For those of us who were awake to the reality of former President Joe Biden’s infirmities, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book Original Sin is more an affirmation than a revelation.
Efforts to cover up a president’s physical and mental decline have a long and ignominious tradition. Woodrow Wilson famously had a stroke and was largely incapacitated for his last year in office. The reality of Franklin Roosevelt’s health was kept secret during World War II, and there have long been questions about whether Ronald Reagan was afflicted by Alzheimer’s during his second term in office.
None of those instances, of course, come close to the scandal that was the Biden presidency, which was effectively run by a small cadre of aides and family members who operated behind the scenes while the world watched as the ostensible leader of the free world aged and declined in an undignified and humiliating fashion. Tapper and Thompson relate numerous tales of senior administration officials, including Cabinet secretaries, who were unable to have much access to the man who was supposed to be their boss, instead having to work through a network of go-betweens who would convey information to the inner circle.
In many ways, the most disturbing truth of the Biden administration is that the sprawling federal bureaucracy has become so vast and self-functioning that an incapacitated president hardly registered. The very agencies that are tasked with executing the executive power of the United States effectively run on autopilot, regardless of who the president is, or what agenda he chooses to pursue.
In this sense, Biden was the perfect president for the deep state. A nominal figurehead who exercised very little power, even as the government he was supposedly elected to run operated as normal, with little concern about who the president was or what he was doing, because there was little he could do, given that his operative hours were from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and were primarily occupied by awkward and canned appearances with world leaders, fundraisers, and meandering speeches.
The Biden administration had many, many, many faults. There is little question of that. It was effectively a four-year regency, given that its namesake was hardly capable of governing. But it also exposed the federal government for what it is: a vast, unaccountable bureaucracy that does not need a president or an executive to operate.
During the first Trump administration, the federal bureaucracy thwarted and stonewalled numerous efforts that the duly elected executive and his advisers sought to implement.
In a pair of reports for America First Policy Institute, James Sherk, who served on the Domestic Policy Council in Trump’s first term and has since returned to work in the president’s second term, detailed the extent to which federal employees obstructed, slow-walked or otherwise sabotaged lawful directives from the White House and Cabinet officials.
In one of many examples, Sherk wrote that “career attorneys at the Environmental Protection Agency did not inform political appointees about major cases the agency was involved in or the government’s positions in pending cases. To learn what the agency was doing, political appointees had to monitor public court filings.”
Other career staff in other agencies simply refused to work on cases with which they had ideological disagreements, while others submitted drafts for programs and regulations that were intentionally designed to fail legal muster, greatly expanding the amount of work that political appointees had to do.
But during the Biden administration, led by a president who was simply not capable of being an energetic executive, the federal bureaucracy operated as normal. It didn’t need extensive direction from the president because it already had an institutional agenda to implement that came from its own groupthink.
Effectively, the federal bureaucracy’s Biden-era autopilot was the other side of the coin of its excessive resistance to the first Trump administration. The Biden administration could simply sit back and watch the bureaucracy operate effectively as it implemented liberal policies that the administration had little objection to. And for the bureaucrats, there was no need to resist, no need to stonewall, and no need to impede the day-to-day operations of the duly elected government, because the man who was supposed to lead that elected government was incapable of doing so, and the small group of advisers who were really making decisions had no objections to their agenda anyways.
Shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, I argued that the president needed to lose in 2020 to have the know-how and the ability to execute on the agenda he is implementing in his second term. The silver lining of the four-year Biden interregnum was twofold: It exposed for the entire nation the radicalism that has infected the Democratic Party. But it also allowed the Trump team to see exactly how the bureaucracy functioned when a Democratic president was in office, and, in this case, a Democratic president who was largely incapable of actually leading the country.
Armed with the knowledge gleaned from an initial four-year term followed by a four-year exile, the Trump team has mobilized what is arguably the most aggressive agenda to reshape the government and the role of the U.S. in the world. From the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and elsewhere, the Trump administration, with its Department for Government Efficiency, has staged the largest and most comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy in the nation’s history.
As the Biden years showed, the federal government is largely unaccountable to who leads it, so much so that it ultimately did not matter that the president was incapacitated. Most federal bureaucrats go to work each day with little fear of ever losing their jobs. So when Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, was grilled by the Senate for his stated desire to traumatize the federal workforce, the operative agenda was to spook the bureaucracy into once again being responsive to the directives of the elected administration.
WHAT BIDEN DIDN’T KNOW, AND WHEN HE DIDN’T KNOW IT
Instead of marching to the beat of its own drum, the federal workforce is now facing the very real possibility that failure to advance the presidential administration’s agenda will result in job loss.
The Trump administration is still in the early stages of its effort to bring the sprawling and undemocratic federal bureaucracy to heel. And while the early signs are promising, undoing the damage of a four-year term in which the bureaucracy was left to its own devices will take some time. The deep state has lost its puppet president and is facing a reckoning it had worked diligently to avoid.
