Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State

Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State Rebecca Ingber * ABSTRACT: Modern accounts of the national security state tend toward one of two opposing views of bureaucratic tensions within it: At one extreme, the executive branch bureaucracy is a shadowy “deep state,” unaccountable to the public or even to the elected President. On this account, bureaucratic obstacles to the President’s agenda are inherently suspect, even dangerous. At the other end, bureaucratic resistance to the President represents a necessary benevolent constraint on an otherwise imperial executive. This account hails the bureaucracy as the modern incarnation of the separation of powers, an alternative to the traditional checks on the President of the courts and Congress, which are faulted with falling down on the job. These “deep state” and “benevolent constraints” approaches to bureaucratic behavior track debates in the scholarship over the legitimacy of the administrative state more broadly, and are used as rhetorical devices to challenge or defend current allocations of power. These accounts lead, respectively, to fear of or over-reliance on bureaucratic resistance—which I define here broadly as action or inaction within the executive branch that hinders executive movement—as a means of checking Presidential power. Fear of bureaucratic resistance results in an erosion of valuable internal checks on the President. Alternatively, over-reliance on these internal checks may result in complacency, and an abdication of responsibility by the traditional external checks, namely members of Congress and the courts. Both approaches result in an insufficiently constrained President, which should concern most advocates and opponents of the administrative state. * Associate Professor, Boston University School of Law. I am grateful to Jack Beermann, Pam Bookman, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Bennett Capers, Daniela Caruso, Kris Collins, Ashley Deeks, Stacey Dogan, David Fontana, Ahmed Ghappour, Paul R. Gugliuzza, Monica Hakimi, Gary Lawson, Tracey Maclin, Linda McClain, Anton Metlitsky, Gillian Metzger, Jon Michaels, Martha Minow, Henry Monaghan, Nancy Moore, Mark Nevitt, David Noll, Nicholas Parrillo, Deborah Pearlstein, David Pozen, Daphna Renan, David Rubenstein, Katherine Silbaugh, Theodore Sims, Mila Sohoni, Glen Staszewski, Rory Van Loo, Steve Vladeck, and Matthew Waxman, as well as participants at the Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable at Michigan, the New Voices in Administrative Law workshop at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, and the BU Law faculty workshop, for generous discussions and comments on drafts. For excellent research assistance, I thank Margaret Chrusciel, Lindsay Ladner, and Stew Sibert. 139 140 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 104:139 This Article seeks to navigate the tension between these approaches in order to craft a more realistic account of bureaucratic resistance, divorced from substantive views about the policies or President at hand. This account suggests that critics of the bureaucracy underestimate the extent to which bureaucrats wield formal authority well-tethered to politically accountable sources. And both critics and champions of bureaucratic resistance overestimate the extent to which bureaucrats exercise functional power free from practical constraint. Ultimately, the bureaucracy is neither all-powerful nor unaccountable. While it plays an essential—and endangered—role in the modern separation of powers, it is neither the threat that some fear, nor the holistic cure to a President who is. I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 141 II. THE DEEP STATE AND THE INTERNAL SEPARATION OF POWERS .................................................................................. 147 A. B ENEVOLENT C ONSTRAINTS : T HE I NTERNAL S EPARATION OF P OWERS ............................................................................ 149 B. T HE R ISE OF THE A MERICAN “D EEP S TATE ” N ARRATIVE ........... 151 C. P OINTS OF C ONVERGENCE AND P OINTS OF D EPARTURE .............. 154 III. BUREAUCRACY AND RESISTANCE .................................................. 155 A. B UREAUCRATIC A XES ............................................................. 156 1. Career-Political Continuum ........................................ 157 2. Burrowers and Ladder Climbers ................................. 158 3. Ideological Alliance with the President ...................... 160 4. Political Taint and Independence .............................. 160 5. The Entrenched and Transient Bureaucracies .......... 161 B. D ISAGGREGATING R ESISTANCE ................................................ 162 1. Mechanisms of Resistance ........................................... 163 2. Purposes of Resistance ................................................. 165 i. Neutral Friction ....................................................... 