OPINION:
The first must-have volume for would-be political appointees hoping to restore America after the swearing-in of a Republican president in 2025 has just been published.
In “You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State” (Encounter, 2023), former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt describes the growth of the federal bureaucracy over more than two centuries, discusses the lessons he learned over a two-decade period in and around the Department of the Interior, and details what appointees must know to deliver the change promised the American people.
It is the perfect accompaniment to The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” which is described as “a comprehensive policy guide for the next conservative U.S. president,” released days ago. “Mandate” examines what to do; “You Report to Me,” after exposing the “failed administrative state” and how it got that way, explores how to do it.
Mr. Bernhardt has the bona fides to write authoritatively of a department, established in 1849, that manages 413 million acres, nearly a fifth of the country, with 70,000 employees and an annual budget exceeding $16 billion.
Born and raised on Colorado’s rural western slope, Mr. Bernhardt is the only person ever confirmed by the Senate as the department’s solicitor (top lawyer), deputy secretary and secretary. He served Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump; in fact, “you report to me” was Mr. Trump’s instruction to him. Strikingly, when Mr. Bernhardt called Mr. Trump as ordered, it was the president, not a senior staffer as under Mr. Bush, who returned his call.
“I speak for the mice,” one bureaucrat answered Mr. Bernhardt, who regularly engaged department employees at headquarters and in the field, when he asked what she did. The exchange illustrates Mr. Bernhardt’s greatest concern regarding civil service: “employees who advocate for their own pet cause rather than serving as neutral, technically competent administrators … faithfully executing the authority that Congress … granted to the secretary of the interior.”
Mr. Bernhardt doubts the bureaucrat read the law she was charged with implementing, but she alone is not blameworthy. Culpable too are “political leaders of both parties” for their “longstanding failure … to guide agency decision making in accordance with the law and to hold civil service members accountable for their job performance.”
Mr. Bernhardt, who entered the Interior building in 2001 with Secretary Gale Norton, another Coloradoan, documents a new, worrisome change in the civil service: its outright antipathy toward political appointees who join the department, as he did in January 2017.
Federal civil servants have always been predominantly left of center; in fact, recent studies show they are 2-to-1 Democrat to Republican; senior civil servants are 3 to 1. Nonetheless, they previously set aside their personal views to fulfill their responsibilities consistent with the vision of those America sent to Washington.
When Mr. Trump took office, however, many rebelled. For example, 400 career lawyers in one Justice Department division refused to prepare legal briefs to prevent biological males from competing against biological females in high school and college athletics, leaving those filings to 12 political appointees.
Although largely complimentary of the response of civil servants to his efforts and those of former Secretary Ryan Zinke to implement Mr. Trump’s policies, Mr. Bernhardt details instances when bureaucrats flouted orders. For example, Mr. Zinke directed the Bureau of Land Management to plan to move its headquarters to the West, home to 99% of the 245 million acres it manages and 97% of its employees.
Two years later, Mr. Bernhardt replaced Mr. Zinke and asked to see the plan. None had been prepared. The bureau’s senior civil servants, representing hundreds of years of employment with the agency, were stonewalling. Mr. Bernhardt accomplished the move, but two years later than if civil servants had followed orders. Such insubordination is not lost on the American people. A recent survey found 60% believe career federal employees have too much influence over policy.
Mr. Bernhardt explores recent rulings of the Supreme Court, including its landmark decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which “signals a potential for [the Court] returning power to the American people instead of a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.”
Congress too must do its job, Mr. Bernhardt urges, not just by reforming the civil service and the regulatory process, but also by delegating specific statutory authority, by holding political appointees accountable for agency decisions, and by evaluating whether the programs it created are achieving intended results.
“Driving Change as a Political Appointee,” Mr. Bernhardt’s concluding chapter, contains sage advice from his decades in and around the Interior Department for those who recognize both that “[t]he nation needs competent, experienced administrators to serve at both career and political levels of the federal executive branch” and that “the American people deserve a government that serves them better.”
It is required reading for any citizen who, despite “[t]oday’s rancorous political environment,” wishes to accept Mr. Bernhardt’s challenge to serve as he did. Although he sets out an informative road map for success, Mr. Bernhardt argues the true “blueprint for accountable government” is in the “Constitution’s separation of power and in the oath taken every career civil servant, every executive appointee, every member of Congress, and every federal judge.”
• William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.
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You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State
By David Bernhardt
274 pages, Encounter Books, May 9, 2023
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