A new report by a conservative-leaning think tank suggests that, despite the denials from some quarters, something akin to the deep state decried by the Trumpian right does exist within the federal bureaucracy and can have a real impact on government policy.

The conclusion comes in a report by the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden, who interviewed five political appointees in President Trump’s Department of Education when it was run by Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Mr. Eden said conflicts and distrust between political appointees and civil servants in the department and misaligned political agendas between the two plagued the department for the entirety of the Trump term.

“The way an administrative state is supposed to work is that you have a thin layer of political appointees on top of a bigger layer of civil servants,” Mr. Eden said. “The civil servants are supposed to be the hand in the glove of the political appointees, but it didn’t work that way.”

The conflict resulted in considerable delays of two of Ms. DeVos’s principle initiatives, Mr. Eden said — rolling back the Obama-era expansion of titles IX and VI of federal civil rights law.

President Obama’s Education Department encouraged universities to prosecute sexual misconduct on campuses under Title IX, which was initially intended to protect against sexual discrimination, and expanded the use of Title VI, which blocks discrimination based on race, to penalize public schools that disciplined more minority students than non-minority ones.

Ms. DeVos wanted to rein in both those efforts. Undoing the Title VI measures could have been done with the stroke of two pens, Mr. Eden said. Instead, it took two years. Rolling back the Title IX measures took three and a half years, he said, partly because career civil servants did not agree with the policy changes being pushed by Ms. DeVos.

“They were not the sole factor,” Mr. Eden said. “But when you try to piece together time that was spent in unnecessary infighting, there was probably about eight months of governing lost because of the sense that the political appointees couldn’t trust the career civil servants and that the careers had a different agenda.”

Political scientists have been using the term “deep state” for decades, primarily in reference to military leaders or oligarchs that wield veto power over civilian governments in developing countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey. It is still frequently used unironically in media coverage of politics in those countries.

Mr. Trump and his allies — especially aide Steve Bannon — co-opted the term and used it to refer to a federal civil workforce that he believed was threatened by his plans to “drain the swamp.” At a speech in Warsaw early in his tenure, he warned Poles of “the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.”

In some respects, his fears were borne out. On day one of his administration, a National Park Service employee tweeted out pictures comparing the size of the crowd at his inauguration unfavorably to that gathered for Mr. Obama’s in 2008. Mr. Trump was incensed, and the story dragged out for days. Throughout his administration, media outlets published scathing essays by and interviews with disgruntled former federal bureaucrats.

Mr. Eden is not the first to document the intransigence of the federal bureaucracy. The authors of a 2021 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, looking at data from between 1997 and 2019, concluded that the federal bureaucracy is indeed somewhat unaccountable to democratic outcomes like presidential elections.

There is little turnover among civil servants regardless of an election’s outcome, the authors found, and those civil servants tend to perform worse when their own politics do not match those of the administration. When the two sides’ politics are misaligned, they said, projects take longer and cost more.

And, yes, the authors wrote, the U.S. federal bureaucracy does tend to have an anti-conservative bias. About half of federal civil servants are Democrats. In 2019, 26 percent were Republicans. The percentage of Democrats increased the further up the federal career ladder one climbed, the authors said.

Polling of federal employees by Government Executive magazine before the 2016 election suggested that half of those employees preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. Just 34 percent said they supported Mr. Trump, and as many as a quarter of them said in another poll that they would resign if Mr. Trump won the election. 

There is, however, no conspiracy behind the discrepancy, the authors of the research bureau study wrote. Republicans merely tend to gravitate toward the private sector, and Democrats to public sector careers. There is also higher turnover among Republican bureaucrats.

Ms. DeVos herself echoed some of Mr. Eden’s findings during an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this week. 

“We really had to essentially work around most of the career staff because there were very few who would actually get the work done that needed to be done,” Ms. DeVos said. “You’re never going to have the creativity in a large bureaucracy that you need to have in really upending and changing what isn’t working.”