165 ii. Legal Constraint ...................................................... 167 iii. Ethics, Abuse, and Norm-Breaking ............................ 169 iv. Evidentiary Disagreement and Professional Standards ................................................................ 170 v. Policy Disagreement .................................................. 171 IV. FORMAL AUTHORITY AND FUNCTIONAL POWER TO RESIST .......... 173 A. D EFINING F ORMAL A UTHORITY AND F UNCTIONAL P OWER ......... 174 B. F ORMAL A UTHORITY TO R ESIST .............................................. 175 1. Congressionally-Sourced Bureaucratic Power to Resist ........................................................................ 175 2018] BUREAUCRATIC RESISTANCE 141 i. Congress Protects, and Limits, Bureaucratic Resistance ................................................................ 176 ii. Congress Delegates Directly to Areas of Bureaucratic Competence .......................................... 177 iii. Congress Bargains in the Shadow of the Bureaucracy ............................................................. 179 2. Judicially-Sourced Bureaucratic Power to Resist ........ 181 3. Executive-Sourced Bureaucratic Power to Resist ....... 183 i. Ephemeral Versus Longstanding Sub-Allocations ........ 185 ii. Formally-Created Versus Organic Sub-Allocations ....... 186 iii. Contemporaneous Versus Past-Presidential Sub-Allocations ........................................................ 187 C. F UNCTIONAL P OWER TO R ESIST .............................................. 189 1. Vertical Constraints on Resistance .............................. 190 2. Horizontal Constraints on Resistance ......................... 193 3. External Constraints on Resistance............................. 195 4. Leaking as Both Power and Constraint ....................... 197 V. ASSESSING RESISTANCE ................................................................ 201 A. A SSESSING Z ONES OF R ESISTANCE A CCORDING TO L EGALITY ............................................................................. 203 B. A SSESSING M ECHANISMS OF R ESISTANCE A CCORDING TO P URPOSE .......................................................................... 204 VI. RESISTANCE REVISITED ................................................................ 206 A. P RESIDENT N IXON ’ S L AST D AYS , AND D EFENSE S ECRETARY J AMES S CHLESINGER ’ S E FFORTS TO C ONSTRAIN THE U SE OF F ORCE .............................................................................. 208 B. P RESIDENT O BAMA ’ S F AILURE TO C LOSE THE M ILITARY D ETENTION F ACILITIES AT G UANTANAMO B AY ......................... 210 C. P RESIDENT T RUMP ’ S C LASHES WITH DOJ AND THE FBI OVER I NVESTIGATIONS INTO R USSIAN I NTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 P RESIDENTIAL C AMPAIGN ....................................... 214 VII. CONCLUSION .............................................................................. 220 I. INTRODUCTION In January 2017, a momentous transition in the U.S. presidency loomed on the horizon, and the Israeli press carried a fantastical allegation. According to the country’s main daily newspaper, career U.S. intelligence officials had warned their Israeli counterparts against providing information to the incoming U.S. President’s administration, their own government , for fear that, through malfeasance or trickery, the information might land in the wrong 142 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 104:139 hands. 1 The allegation was explosive, and quite possibly inaccurate. But it fed into a narrative—nurtured by friend and foe of the incoming President alike—that lurking within the executive branch bureaucracy were career operators who harbored reservations about the new President and might seek to undermine him. As such, the existence of misgivings among career bureaucrats inside the executive branch regarding the incoming President’s motivations and intentions is hardly controversial. 2 Nor is it unique to this President, though there may be significant differences of degree. But the extent to which these misgivings have or could lead to active subversion by career bureaucrats, and the propriety of any such “resistance” from within the executive branch to an elected President, are matters of hot debate. That debate has fed and been fueled by longstanding disagreements in scholarship over the legitimacy of the administrative state writ large. But two underlying questions—the practical power and the formal authority of bureaucrats to resist—have not been adequately examined in the literature. They, and the ensuing extent to which the bureaucracy should be either feared or revered as a threat to the republic or as its last hope, are the focus of this Article. Fear or reverence animates many accounts of bureaucratic tension within the “national security state.” Modern accounts, to the extent they ascribe any significance to actors beyond the President himself and his appointed cabinet, tend toward one of two diametrically opposed conceptions of resistance to the...