In the increasingly unlikely event that Donald Trump is elected president, it should be conceded that he could prove to be a transformative chief executive in unexpected ways—indeed, in ways that good progressives would, ordinarily, welcome. Case in point: The federal civil service.

For decades, it has been an article of faith among the chattering classes that one supreme weakness of the executive branch is that our senior civil servants lack the power and discretion of their European equivalents. Unlike, say, Britain, where ministries and executive departments have permanent undersecretaries who straddle governments and wield considerable influence—think of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Prime Minister—the federal government in Washington is turned upside-down when administrations change. The Department of State gets a whole new senior bureaucracy, of course, along with the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). So, for that matter, does the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).