## Notes from 12 April 2026 [[2026-04-11|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-04-13|Next note →]] I recently came across [[Nick Dokoozlian]]'s Substack _[Against Inertia](https://nickdokoozlian.substack.com/)_, and it's worth following for anyone interested in the civil service reform debate from a conservative perspective. Two pieces read well together. The first, published in the _[Chicago Policy Review](https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2025/08/04/from-resistance-to-reshaping-the-rights-transformation-of-federal-bureaucracy/)_ (August 2025), traces the ideological arc of the American right from Reaganite anti-government skepticism toward what the author calls a competing vision of federal power — one that no longer seeks merely to shrink the state but to [[Trump Administration|reorient it under tighter presidential control]]. The second, published in his Substack in February 2026, draws on [[Nixon Administration|Nixon's administrative presidency]] to argue that the Trump administration is repeating a structural mistake: using executive orders and political appointments to reshape the bureaucracy without building the statutory foundations that would make those changes stick. The _Chicago Policy Review_ piece is essentially an intellectual history of how the right's relationship with executive power inverted over fifty years. What Dokoozlian traces is an ideological shift — from Reagan's "government is the problem" to a Trumpian willingness to [[Hostile State Capacity|seize and redirect state capacity]] rather than roll it back. The FDR parallel is provocative but defensible: both presidents used the executive branch as an instrument of structural transformation, the difference being the direction of travel. The Substack piece picks up where the historical arc leaves off, turning sharper and more prescriptive. Using Nixon as a case study, Dokoozlian makes two connected arguments: - first, that lasting reform requires institutional design before political battle (Nixon's creation of [[Office of Management and Budget (OMB)|OMB]] being the model), and - second, that the "administrative presidency" — governing through appointments and executive action rather than legislation — is a necessary but ultimately insufficient strategy. The Nixon parallel works well here. The Ash Council spent over a year studying the problem before proposing changes; DOGE operated on a timeline measured in weeks. That gap between deliberate institutional engineering and politically charged disruption captures something real about the current moment. I'm not convinced that Schedule Policy/Career is sound policy. The arguments against it are strong, and the fact that it hasn't been codified in statute, as [[Ronald Sanders]] has repeatedly pointed out, suggests even its proponents sense its fragility. But Dokoozlian's broader institutional argument doesn't depend on Schedule F being good policy. His core point is more basic: deconstruction is easier than construction, and the Trump administration has been far more effective at the former than the latter — whether measured in durable HR reforms institutionalized in law, or in management architecture more broadly. This raises what I think is the most interesting question lurking in both texts: what happens when Republicans leave office? Executive orders get reversed. Politically appointed officials go home. Nixon's administrative presidency ultimately produced the [[Carter Administration|1978 Civil Service Reform Act]] — legislation designed specifically to entrench the very protections conservatives have been fighting ever since. If the current reforms are not institutionalized in statute, they face the same trajectory. Dokoozlian's call for Congress to pass the _[Reorganizing Government Act](https://americansforprosperity.org/make-government-work/reorganizing-government-act/)_ — which would give any president formal authority to submit agency reorganization plans, including abolishing or merging departments, subject to an expedited simple-majority congressional vote [^1] — is, in this light, less a conservative prescription than a basic lesson in institutional durability that applies across ideological contexts: a congressionally-anchored process, even an agile one, is simply more stable than an executive order the next administration can reverse on day one. Dokoozlian is clearly to my right, and I read him with that in mind. But the tension between responsiveness and insulation — between making the administrative state more accountable to elected authority versus more protected from political pressure — produces empirical questions that cut across normative divides. The Nixon framing adds real analytical traction. [^1]: In Brazil, the federal government uses _medidas provisórias_ — provisional measures — to reorganize the executive branch: the president issues them unilaterally and they take immediate effect, but must be ratified by Congress within 120 days or they lapse. At the state level, Minas Gerais has a more structured equivalent: its constitution (Art. 72) allows the state legislature (ALMG) to pass a resolution at the end of a legislative term authorizing the incoming governor to enact _leis delegadas_ — delegated laws with full legislative force — reorganizing the executive branch's administrative structure within a defined scope and timeframe. This gives a new governor the legal tools to restructure the state government from day one.