“Much alarm has been raised among Establishment media and politicians about President Trump’s efforts to cut the federal bureaucracy and to force its top officials to be more loyal to him and to those who voted for him. How did we come to find ourselves in a situation where our top national administrators – who exercise immense governing power in our country – think of themselves as independent of the elected president? Why does it create alarm among our elites when the president expects those running the administrative state to carry out his political program? The roots of this entitled attitude go back many decades, and are part of the original Progressive project to comprehensively reshape American government. We are now in the midst of the first serious effort since the 1930s to restore some measure of democratic accountability to national administration. In this Provocation, Ronald J. Pestritto explains how we got to this moment, and what the prospects are for the current effort to turn things around.”