Unleash the Sheep State
Civil service reform should empower the flock, not just cull the herd.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it.
To receive future installments into your inbox—plus more great pieces by American Purpose and Francis Fukuyama’s blog—simply click on “Email preferences” below and make sure you toggle on the buttons for “American Purpose” and “Frankly Fukuyama.”
The Sheep State is a little-known corner of the federal bureaucracy that has heretofore managed to avoid the shears of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE as they rampage through the “Deep State” (formerly known as the federal civil service).
Yet the Sheep State is a good illustration of what Musk and Trump get right, and what they get very wrong, about civil service reform. For the Sheep State, like the rest of the Deep State, the problem is not that the flock has grown too large, or that it consists only of partisan Democrats; it is that it is hemmed in by regulations and laws that allow interest groups to meddle via the courts. If President Trump truly wants to improve the civil service, he should work with Congress to deregulate the federal flock, not just cull the herd.
It is no surprise that the Sheep State has avoided the ire of DOGE so far. It is so deep and woolen that very few Americans are even aware of it, despite being more than a century old. Its official title is the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station (USSES) near Yellowstone National Park. Its federal workforce consists of a flock of approximately 3,000 along with their human minders at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The research station collaborates with a number of universities to conduct research on improving American agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Like most members of the civil service, the sheep at USSES are apolitical, underpaid, and technical experts at what they do. They are also hemmed in (both literally and figuratively in this case) by mountains of red tape, lawsuits, and court orders blocking much of their operations.
That would make an excellent target for civil service reform, but it isn’t what Musk is working on at DOGE. In a recent interview alongside President Trump, Musk framed DOGE’s work as an ideological purge: “I think what we’re seeing here is the … thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.” To be sure, both Trump and Musk believe that the first Trump administration was thwarted at every turn by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats within federal agencies. They are taking a slash-and-burn approach this time around.
Yet President Trump also justified the cuts on other, less partisan grounds. “We don’t build the way we used to build,” he said. “The regulators go in and they make it impossible to build. They make it very difficult to build anything, whether it’s a ship, a plane, or a building or anything … They use the environment to stop progress and to stop things. It’s always the environment. ‘It’s an environmental problem.’ It’s not an environmental problem at all.”
It is, in fact, often an environmental problem, or at least an environmental policy problem. Trump is mostly correct in diagnosing the big problem here—America has a lot of trouble building—but he is mostly incorrect about its cause. Most of the time, the problem is not that the civil service is intervening to make it harder to build something. In fact, most of the time it is the civil service that is trying to build the thing being stopped. Much of the civil service are engineers, scientists, researchers and contracting officers working to build infrastructure projects or ships or planes, or to keep air travel safe, or even, in the case of the Sheep State, to do agricultural research. The vast, vast majority of the civil service are simply trying to get things done—nonpartisan things. The problem with the civil service, as President Trump noted, is that they often can’t.
The cause of that problem is not a bureaucracy of busybody environmentalists. It is a network of laws that have opened up the actions of the civil service to intervention by anyone motivated to stop them. These laws and policies include the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The Sheep State knows the latter all too well. NEPA seems like a common-sense environmental law requiring agencies to study actions before they take them. For USSES, however, it has turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The federal flock has been largely unable to graze or conduct its research for more than a decade. The saga began when the ARS was sued by environmental groups in 2007, claiming that the sheep station was violating NEPA by not completing an environmental study. That is probably because the sheep station was founded more than 50 years before NEPA became law. The ARS settled the lawsuit in 2008, and agreed to complete an environmental study under NEPA to permit its ongoing operations. The ARS also agreed to pay the legal fees of the environmental groups that sued them.
After some initial study, the ARS started an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) under NEPA in early 2011, but didn’t complete that study until late 2018. That is nearly seven and a half years of environmental study for a large flock of sheep. And this was not a new flock, but merely an update to the operations of the same flock of sheep that was already grazing at USSES long before the environmental lawsuit.
