Tuesday’s Strategic War Planning Open Commentary

Walker Percy is one of the more celebrated American novelists of the late 20th century.  One novel he wrote was titled Lancelot in which the protagonist is named Lamar A. Lancelot.  He is a convicted murderer of his wife and a summary of his fictional life is here.

The pseudonym adopted for the following two part essay is the same Lamar A. Lancelot.  He is a former high level and recognizable official in the Trump administration with many important things to say about how a future Trump administration might succeed or miserably fail.

This is no bulls**t important advice.

People can whine and bitch about useless congressmen and senators who have virtually no statutory or police powers and bitch about arrogant bureaucrats protected by ancient civil service laws and regulations, but there are only certain options a contrarian chief executive like Trump will have and he had better be aware of them.  The system has been modified and rigged against him and should he win again the lynching parties are going to be ready and waiting.

Irregular Order, Part I

What it will take to break the Deep State.

Happily, those preparing for the next America First administration understand how the lack of appropriate appointees weakened the Trump Administration. They are identifying and preparing a corps of “politicals” to drive implementation of the next America First president’s program. This effort is necessary and worthy of our support. However, we must recognize its limits.

and,

Quantity has a quality all its own. First, we face a profound problem of numbers. Even if the next America First administration finds high-quality politicals for all of the approximately 8,000 appointed positions that exist now, plus the approximately 50,000 identified in the “Schedule F” initiative, this relatively small cadre will oversee hundreds of thousands of career “feds” who can obstruct the president’s program, whether through active “Resistance” or simple foot-dragging. As we sawduring the Trump Administration, politicals cannot trust anything this bureaucratic host does—everything must be questioned, double-checked, and re-written. Sustaining this level of vigilance can wear down even the strongest among us.

a further part of the problem,

The part of the iceberg under the water. Even our analysis above does not fully convey the scope of the problem, because it does not consider the network of external ally and client entities with which the formal bureaucracy shares “governance” and through which it actually does much of what offends America First. This network includes state and local governments; “non-governmental” organizations, certain charities, and other “civil society” groups; labor unions, trade associations, and pressure groups; consultants, contractors, and other “implementing partners”; international and multilateral organizations; and academic institutions and think tanks.

and the first step of the solution,

Target the bureaucracy’s weakness. Happily, such approaches remain possible, if difficult to pursue, because the bureaucracy has a critical vulnerability: it has not yet discovered a generally-applicable way to fund itself and its clients without the intervention of Congress and the White House. The next America First administration must exploit this. Cutting off funding for whole offices, bureaus, programs, and activities would eliminate them at a stroke—sparing politicals from the procedural minutiae and litigation involved in firing individual feds or ending individual programs, while also starving the bureaucracy’s external clients.

The author not only provides solutions to the Deep State Leviathan, but he also explains all the naive assumptions about curing these problems and fighting the obstinate jackasses that have consumed and defeated Trump, past presidents and well-intentioned politicians.

Simply nominating great Cabinet members and other agency directors will not cut it.  The old adage about “Personnel is Policy” helps, but it is no longer the whole solution.

Irregular Order, Part II

In part I, we explored why America First cannot put its hopes in personnel alone; why we also need “irregular order” that exploits Deep State weakness; and “force multiplier” techniques for a relatively small cadre of America First political personnel.

Now we turn to the irregular order approaches themselves. All three use the bureaucracy’s critical vulnerability—funding—but at different points in the government funding process. None will be easy to execute. But any would be preferable to the status quo, where the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause has been reduced to an annual ritual of humiliation for the political branches of government.

These three approaches need not be used in the order presented below; rather, they could be used in a sequence or combined in a hybrid approach—e.g., constitutional impoundment for agencies that are amenable and soft impoundment for those that are not. Ultimately, however, “how” and “when” are questions of prudence for those who will pay the price and reap the rewards of irregular order.

Please read the whole thing.