Yeshiva University, Cardozo School of Law LARC @ Cardozo Law Articles Faculty 2018 Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State Rebecca Ingber Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/faculty-articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Rebecca Ingber, Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State, 104 139 (2018). Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/faculty-articles/479 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty at LARC @ Cardozo Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of LARC @ Cardozo Law. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. A4_INGBER (DO NOT DELETE) 10/26/2018 8:48 AM Bureaucratic Resistance and the National Security State Rebecca Ingber* ABSTRACT: Modern accounts of the national security state tend toward one of two opposing views of bureaucratic tensions within it: At one extreme, the executive branch bureaucracy is a shadowy “deep state,” unaccountable to the public or even to the elected President. On this account, bureaucratic obstacles to the President’s agenda are inherently suspect, even dangerous. At the other end, bureaucratic resistance to the President represents a necessary benevolent constraint on an otherwise imperial executive. This account hails the bureaucracy as the modern incarnation of the separation of powers, an alternative to the traditional checks on the President of the courts and Congress, which are faulted with falling down on the job. These “deep state” and “benevolent constraints” approaches to bureaucratic behavior track debates in the scholarship over the legitimacy of the administrative state more broadly, and are used as rhetorical devices to challenge or defend current allocations of power.