On My Desk: O’Leary’s Ethics of Dissent and Guerilla Government

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Grant E. Rissler
December 6, 2024

Among the key articles compiled by the journal Administrative Theory & Praxis (ATP) in their First Year PhD Seminar Collection is O’Leary’s 2017 article “The Ethics of Dissent: Can President Trump Survive Guerrilla Government?” The article is worth revisiting in light of former President Trump’s victory in the recent U.S. presidential election after making statements that many have argued are at odds with American traditions of democracy and the resulting potential resistance on ethical grounds by administrators within the federal bureaucracy to the incoming administration’s proposed policy changes.

The “deep state” of career employees is “not going anywhere” according to the title of a Nov. 27th opinion column by Marc Fisher, an associate editor at The Washington Post with nearly 40 years of reporting experience in Washington.  Drawing on conversations with anonymous career Justice Department lawyers, Fisher shares one person’s sense that “it almost doesn’t matter who’s at the top if things are allowed to operate properly,” and goes on to note that “when they’re not, career staffers can and will resist.” 

Public administration scholar Rosemary O’Leary speaks to this tension in her book The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government, using the term “guerilla government” to highlight the phenomenon of public servants working against the wishes of superiors in order to uphold or do what they think is ethical or right. O’Leary highlights some of the key themes of her research and analyzes possible impacts for the first Trump administration in her ATP article “The Ethics of Dissent: Can President Trump Survive Guerrilla Government?”  She notes in her article that “Guerrillas run the spectrum from anti-establishment liberals to fundamentalist conservatives, from constructive contributors to deviant destroyers. Guerrilla government is about the power of bureaucrats: the tensions between career public servants and political appointees, organization culture, and what it means to act responsibly, ethically, and with integrity in a public setting.”

Insights from O’Leary’s writings on Guerilla Government

After highlighting three theoretical lenses for understanding guerilla government (Bureaucratic Politics, Organizations and Management and Ethics) and Dwight Waldo’s twelve ethical obligations of a public servant (see Figure 2 from O’Leary’s article), O’Leary reviews several case studies of guerilla government.  In addition to noting historical cases like Mark Felt’s leaks of information in the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency, O’Leary examines two case studies in greater detail – the Chelsea Manning/Wikileaks release of classified government documents and the Edward Snowden case that “outed” what he saw as excessive National Security Agency surveillance of Americans.  Snowden, she notes, chose to go public with his actions, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights principle that “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience” to support his belief that “individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity.”

At the conclusion of her article, O’Leary highlights six themes, which she terms “harsh realities” about the power of career public servants:

• Guerilla government is a permanent feature of open systems like federal bureaucracies and shows the that “for better or worse” bureaucrats are powerful actors.
• Tactics of guerilla government are diverse, ranging from stalling to coordinating resistance with other staff to cultivating relationships with outside media or interest groups that are opposed to the policies a bureaucrat feels requires opposition.
• Not all guerilla activity is ethically equal but sorting out which is more ethical is difficult. Juxtaposing the ethical articulations of the cases she studied to Waldo’s twelve competing ethical obligations of public administrators, O’Leary notes that the commitments of guerilla actors are “neither to organization, nor to the public . . . [but r]ather, their commitments were to their own personal interpretations of the public interest . . . professionalism, self, sometimes even nation, and humanity.”
• The interactions of growth trends in big data, hyper social media and government contracting are likely to increase the opportunity for guerilla government.
• Most public organizations are not equipped to reduce the risk of guerilla government because instances share one or more of four institutional conditions:
  • Limited internal opportunities for dissent
  • Cost of open dissent is greater than clandestine dissent
  • When issues involved are personal/subject to deeply held values
  • When quitting would make things worse than staying and fighting surreptitiously from within.
• There is an inherent and unavoidable tension for career bureaucrats between accountability to superiors and sustaining policy on one hand and innovation and accountability to principles on the other and this tension must be managed as it cannot be eliminated.

Relevance to Public Administrators in a Second Trump Administration

One of the basic lessons in American grade school civics curriculums is that the U.S. form of government is constructed to have built-in checks and balances that make rapid change difficult. In this system, only when like-minded actors simultaneously control the White House, both houses of Congress and a majority on the Supreme Court can major shifts occur. Usually missing from the grade school civics lessons is the power of bureaucrats that O’Leary’s research highlights, but the ethical tensions that O’Leary outlines as inherent are likely to be at their highest in such a period of rapid change when bureaucrats may see themselves as the last line of defense against policy shifts that they see as unethical.  Arguably, the most recent election in the United States creates such a potential window of unilateral partisan control, dialing up the ethical tension for the bureaucrats, like those interviewed by Fisher who may see certain policy changes as a matter of life and death. Indeed, Fisher concludes his column by quoting Yale historian Timothy Snyder arguing that democracy depends on laws “implemented by civil servants. We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly.”

Conclusion

The article by O’Leary provides important insights to public administrators and those who study the actions of individual bureaucrats who swim against the stream of their current superiors. Especially in the context of a potential major shift in a host of policy areas under a second Trump Administration, the instances where career administrators will face countervailing ethical tensions are likely to increase.

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Author:  Grant Rissler is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, University of Richmond (VA).  He serves on the editorial board of Administrative Theory & Praxis (ATP) and focuses his research on social equity and peacebuilding with particular interest in local government responsiveness to immigrants.  The “On My Desk” series of columns, beginning in July 2024, intentionally highlights the insights of one or more articles published in ATP in relation to a current debate or event.  Grant can be reached at [email protected].

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