Very interesting article. Don't let a few 'Trump administration' criticisms stop you from the end. I kind of wish he'd reversed the order he presented his thesis, as too many see 'anti-Trump' so easily:

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/13...484a6-81168121

To Make America Great Again, The Right Needs To Learn How To Run Bureaucracies

We need a Federalist Society-type organization to train young conservatives to become federal bureaucrats if we want to slay the Big Government leviathan.

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Groups like the Federalist Society have been intentionally and painstakingly cultivating conservative legal talent for decades, picking out talented young conservatives during law school and nudging them towards mentors and jobs that will encourage them to develop useful areas of expertise for the movement. The Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges has successfully nudged sitting federal judges to adopt more conservative positions. Other examples of strategic conservative initiatives to turn the judiciary red abound.


At the state level, enormous amounts of money have been spent by numerous conservative (and libertarian) donors to build up think tanks, produce training sessions for state legislators, and disseminate model legislation for passage. And of course, much conservative policymaking is explicitly targeted towards shifting power to state governments.


We Need A Federalist Society for Bureaucrats
Yet we do little to prepare young socially conservative professionals to tackle the federal bureaucracy. At flagship internship and young professional programs run by the Heritage Foundation, the Koch network (disclosure: I participated in both the Koch Internship and Koch Association Program), and other conservative institutions, more time is often spent encouraging young conservatives to attend the right happy hours than encouraging them to find a mentor who can teach them about actual government programs.


Young conservatives will be told that the most useful things they can read to prepare to roll back the administrative state is Edmund Burke or F.A. Hayek, as if Hayek can help you figure out the most conservative way to structure housing voucher eligibility within the confines set by statute. Few conservative talent development programs make any concerted effort to teach actual government administrative tasks and skills to young professionals. The vast majority of young people in these programs will be deployed to support donor management and fundraising.


There’s a deep disconnect in conservative logic on this front. We talk about the federal government as this overwhelming entity that tramples on rights and liberties and is far too powerful and vast, and then we send young people to fight the federal government armed with nothing but their summer reading list and a few weeks’ experience processing mailers. If conservatives are serious about rolling back the administrative state, we need to be training socially conservative young people to have the skills necessary to step into the Department of Interior on day one of a new administration and actually make a difference.


To drain the swamp, we will need structured mentorships with carefully identified conservative federal bureaucrats, seminars and programs aimed at nudging existing bureaucrats in a conservative direction, cultivation of high-quality masters programs in public policy and public administration, and concerted efforts to identify and groom young conservative talent for federal careers at an early stage.

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It’s not good enough to have a few smart ideas people: government requires an actual team, and that means cultivating a network of social conservatives within the belly of the beast. There are about 4,000 political appointee positions in the federal government, of which about 1,200 require Senate appointments. Many of those political appointees will then hire multiple staffers, meaning that the total political personnel for a new administration can total well more than 10,000 people. You can’t fill that staffing need out of a few think-tanks.


You can’t drain the swamp without first becoming an expert in, well, swamps. If you want to hunt wild boars, you had best bring your spear. One cannot expect to defeat the modern administrative state without an actual mastery of administration.


Until the conservative movement makes a serious, long-term effort to train young people to manage the federal bureaucracy competently until it can be reduced, the swamp will keep winning. Conservative leaders will continue to be hamstrung by uncooperative agencies, tut-tutting middle management, quiet obstruction from the bureaucracy, and repeated defeats in the courts.


But social conservatives can promote administrative and managerial talent for federal bureaucracies as effectively as we have for the judiciary or state bureaucracies, or as effectively as economic conservatives have in their areas of concern. If we’re serious about reducing the power of government in our lives, that’s exactly what we need to do.


Lyman Stone is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and an Advisor at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence. He and his wife serve as missionaries in the Lutheran Church-Hong Kong Synod.