roberts Court ruled that the SEC was attempting to operate like a court, acting both to judge the case and impose a penalty. That, the Court said, violated the Seventh Amendment guarantee of a trial-by-jury. Therefore, regulators could not adjudicate and set penalties.
This gravely weakens the enforcement power of federal regulators. It moves judging guilt and imposing penalties out of the agencies and into the courts. That, in turn, will increase the workload for regulators, who need to prepare courtroom litigation and the inevitable appeals to the courts’ decisions. It will add months or years to that process. It moves more decisions from the executive to the judicial branch, which further weakens the power of regulators.
The third thread aimed to make it easier for political officials to root out career administrators who disagreed with them—or who quietly worked behind the scenes to sabotage an administration’s decisions. Right-wing reformers were convinced that woke, left-leaning feds populated most of the bureaucracy, especially in agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Right Division of the Justice Department, and parts of the Department of Homeland Security. In “Tales from the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump,” James Sherk contended that “Most career federal employees honorably serve the American people, diligently following orders and implementing policies of elected officials,” but that a significant minority did not. Therefore, he said, “Congress should return to the original vision for the civil service and make all federal employees at-will.”
Now, the Founders in fact did not have an original vision about the experts who would work for the government. It’s not a question that they thought much about at all. They were preoccupied with balancing the competing centers of powers in the new country.
The Founders did indeed charge the president to “Take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” There was an early debate about the president’s power to remove top political appointees like ambassadors, but nothing was said about removing civil servants. In the “Decision of 1789,” James Madison made the point that the president had the power to remove the people he appointed, a position reinforced by the 1926 case Myers v. United States. However, on the broader debate about just how deeply this power goes—are all federal employees at-will, subject to the removal of the president?—the limits have neither been tested nor defined. Since its creation in 1883, the American civil service system has protected federal experts, especially against removal for reasons other than poor performance. Especially after a recent regulation adopted by the Biden administration, those protections apply to almost all federal employees.
Sherk and other conservatives disagree and, toward the end of the Trump administration, they created “Schedule F,” which allowed the president to sweep federal career civil servants in policy-making or policy-advising positions into a new federal schedule. In this Schedule F (which follows along in order after Schedules A through E), existing employees could be removed at will and new employees could be hired into these positions without being chosen based on merit. The Biden administration removed this schedule during its first days in office, but Project 2025 made the reinstatement of Schedule F one of its principal proposals for Trump’s second administration. Pro-Schedule F groups have made it clear that they intend to keep fighting the campaign until they win. They are committed to removing federal administrators who, they believe, frustrate the politics of conservative presidents.
The fourth thread invokes “originalism,” and involves a commitment to going back to a simpler separation-of-powers model. Conservatives view this as the most important thread because it is perceived as a way to unwind programs that, over the last century, have expanded the size and role of government. If a literal reading of the Constitution does not provide a straightforward interpretation, they reason, then the guiding principle ought to be the meaning of the Constitution when it was adopted.
There are, of course, big problems with that approach. The Founders were, if nothing else, consummate politicians. They faced the challenge of creating a government that brought unity without shredding the new country with the many tensions between the nation’s many different factions. Madison, after all, warned about the “mischiefs of faction” in Federalist 10. But as a result, the Founders wove ambiguity through all the founding documents. The doctrine of separation of powers in the Constitution is nothing if not a monument to the power of ambiguous statements about political power. Their need for political compromise produced fuzzy language that helped them negotiate the challenges of ratifying the document, but which often left an unclear guide for our present.
The Founders, moreover, could never have imagined a world of lightning-fast communications that break down boundaries everywhere. They certainly never foresaw the huge sweep of the country’s size, the many problems the people ask the government to take on, and America’s premier place in the world—although most of them would have savored the expansion of what they so painfully built.
The underlying ambiguity of the founding documents makes it possible to take a wide range of positions, left and right, and to find reinforcement in the work of one, several, or many founders. That makes it harder to deal with the basic question of experts in government—how much discretion they ought to have, how much power they ought to wield, how large a role the government ought to have in our lives. This is the most intriguing and most fundamental constitutional struggle about governance for our time.
But it would be a huge mistake to imagine that the Founders drew a blueprint to answer these questions for us. They created very broad guardrails, not a narrow road to follow.
Over the last 140 years, the United States has moved from bipartisan consensus about the role of experts in government towards deep division, with the left embracing an expansive view of government and its experts and the right aggressively pursuing an effort to shrink both that role and the power of experts. The country has also moved from a model of accountability based on authority through hierarchy to conservatives pressing for a new model based on control by the president and reinforced by an understanding—a strong position but certainly not one universally shared—that accountability ought to be based on a reading (but only one reading) of the principles the Founders advanced.
So the crusade to undermine the federal government’s expertise has a powerful but partisan base, driven by crusaders on the right. But the erosion of expertise doesn’t come just from the right. From the left came a government increasingly mired in proceduralism. I’ll examine that movement in Part II.
Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is the author, with William D. Eggers, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.
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Interesting and erudite. You avoid examining motives for the conservative Republican reaction (perhaps you will cover this in a latter essay?). In my view, it arises in part from a somewhat justified view that "experts," especially in the US civil service, often have a partisan agenda that distorts their expert judgement.