Revised, expanded, 12-22-25. I did not understand what people meant by "the Deep State." What follow are explanations I have found online and share here because I doubt I am the only one who didn't get it. I hope others can provide links to further explanations (or examples).
• Deconstructing the Deep State (Charles S. Clark, in Government Executive)
Donald Trump isn’t the first president to be deeply skeptical of the institutions and people he now leads.
“When Democrats come to Washington, they arrive as an army of liberation. They turn to the civil service and say, `We love you, go forth and let 1,000 flowers bloom.’ Then comes the madness, and the Democrats wake up,” Turk said.
“Then the Republicans arrive as a conquering army and put their heels on the neck of the civil service. But after about a year or 18 months, they realize that they actually need them to run the place. So they take their heels off the necks, and things are fine.”
The label deep state “assumes there’s some kind of planned conspiracy going on,” said Donald Devine, who headed the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration, who still bemoans the obstacles to firing federal employees. “It is irrational to allow people to run around government doing anything they want, simply following the parochial interests of their agencies. Federal employees need and legally require political supervision, which was the essence of the Carter reforms, a lesson that the Trump administration Office of Management and Budget needs to explain to the White House rather than promoting a naïve version of the permanent bureaucracy.”
“To refer to career civil servants in the U.S. government as some form of deep state is a clear attempt to delegitimize voices of disagreement," says Read More