[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.