The oldest danger, dressed in modern clothes

The New York Times reports that the Trump White House went to extensive, clandestine lengths to shape the decisions of the Merit Systems Protection Board — a body whose entire reason for existence is to stand between a federal employee and a president's raw power to hire and dismiss for political loyalty alone. If the report is accurate, what was done behind the scenes was not administrative reform. It was the quiet capture of the referee by one of the players.

I wrote, and believed with every fiber of my conviction, that the accumulation of all powers — legislative, executive, and judicial — in the same hands is the very definition of tyranny. The merit system, whatever its modern form, is a structural answer to that danger: it says that the professional servant of the public should answer to law and performance, not to the shifting favor of the man at the top. To secretly sway the board that enforces that principle is to hollow it out while leaving its name on the door.

The White House, the Times says, advances a theory of executive power so sweeping that the president might install loyalists at nearly every echelon of government. I recognize that theory. Every prince who ever wished to govern without interference has dressed the same ambition in the language of efficiency and unity of command. The argument is always that a single, energetic will can govern better than checks and deliberation. It cannot — and the history of republics lost to consolidation is the proof.

I do not say this as a partisan of any faction. I have seen, in my own time, men on every side of the aisle reach for powers they would have thundered against when those powers were in opposing hands. The principle is not that this president is uniquely wicked; the principle is that the office, given room to expand, will always expand, and the citizen is always the one who loses the ground. The cure is structural, not personal: the boards, the courts, the free press, the vigilant legislator — all must do their appointed work, or the whole of it collapses.

What I find most alarming, if the Times account holds, is the secrecy. A president who believed his theory of executive power was just would argue it openly, in court, before Congress, before the people. Secrecy is the confession that sunlight would not be kind to the argument. A republic cannot be governed well from the shadows; it can only be captured from there.

To the citizen reading this: the question is not whether the federal workforce should be efficient or accountable — of course it should. The question is whether accountability runs upward to the law and to the public, or whether it runs inward to a single man's pleasure. Those are not the same thing, and anyone who tells you they are is asking you to surrender something you will not easily recover. An educated people, keeping constant watch, is still the only remedy I know.