The unelected bureaucracy was more like the chinese party system. The U.S. has a strong-president model by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The check isn’t supposed to come from unelected bureaucrats, it’s that the strong president is elected every four years. It’s supposed to be a tight feedback loop. Engineers of all people should understand why that’s good.

When the next democrat president gets into office, he or she should do the same thing as Trump: put trusted deputies in charge of various departments and whip them to actually do what people elected the administration to do. That’s how our system is supposed to work. And democratic voters would I’m sure be much happier with the party if they sometimes actually got what they voted for.