BBC's famous "Yes Minister" comedy assumed that the existing bureaucracy defines most of policy (and tries to perpetuate and enlarge itself). I haven't seen much evidence that this is wrong.
There's no way any human being can know all the people in a single government agency, much less the whole government. To pick people to direct an agency you have to trust someone else's vetting of them – and trust the standards by which they were measured. The reports that cross your desk are distillations of distillations: how do you know if there was a pattern to what was omitted?
We hope that the president we vote for will pick a trustworthy team to farm out the other personnel selections to and give them the general policy directions for their various underlings to implement, and then listen to what we hope is their good advice. We hope we can trust the policy statements and party brand. We hope we're not buying a pig in a poke. That's a lot of hope.
Trump seemed to have some sensible advisors, but so many of his team rotated in and out that I figure continuity had to have suffered – and then bureaucratic momentum wins. "Personnel is policy:" and the bureaucracy has most of the personnel already – and offers a pool from which one may select directors.
Perhaps instead we vote for Incitatus, with religious faith in the party brand and trusting that the team that selected Incitatus is benign. That team, invisible to any ballot, will pick the cabinet, set the policies, and try to decide on the proper reactions to the crises that will arise. The president will sign bills like a living autopen, read from teleprompters, and smile or glower on cue.
It might seem as though either way the bureaucracy dominates, but it isn't entirely just a difference in degree. In the case of a compos mentis president, decisions in the various crises would be made by the same person; there's no guarantee that the same person each time would give Incitatus the lines to say. And a forceful president might have some impact in despite of the bureaucracy.
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We had a retired P.P.S. as a houseguest when the July 4 UK election happened, and over the next several days she was glued to the news about which MP's were given charge of which ministries and departments, and commenting on whether they were "good to work with" from her previous experiences.
I came away thinking that her view is clearly represented in the statements "the civil service should define most of policy" and "a minister who disagrees with their civil service advisors about a policy is a bad minister".
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