Subject: Re: Paging Dope1, Mike, Righties
The swampiness operates just fine while remaining within the constitutional boundaries. It is reflected in the day to day decision making and priority setting by certain leadership who let their politics color the performance of their agency.

Accepting your diagnosis of the problem for discussion purposes, I'm afraid you're still describing an insoluble problem. There's no way to take the politics out of politics.

Remember, the reason we have civil service protections is because the real-world experience of having political and patronage appointees to government positions is that they inevitably make many (most) of their decisions based on political considerations. They end up making their day-to-day decision making and priority setting with politics coloring the performance of their agency and their own actions. The idea behind the civil service is that you end up insulating the people who do the day-to-day decision making and priority setting from political pressures. They can be fired if they're doing a bad job, but not because of politics. You give them the protection to do their jobs to the best of their ability and following the rules that have been set down by Congress and the agency heads - within those boundaries, they are free from being influenced by political considerations.

If you go ahead and label how they perform their jobs once freed from political pressure and patronage as itself being political - following the "politics of the individual" rather than the politics of the group - then there's literally no escaping politics in the performance of agency duty. Judgment can always be interjected into the process by someone. If you allow that judgment to come in from the political appointees, you're back in the pre-civil service world of political favoritism or punishment being exercised from above; if you label the judgment calls made by the protected civil service staff as political, then you have politics there as well.

Swampiness is also reflected in responsiveness to congressional requests for data or proposals based on which side of the aisle is doing the asking. Investigations drag out and bog down because every tiny little thing is resisted by the agencies holding the information.

Again, that's inherent in the separation of powers. The whole idea is that the President can resist Congress. It's the key difference between our system and a Parliamentary system. The President is not like a PM - he isn't appointed by the Legislature, but directly elected in a separate election. So the President can - and frequently does - tell Congress to pound sand on a lot of issues. A "nonconformist" President can't change that. In fact, I expect a "nonconformist" President would be more likely to direct their agencies to resist Congress when they felt like it.