John DiIulio: A Second Trump Term and the Civil Service

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

What should we make of Trump’s plans for the federal bureaucracy in a second term? In recent days, there has been extensive reporting about “Project 2025,” an agenda and road map that openly aims to politicize the civil service and render it more compliant with the executive. In this Conversation, we are joined by University of Pennsylvania political scientist John DiIulio, one of the leading experts on the civil service and bureaucracy in America. DiIulio takes the Project 2025 proposal seriously. But he argues that attacks on the permanent bureaucracy as a “Deep State" are misleading, because the federal agencies all are accountable and subject to Congressional oversight in meaningful ways. DiIulio considers the threat of a second Trump administration prioritizing loyalty over competency in the bureaucracy, the history of the civil service in the US, and what meaningful reforms of the bureaucracy might look like. DiIulio argues that above all we should focus on reforming the use of federal contractors, which remains the most unaccountable part of American government.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, welcome back to conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. I'm very pleased to be
0:18.8	joined today by my friend John De Eulio, Professor of Political Science at Penn, previously at Princeton, a student of James
0:26.9	Q Wilson, who I studied with a little bit too, but John was really his student,
0:32.4	extraordinary, and Jim didn't the honor really of making him the
0:36.1	co-author of Jim's American government textbook which I think at one point at least
0:40.9	was the best-selling American government textbook for college students in the country.
0:45.0	Is it still?
0:46.0	It was.
0:47.0	Not quite, but it's doing okay.
0:50.0	It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
0:51.0	what happens to go from, you know, Major League to AAA.
0:54.0	It's an excellent book and you actually learn.
0:57.0	It's not just a textbook either.
0:58.0	You learn a sound about sort of subtle points as well.
1:01.0	John has also experienced in politics,
1:04.2	local state level in the federal government,
1:07.1	describes a self-studile Democrat
1:08.8	that we served for a year or so in the Bush White House.
1:11.2	So a wide-ranging background in political science and
1:14.5	politics. And John, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Bill. It's an
1:18.8	honor to being with you as ever. And John is an expert on many things actually, but one of them is the bureaucracy or which is the
1:30.0	but one of them is bureaucracy or civil service or how government actually works.
	...

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