Senior Executive Service
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The Senior Executive Service is the federal government's uppermost civilian career tier. John Kiriakou has described it as the structural engine of the permanent bureaucracy, operating across every major agency under agency-specific names: the Senior Intelligence Service at the CIA, the Senior Foreign Service at the State Department, and the Senior Commercial Service at the Commerce Department.

Kiriakou explained that senior executives typically serve thirty to thirty-five years, in some cases forty, far longer than any elected president's eight-year maximum: "Presidents come and go every four years or every eight. And these people are there forever." Their job security is guaranteed by the Civil Service Act, which makes them effectively impossible to fire. This combination of tenure and legal protection means that when a president orders something the senior executive class opposes, the most common response is simply to ignore it: "They just ignore them. Then they know that they can slow roll it or they can wait him out and he won't be president after a while."

Kiriakou has argued that meaningful reform of the executive branch would require executive orders with explicit enforcement mechanisms, sanctions for non-compliance, because the existing structure contains no consequence for senior executives who decline to carry out presidential directives. He points to the National Intelligence Council's National Intelligence Officers, drawn from the Senior Intelligence Service, as a concrete example of this tenure in action. Elsewhere Kiriakou has made the same point about the CIA specifically, saying the agency is led by a cadre of Senior Intelligence Service officers who have served 20 to 35 years and outlast any president, a dynamic he says has let the CIA plot against multiple presidents historically, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and, in his view, Donald Trump.

See also

- CIA
- Church Committee
- Pike Committee
