In the context of the US: is there an actual "secret government" or "deep state"?

I was thinking about this question/topic in light of reading the following article from 2014:

http://ift.tt/1nqcVKW


A couple of excerpts:

Quote:

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Quote:

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

I realize that, as we all know all too well, conspiracy theorists go way overboard with wild assertions, paranoid speculation, and blatant untruths, but there are legitimate concerns regarding the increasing power and secrecy of large, increasingly interconnected military, intelligence, national security, and related bureaucracies - and what the implications of that are in terms of American (and other countries, for that matter!) politics and society.

So, my question is twofold: Is the "secret government" at all a real phenomenon, and if so, how problematic do you find it?

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1W1Fx9y