CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - Former Trump appointee Ken Blackwell recently observed that his boss didn't fully grasp what a new president must understand about the bureaucratic administrative state.
“They operate behind the scenes,” he said. “Trump was familiar with what happens on Wall Street and you can't get any more cutthroat than New York real estate dealings but he didn't understand that all of these folks didn't fight in the open ring.”
Under Trump, Blackwell served as a senior transition official and was appointed to the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity.
He defines the bureaucratic administrative state as civil service workers.
“What happened under Clinton and Obama is their deliberate strategy of leaving their folks behind into the structure,” Blackwell said. “The bureaucratic administrative state that has been structured now is an independent force that must be brought under control.”
Blackwell was a featured speaker at the 2023 Black Conservative Summit in Chicago on March 25 along with former Texas GOP Chairman Lt. Col. Allen West, former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, former candidate for Illinois Lt. Gov. Stephanie Trussell, Bob Woodson founder of the Woodson Center, Dr. Eric Wallace, founder of the Freedom's Journal Institute, and Indiana Attorney General emeritus Curtis Hill. The annual conference is organized by the Freedom's Journal Institute.
Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State and Ohio State Treasurer, also served as a political appointee under former President George H.W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
“There wasn't as much conflict between the agenda of George Bush and the civil service bureaucracy as there was between Trump's worldview and agenda and theirs,” he said. “Those of us in the George Bush administration had better-leveraging power.”
While working with U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker III in D.C., Blackwell noticed their varying approaches to the resistance of the permanent structure.
"It was very difficult when their agenda was different from the President's agenda or the Secretary of State's agenda so there was that constant conflict," he said. "Shultz embraced the bureaucratic administrative state and tried to put it back on a positive track. It didn't work. Baker walled himself in on the 11th floor of the State Department with about 15 people and kept them away from us as best as possible."
But at the start of Trump's presidency in 2016, there wasn't a coherent enough team to form a strategy, according to Blackwell.
"There were various spheres of influence around Trump," he said.
Compared to political appointees who have a life expectancy in their positions of 18 months, foreign service officers are required to change their designated country every three years and civil servants don’t have an expiration date.
“If I had a problem person in D.C. who was in the civil service in this particular unit and I couldn't fire them, I would transfer them to Alaska," Blackwell told Legal Newsline. “Towards the end of the Trump administration, they started to get at their laws and regulations that had been designed to protect the permanency of this bureaucracy."
There are some 2.1 million federal civil service workers, according to the Strengthening the Federal Workforce report.
Currently, Blackwell is a senior fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council, a pro-marriage and pro-life think tank in Washington, D.C.
"I'm making sure the platform of the Republican Party continues to be something that is in opposition to the Democrats' socialist-leaning big welfare state program and instead sticking with a platform that respects the dignity of life and is dedicated to making sure there's an environment in the country that encourages the rebuilding of the nuclear family."
Blackwell is 75 years old but when he was a student, he was involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and the Urban League in Clarksdale, Miss. and Chattanooga, Tenn. during the Civil Rights Movement.
As a result, the indictment of Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is particularly concerning to Blackwell.
"The black community can never be supportive of an ambitious government that weaponizes its resources because that happened to us,” he added. "Black people can never accept that as business as usual or we will find that it will be weaponized against us again."