That much paperwork seems like an out-of-control bureaucracy (the ARS humans, not the sheep) but that was not the case. Ridiculously long environmental studies are a telltale sign of conflict, not overzealous administration. The sheep at USSES have been the subject of a truly incredible amount of environmental study and litigation over the last fifteen years, along with several injunctions from federal courts.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested permanently closing USSES to Congress, simply because all of the litigation prevented the sheep station from functioning. The report is frank: “Since 2007, various environmental groups sued ARS three times over grazing activities … These legal actions introduce further uncertainty in the availability of grazing lands for research, and the agency’s ability to allocate resources and implement approved project plans are seriously hindered.”
Congress still kept funding USSES, and grazing briefly resumed in 2017 following the completion of a Final EIS for the flock’s grazing activities. Later that year, in a completely separate environmental lawsuit, a federal court ordered a temporary injunction on the grazing planned on some Forest Service land that was part of USSES’s planned activities. Then in 2019, another lawsuit from environmental groups was filed to challenge the 7.5-year ARS environmental study. In 2021, a federal court ruled in favor of environmental groups in that lawsuit, and enjoined the sheep from grazing anywhere outside of the station’s headquarters and a few other properties until the ARS completes another environmental study. That study is still not complete today.
There are several issues at the center of the fight between ARS and the environmental groups suing the Sheep State. One of them is a concern from the environmentalists that the grazing areas would cross some grizzly bear habitats in the region (yes, that seems like a problem for the sheep rather than the bears, but in this case there is a concern that grizzly bears could be harmed by the overlap). There is also a concern that bighorn sheep in the region would be at increased risk of catching pneumonia from the USSES flock.
I have no intention of making a value judgement regarding the merits of these environmental issues, but they raise a few points very relevant to my argument.
First, the way that NEPA litigation works is that the courts aren’t making value judgements either. Unlike the president or Congress, the courts can’t close USSES and fire the flock. Presumably the environmental groups suing ARS over the last 17 years would like to do just that, but they can’t. All they can do is delay or require more environmental study. The question before the courts is never substantive, it is always procedural: did they study enough? For the Sheep State, the answer has consistently been “no” despite more than a decade of study across multiple federal agencies.
Second, this is obviously an extremely inefficient way to run a sheep research center, or any other government initiative with environmental tradeoffs for that matter. Shouldn’t the actual civil service be empowered to make decisions or take actions such as herding sheep? Or to protect grizzly bears? Or further any other public or environmental goal? The present arrangement is an unbelievably inefficient way to navigate the many tradeoffs of modern governance. My own brief summary of the travails of the Sheep State really does not do it justice.
America’s civil service has become so ineffective because it has been undermined by both political parties, in very different ways. Republicans are broadly opposed to the expansion of open-ended procedural regulations like NEPA, but also take a slash-and-burn approach to the federal bureaucracy, as evidenced by DOGE in recent weeks. Democrats, on the other hand, have undermined the civil service by enacting and supporting procedural laws that allow interested parties to intervene via the courts.
A burgeoning pro-growth wing of the Democratic party has shown more interest in reforming the laws and regulations that open infrastructure projects and other public initiatives (like sheep research) to intervention by interest groups through the courts. Their case for reform was bolstered by the challenges that the Biden administration faced in actually implementing its landmark infrastructure and industrial policy legislation in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
There is an obvious middle path to bipartisan reform that is truly impactful here, but it would require temperance (I know) on the part of the Trump administration. The American people want a civil service that actually works, not haphazard cuts. That will require old-school political compromise and negotiation in Congress. A few tech-smart zealots at DOGE will never be able to deliver it.
This would also be a tough tradeoff for Democrats to accept while a Republican sits in the Oval Office. However, it would be precisely the kind of long-term bipartisan compromise that parties are open to after a big election loss. It would require a politically savvy shepherd in the White House to negotiate such a compromise. It may be wishful thinking to imagine that President Trump could fill that role. Nevertheless, he should.
For now, the federal flock at USSES is largely hemmed in; unable to conduct the research that has helped the American agricultural industry for more than a century. Whether you consider the Sheep State a valuable public good, or an outdated relic to be culled, or an environmental hazard, one thing is certainly true: the present state of affairs is no way to run a civil service. Real civil service reform would empower the federal flock.
Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He leads the center’s Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
 | A guest post by
|