[mrsilencedogood]

"If you commit to institutional neutrality, the result is a one-way ratchet"

Can you explain why this is the result? And why is it allegedly democrats that the ratchet pushed towards?

There are well-known differences in political alignment both among more-educated workers (the federal government probably does not employ many people without at least a college degree of some sort?) and being employed in a public-services government job (e.g. what kinds of workers are more likely to want to work for the EPA? People who want to protect the environment or people who want to exploit it more? Remember, one party tried to sell off a large number of public forests and lands and is gutting the national parks).

These seem like they would explain the majority of the effect you mention without any mention of some kind of ratchet mechanism.

[rayiner]

The one-way ratchet results from the very factors you mention. To your EPA example: the nation’s environmental laws all reflect compromises between protecting the environment and minimizing impact on businesses. They wouldn’t have gotten through Congress otherwise. If you have an EPA full of employees who, to use your words, think of one side of those compromises as “exploit[ing]” the environment, they are naturally going to push to effectively undo those compromises, in a direction that generally aligns with the party that federal workers overwhelmingly vote for. That’s the one-way ratchet. It’s a typical principal-agent problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble....

But that’s not how the system is supposed to work in a democracy. Ideally, executive branch policies would track the pattern of presidential elections, without any detectable aggregate influence from the political preferences of federal workers.