The US government (like all liberal, democratic governments) is a massive, many-headed bureaucracy, with competing and sometimes contradictory objectives. Those objectives are long-term, shaped by committee and subject to organisational inertia, so the departments will function regardless of the political weather. It doesn't matter what public sentiment is, nor how widespread that sentiment may be. Being able to utilise any part of it requires connections and a high level of managerial competence - in George W Bush's case that was through his own personal, familial connections, and through his cabinet, many of whom were career civil servants who'd served in previous administrations going back decades. The feeling of "unity" people may have experienced doesn't come into it.
The US bureaucracy is vast, and although POTUS has the ability to directly appoint many, that ability is neither unilateral (since the Senate must confirm most of the most important appointees) nor wide-ranging. Civil service hiring rules has much more impact on the makeup of a bureaucracy than the President himself does. It's simply not possible to "recolor" the public sector at a whim in the USA.
If you can't imagine that a bureaucracy as large as the united states government might not have competing interests within... I'm not sure I can help you.
I’m not in govt. but, based on past experiences, imo you’re misattributing structured intent to general bureaucratic haze. The “assuredly” part gives that away for me.
The organizational prowess and intent that people assume is present there rarely is. It’s present when you get to certain teams and levels.
More often than not It’s civil servant teams trying their best to replicate organizational processes taught in an MBA program.
There is very little democratic influence in the bureaucracy of most governments. Most functions aren't political, and most politicians don't actually have any direct authority to manage a random government employee's job performance.
While I think the stated concern about a 'deep state' is rather exaggerated, I think there is a legitimate concern about friction between the executive and the bureaucracy. There is broad tradition of non-partisan civil service taking orders from the partisan government of the day across the Western world, and it exists for two very good reasons: If the civil service is partisan, worthy public servants will lose their positions upon any change in government; and if the civil service is partisan, governments will not trust them.
We saw this in Canada under the Harper government in the early part of this decade, with civil servants actively undermining the government and the government retaliating with gag orders; it didn't take long before the government, knowing that any research they asked for would be leaked in the most damaging way possible, abandoned evidence-based governing in favour of seat-of-the-pants policy-making.
Now, what took a decade in Canada seems to have happened in a matter of weeks in Washington; but the fact remains that when the civil service is overtly opposed to their political masters, good government becomes impossible. It's one thing to have a bungling fool in charge of the ship of state; it's quite another to have a bungling fool who knows his crew are in the process of staging a mutiny.
The bureaucracies don't change much between administrations and there is a lot of the same faces at the top between administrations. It causes a permanence of policy regardless of the party. In fact, the bureaucracy are more or less required to be non-partisan in their long term policies. The hypocrisy is probably more of an effect of indoctrination into the bureaucracies than of actual changes in an individual politicians views. It would be difficult for a president to reverse 8+ years of an institution's operations, especially when those have been funded for longer by congress.
In the US, our bureaucracies seem to attract some of the least intelligent people who have no interest in improving their institutions, just in riding the gravy train forever. I think that this is an outcome of how we treat all bureaucrats as equal. There are no entrance exams, or university -level courses for being a bureaucrat. There's no national standard. There's no pride or recognition in being a good bureaucrat, and few if any consequences of being a mediocre one. IMO it seems like a problem with what the US views is the acceptable structure of government, with many overlapping state and federal agencies and endless finger-pointing. There's rarely a "the buck stops here" moment, and so no need to ever improve. If you're familiar with the bozo theory, basically the entire bureaucracy is already full of bozos and thus irredeemable.
The natural ebb and flow of political appointees in government is a great example of it. Good civil servants can make things go great.
Where government performs very poorly is typically where both the formal and informal leadership networks are not up to the task. Brilliant appointed leaders exist and can do amazing things. The informal leadership and machinery requires care and feeding, and tends to fail spectacularly when it's ignored or actively undermined.
For what it's worth regarding working at cross-purposes, most people anywhere tend to generally think of U.S. government agencies as these very focused monolithic hives filled with people who are mostly all on the same page.
But same as you described the discrepancy between different agencies' priorities, in reality, they're all largely fragmented as individual entities as well. With little fiefdoms here, little fiefdoms there, budget battles, pet projects, clawing of funds, burrowing. Agencies are held together by two things - a dusty org chart that's drifted far away from reality long ago, and procedural stuff like budgeting and delegation of authority that just has to be observed.
Between duplicative functions performed by competing departments and counterproductive internal priorities that reflect the coteries they come from, IMO, not that dissimilar from larger established private companies.
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