Here’s a dirty secret about the federal government many Americans are just learning: It’s run by Democrats, even when voters elect Republicans.

Presidents come and go, but the permanent federal bureaucracy remains the same, and it has a distinct partisan tilt. When Americans send a Republican to the Oval Office, they get a government still administered mostly by the other party.

Yes, that makes a sham of democracy. But no president before Donald Trump was prepared to confront the problem.

Because the bias in the federal civilian workforce (which consists of more than 2 million employees) favors their side, the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were never going to fix it. And earlier, when the parties were less ideologically polarized and there were still quite a few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, it wasn’t as obvious as today that the bureaucracy’s partisan slant meant a workforce opposed to the duly elected president—when he’s not a Democrat.

But from Ronald Reagan onward, it’s become clear that a Republican who tries to get the bureaucracy to carry out a conservative agenda will face a revolt from inside. The Constitution’s separation of powers doesn’t provide for an executive branch divided against itself—it’s the one branch that’s meant to be united within and checked from the outside.