by The Founders of the United States crafted a government based upon the premise that men are not angels. The power and influence that follows being the leader corrupts even the best men and can lead to negative outcomes for the people. Having just been through a War of Independance against a country that sought to keep its colonies under control of a king, they would be hesitant to entrust power, on a nation-wide scale, to anyone without controls.
The Founders created a government that had a system of checks and balances, with the ultimate check and balance being the ballot box. Indeed, of the three created branches of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution, only one of them has unelected figures, and that was for the purpose of making sure politics didn’t trump justice.
Laws at a federal level needed broad support to pass, and gridlock was calculated into the mix. You can see it in things like the Electoral College (a safety check on direct democracy and the power of the cult of personality), election of Senators by the State Legislature (so that the States had their representatives in the Senate), and the Vice President being the President of the Senate (back when the VP wasn’t a running mate for the President and could be his political opponent). It is said that many expected the House and Senate to decide many of the Presidential contests because of division.
Anyone who has followed politics for some time has been frustrated when a favorite program has failed to move forward because of politics and the lack of votes. This is by design. However, those with power figured out a way around this– they would create an agency dedicated to tackling that tough problem, and that agency wouldn’t need to get votes or be approved by the voters– they would be “career civil servants” operating with large authority to create regulations… basically laws.
This had the double benefit of civil servants not having to leave their posts when elections happened– they could continue to operate, doing what they do, unless someone noticed what they were doing. And as the unelected government grew in money and size, it would be next to impossible to keep track of it all, what it was doing, who was doing what. Especially if you make it difficult to remove people from these jobs.
If you stick these agencies in with the current President’s preferred agenda, and fund them with Continuing Resolutions, you have a permanent shadow government that actually rules, while the elected ones show up for the cameras and pretend that they are actually doing something more than collecting pay checks.
