No. of Recommendations: 14
"Drain the swamp" refers to the regulatory state, which is solely the province of the Executive Branch. It needs to be downsized and the chieftains who run it need to be replaced with non-partisan actors who understand their jobs and who don't harbor illusions of power.
It's not solely the province of the Executive Branch. The President has oversight of the regulatory state, and appoints the heads of the agencies and many of their immediate subordinates. But Congress is the one that creates all the agencies, establishes their structure, defines their purposes and the limits of their authority, and approves their budget.
Because Congress has enormous authority and power over the agencies under our system of government, and because Congress has significant checks on Presidential authority, it is almost impossible for an Executive to unilaterally make any material changes to the regulatory state.
The chieftains who run it don't have illusions of power. They have actual political power, formed by years and years and years of working with the corresponding members of Congress in the Committees that set all of the rules for everything that pertains to their agency. Unlike the President, which turns over every four or eight years, members of any given Committee (and especially the chairs and ranking members) can be there for decades. And the agencies work with those members and their staff, day in and day out, and build up enormous political capital with them. The President simply doesn't have the power to make significant changes to the regulatory state without working with Congress, and Congress very much has its own opinions about how the regulatory state should operate.
The President is not like the CEO of a business. In most companies, the CEO is the only and final last word on how things are run. If a new CEO comes in and wants to make drastic changes, then that will happen - there's no other power center within the company that can impede those changes. In the federal government, only part of the authority is vested in the President; a large part of it lies in Congress. Which makes it almost impossible for the President to make broad changes to the federal government without being able to convince Congress to go along with it. Which is why structural reform of the federal government so rarely happens.
