Their jobs are to execute the policies set forth by the duly elected political leadership. No one elected the Deep State. They're not extraConstitutional overlords who can affect public life.

Of course not. But neither is the President an extraConstitutional overlord, either.

These people work for the U.S. Government. They do not work for the President. They are not his personal employees.

This is, again, where people screw up when they conceptualize the government as being like a private company, and the President like a CEO. That's not how the government works. The "political leadership" of the U.S. government includes Congress. Congress sets their budgets, drafts the rules that govern their agencies, creates their agencies in the first place, subjects them to constant oversight, and gives them direction on how Congress wants them to do their jobs. The President has the Executive power, and the Congress has the Legislative power - and neither is neatly cabined into a tightly drawn space.

So if some undersecretary of the interior is doing something that the Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee doesn't like, he's going to hear about it. He might get called in for a nasty hearing. He might have his budget threatened. He might have his Secretary called up to bet yelled at.

All of these folks work for more than just the President, and Congress - even the opposition party in Congress - has enormous power over the federal government. And just because Presidents (and their supporters) get annoyed at that doesn't make it wrong. It's how our government was designed and intended to function.




[N.B.] - and that's ignoring the fact that some of the laws require these employees to exercise independent judgment. Many, if not most, regulatory frameworks are set up so that they are legally required to be implemented according to the laws that have been written and the regulations on the books, and the ability of the President to make changes through incipient policy is limited by the fact that he - and the employees - are required to follow the law. And for some agencies, like DOJ, they exercise and oversight and enforcement role even against the Executive itself, because part of their job is to make sure the government follows the law even if the President doesn't want them to. A great deal of what DJT complained about with the "deep state" stemmed from his inability to conceive that the government has a different organizational structure than a closely-held private corporation.