[vkou]

Those bureaucrats are appointed at the whim of the President, and occasionally through a senate confirmation, both of which are elected offices.

> and barely answer to someone who did.

Their hiring is done by elected officials. Their employment and power, aside from a few positions, which are fixed-term, is contingent on the whims of those elected officials.

Just because Congress has been very busy with abdicating all responsibility for governing the country to the executive (Works great when Obama's in charge, because you can blame him for the milk going sour, works great when Trump's in charge, because he can take all the bad PR), doesn't mean that the bureaucrats don't answer to anyone.

[ceejayoz]

> Their hiring is done by elected officials.

No, hiring is largely done by other civil service personnel. The Secretary of State isn't deciding who works in the cafeteria - there's a number of tiers of career employees between him and that decision.

[Spooky23]

Irrelevant.

The Secretary is accountable, and has people working for him or her who serve at the Secretary’s pleasure.

[ceejayoz]

Irrelevant.

Most of the people working in the State department do not serve at the Secretary’s pleasure.

[Spooky23]

The bosses do. Government employees don’t just run around and do whatever.

[ceejayoz]

Those bosses are limited, both by law and by union contracts, in their ability to fire, punish, or reassign the career civil service professionals.

We learned our lesson on this way back in the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...

[Spooky23]

Have you ever worked for government? I have. There are a myriad of ways to do those things.

Civil servants tend to occupy a public perception of a bunch of incompetent idiots or a malignant threat. The reality is that they just do their jobs, and they are on the whole pretty good at it.

If you want unmanageable, replace the professionals with political people. Have fun getting Senator so-and-so’s kid to stop drinking at his desk or having county chairman such-and-such’s spouse not screw up everything they touch.

The United States did the spoils system for 100 years, it sucked.

[vkou]

I dearly hope the janitor isn't the person who the grousing about the deep state is targeted at... Because if that's the case, it's a pretty weak one.

The janitor isn't the reason the DoS makes poor decisions. These decisions are made much higher up the food chain, and elected officials have direct influence over the people who make them.