If career bureaucrats were just scheduling appointments and filing paperwork, I’d agree with you. But that’s not how these agencies work. Career civil servants are doing entire rulemakings, creating rules that have the force of law. They are preparing enforcement campaigns targeted at entire industries. They are setting internal priorities and policies. And the elected officials have limited ability to control what’s going on if the careers don’t cooperate.

In law school I was an intern for a Commissioner at the FCC. The Bureaus, which were staffed by career civil servants, would send entire rules and orders (hundreds of pages) fully formed up for the political appointees to vote on. Now, I think the career folks at the FCC are fantastic and very responsive to policy changes between administrations.[1] But that’s not true for many agencies. And in those agencies, the career civil servants wield tremendous power and make it very hard for appointees to implement policy the careers disagree with.

[1] Part of this is that, some high-profile stuff aside, there is a consistent ideology between the parties at the FCC. The republicans completely won in the 1980s and almost everyone takes a “law and economics” approach to communications regulations. So the careers are operating from the same analytical framework as the political appointees regardless of who is in power.