23 Aug The Secret Service is Broken. But Why?
As you may have heard, the Secret Service finally got around to beginning the process of addressing the issues that precipitated the nearly successful assassination attempt on President Trump last month:
At least five members of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) have been placed on administrative leave following the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Fox News has confirmed.
One member of Trump’s personal protective team and four members of the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh Field Office, including the special agent in charge, have been sidelined nearly six weeks after the incident. The five are still employed but are teleworking and are no longer allowed in the field. They cannot do any investigative work.
At the very least, this entire episode – the assassination attempt, the missteps that preceded it, the missteps that followed it, the coverup that ensued, and now the official admission that “mistakes were made” – should put to rest forever the misimpression that Max Weber’s characterization of bureaucracy was accurate. He was wrong about one key characteristic of the ideal bureaucratic type, and the sooner we, as a society, recognize this, the sooner we can address the monumental effects of his inaccuracy.
The first thing we must acknowledge, as I noted in my American Greatness column last weekend, is that “bureaucracy” describes a means, not an end, meaning that it can be put to use in the pursuit of any ends its operators choose. Inevitably, those ends are the emotive values determined to be important by the regime: “the ends of government management become the purview of the manager/administrator who substitutes his or her personal preferences for genuine moral positions.”
The second thing we must acknowledge is that there is a distinction between “the regime” and “the current leaders.” Unfortunately, “the regime” is difficult to pin down. It is an amorphous, semi- permanent entity, a creature that encompasses the elected government but is bigger than just the government. Additionally, it includes the bureaucracy, the unofficial state media, the conglomeration of non-governmental organizations that support the state, the corporations with which the state colludes, and so on. It is “the deep state.” It is the Leviathan. It is impossible to define precisely yet immediately recognizable.
Weber insisted that the bureaucracy would be subservient to “current leaders” rather than be part of a broader anti-democratic entity that is answerable only to itself. Indeed, the most important component of Weber’s ideal type is that the bureaucracy is, ultimately, responsive to the demands of its political masters.
If the bureaucracy were responsive to its political masters alone, however, then the Secret Service would not have screwed up in Trump’s case. It would probably never screw up. The political leaders of our two dominant parties may be callous, out-of-touch, vain, reckless, and incompetent. And they may disagree with one another on every matter, if only for the sake of disagreeing with one another. They nevertheless share one common trait that should ensure the effectiveness of the Secret Service above and beyond all other government agencies: they are self-interested. That agency protects them, and therefore, it is in their self-interest that it be free from the value calculations and other trivialities that make contemporary bureaucracies ineffective and distract them from their function. But it’s not. It’s just as screwed up as every other agency. It’s just as inefficient and laden with immaterial value considerations as everything else in the administrative state. The political leaders’ self-interest doesn’t matter, in other words, and something else does.
That something else is, almost inarguably, the “values” of “the regime” – which are often the values of the bureaucrats themselves.
As I noted in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital – a book that is about much more than merely ESG – American bureaucracy’s break with Weber came in 1948 with the publication of Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State. Like Alasdair MacIntyre (the source for my American Greatness column), Waldo objected to the idea that administration could be applied in a “value-neutral” way. He believed that the entire administrative enterprise was an exercise in the application of values. Unlike MacIntyre, however, he saw this as a positive conclusion, an opportunity to be clear and open about the nature of administrative undertakings:
His contributions to the debate, however, were not interpreted as mere observations. They were, instead, taken as a license for administrators (and their educators) to become value advocates. In this sense, Waldo’s contributions constitute a watershed in administrative/bureaucratic practice in the United States, a rejection of pure positivism and a slide toward a more enduring antipositivism. In isolation, such a slide could be seen as a minor development, a mere concession to reality. But, of course, Waldo’s ideas were neither offered in isolation nor heeded in a vacuum. They took place against the backdrop of a cultural revolution of sorts, the “second stream” of American liberalism noted above and discussed below.
In 1968, Waldo hosted a very famous public administration conference that came to be known as “Minnowbrook” because it was held at the Minnowbrook Conference Center on the campus of Waldo’s then-new employer, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The conference was not only an enormous hit among educators, but it also took on legendary status among administrators—that is to say, public bureaucrats. In 2018, on the conference’s fiftieth anniversary, the Maxwell School remembered the man and his contributions, noting that “Waldo’s 1948 book challenged the idea that public administration is value-neutral, performed in a dispassionate, almost mechanical manner. He argued that public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change” [emphasis added]. George Frederickson, a public administration professor at the University of Kansas and the organizer of “Minnowbrook II” in 1988, told the Maxwell School magazine that Waldo’s contributions included “three lasting themes in PA: social equity; democratic administration; and proactive, advocating, non-neutral public administration.”
These, then, are the values of the regime: “social equity; democratic administration; and proactive, advocating, non-neutral public administration.” At times – now, for example – they reflect many of the values of the elected government as well. At other times – any time a Republican is in office, for instance – they openly and vehemently contradict the values of the elected government.
Most importantly, these values and their near-universal acceptance and practice explain why Weber was wrong, why the bureaucracy doesn’t work, and why the administrative state has become such a massively ineffective and inefficient disaster. They explain in large part why the Secret Service almost allowed Donald Trump to be murdered.
The suspension of five agents is undoubtedly a necessary step in the effort to address the Secret Service’s shortcomings last month. It’s only a very, very tiny baby step, however, and will almost certainly have no impact whatsoever on the overall operation of that agency or the federal bureaucracy more generally. For that to happen, the entire administrative state would have to be rethought and then rebuilt from the bottom up.
Don’t hold your breath.
