Currently I am reading this article.
They give the following definition of the deep state.
"The Shallow State
The malevolent, subterranean American deep state that Trump and his supporters have been railing against since 2016 does not, in fact, exist. But that will not stop Trump from inventing one from scratch. Scholars and analysts have long used the term to describe powerful ministries and state-run utilities whose entrenched officers do one of two things: either they clash routinely with elected leaders, denying them the ability to govern democratically; or they coddle them, insulating those leaders from legal or political reckonings. The term has aptly described power dynamics in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where militaries maintained close control of bureaucratic and political systems even when civilians were nominally in charge. Scholars have rarely used it to describe the United States. And rightly so.
The United States does not have a deep state in large part because the U.S. bureaucracy is notoriously weak. Federal agencies are very much under the thumb of elected presidents and their politically appointed administrators. There are no state-owned utilities of consequence and, with the notable but practically neolithic exception of the Civil War, the country has no culture or history of bureaucrats, military officers, or other government functionaries engaging in subversive, usurping, or otherwise anti-democratic projects. Careful observers of American administrative governance point to a different reality: the United States' bureaucracies are chronically underfunded, understaffed, often micromanaged by the White House, and regularly trussed up by Congress and the courts. Far from being dangerously deep, the American state may be understood as perilously shallow, a near-chronic condition enabled by successive generations of Americans viewing government with great suspicion. The state is already stretched thin when called upon to meet day-to-day demands, never mind when it is expected to respond to acute crises ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the serial coups across the Sahel."
I am very hesitant to trust this article. Most of the authors of Foreign Affairs are hawks/part of the establishment and have an interest to downplay the impact of the deep state. Or they even question its existence.
I have not finished the article yet. I am curious about your opinions.
my friend works there and my other friend used to be a lawyer here.
