Every 4 years there is a new administration in the White House. How can meaningful progress be made with such frequent changes in staff? Same goes for state level administration.
In: Economics
They have a civil service who are the ones who actually do the jobs and have plans in place as to what to do with a new administration, in America in particular it doesn’t always go smoothly since sometimes the person appointed is incompetent.
The big answer to this is that the people who actually do the work of implementing the policy decisions **aren’t** changing. On top of that, it is generally very hard to simply erase everything your predecessor started. If a particular motion is voted into law by the senate, then even if the next session the senate changes, they would still need to pass another vote reverting that law, which takes time.
I’ll try to frame this as neutrally as possible while still giving you a relevant example: let’s imagine that during his tenure Trump had gotten the appropriate legislation passed to start building the border wall with mexico in a big way. That would be hundreds or thousands of jobs for people doing the construction, surveying, logistics, and millions or billions of dollars in supplies and equipment, etc etc. Now, Biden is elected, and he doesn’t like the wall. Well, he has a lot of other things on his plate too, and the border wall might be pretty far down the list of things to address. The laws and funding bills passed to start the project don’t just evaporate once a new president is elected. So, cancelling the project entirely would probably be pretty close to impossible (at least on a short time frame), the closest that the new administration would be likely to get would be to drastically cut the funding, slowing things down. But, that means that when the person in charge changes again, the system is probably still in place, and the new president can allocate more funding towards the project once again.
For better or worse, lots of things in a democratic government move **very slowly**, which can be a disadvantage at times, but also means that the whims of a handful of people are less likely to be able to influence things one way or the other. It often takes a lot of pushing to get the ball rolling, but by that same token it takes a lot of pushing to *stop* the ball rolling as well.
A lot, perhaps even the majority, of the staff *doesnt* change when a new Administration takes over.
Most of the Civil Service is pretty apolitical 99.999% of the time
Bureaucrats run the nation. They always have and always will. There will be a new head of the department installed with whatever focus they bring in, but it’s the unsung heroic bureaucrats that are the engine.
The Civil Service, for the most part, are just hired workers who handle the day-to-day running of the government. They cannot set policy -they are agents, not deciders- but they also aren’t subject to elections or appointment. And so even when elected officials change, these people just keep on doing their jobs.
These agencies also make plans and form teams to handle changes in government. There are things they can’t do for a few days, but they use these procedures to minimize the impact, and make sure that when the incoming officials are ready to take up their new duties, this goes smoothly.
This is the so-called “deep state”. Some radical movements nowadays have tried to attach conspiracy theories to the deep state, which is generally pretty absurd. What I’ve outlined here is what the deep atate actually is, what it does, and why it’s important. It keeps the lights on and the trains running even when leadership is changing. It works pretty well.
The whole idea is that people are supposed to generally agree if they want to make major changes (“progress”). If a given idea is actually supported, then both an outgoing President and an incoming President would be in favor of it.
Much of what governments do isn’t especially controversial.
When a new mayor is elected, there’s no question whether the firefighters should keep putting out fires, or the parks department should keep mowing the grass at the soccer field. The police are going to keep catching drunk drivers, the teachers are going to keep teaching kids to read, the health inspectors are going to keep checking that the restaurant kitchens aren’t overrun with cockroaches, and the street repair crews are going to keep fixing potholes.
Budget priorities may change, and specific policies may be controversial, but quite a lot of “government stuff” is … ordinary, mainstream, non-controversial.
In other words: Most of what government does is not stuff that a new elected official would want to change.
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Now, this *can* break down when extremists are elected. Extremist politicians interfere with the normal stuff that most everyone wants the government to be doing. Mr. Trump for instance interfered directly with something as apolitical as the National Hurricane Center’s forecasting, in the infamous [“Sharpiegate”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alabama_controversy) incident; and went on to try to pressure government weather forecasters to agree with false things he said about Hurricane Dorian.
This is really unusual and troublesome, and we shouldn’t vote for politicians who do things like that. If some (imaginary) politician intends to let murderers get away with murder, or to shut down the fire department, that’s a really clear sign that politician would be a bad choice.
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