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Notes -
A motte for the term: The deep state
Without endorsing any particular theories here, perhaps the best way to think about the deep state is that it is simply parts of the government that have developed their own distinct political goals and capabilities, and are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper. In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government. Any government that remains stable for long enough will develop capabilities that do not require a given person at the top, since the leaders change over time. Those abilities will then be put to use in service of whatever political goals unite that part of government.
This becomes more open and more contentious in a democracy when parts of the government revolt against elected leaders.
The administrative state when it was thought up, had these people be mindless cogs that would pass and process information to the next level until clear orders were drafted and sent for whoever actually ultimately executes them. But consolidation of roles, education and computers now has many of these people aware of the picture they are painting and opinionated with regards to the orders and the people who gave them. Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power, they can selectively apply rigor, sabotage their own work, know who to inform or not inform of a situation, etc... to give themselves some margin of discretionary power.
And recently they seem to relish how much power leaking to the press gives them.
This may be the platonic ideal of what this sort of role should entail, but I don't know that, even if desirable, this sort of job is actually possible. Outside of maybe the most rote service and industrial jobs (and honestly, even then), nobody leaves their personal values and opinions completely at the door.
The civil service jobs we're talking about are often given regulatory authority explicitly by Congress. One could argue that they delegate too much (and courts have agreed occasionally), but the system does allow for much faster pivots than passing bills through Congress would allow. Congress says "The Department of Transportation shall promulgate regulations to improve motor vehicle safety," and after the gears of civil service churn a while get tomes of rules about mirrors, lighting, and crash-safety standards.
But our vehicle regulations aren't written in a vacuum: the YIMBY transit crowd frequently observe that pedestrian safety is basically ignored (this is, slowly, starting to change, it seems) compared to the EU. It seems likely to me that this exists because the bureaucrats charged with writing the standards happily drive their pickup trucks to the office and don't see many pedestrians day-to-day.
Is this the Deep State? By some definitions yes, but this particular example probably isn't hugely political, not do I immediately assume malice. Yes, this sort of thing also exists in politically charged decisions, but I'm not sure it's deliberately by design, or even necessarily avoidable.
P.J. O'Rourke's account of visiting the DoT head office in DC (in Parliament of Whores) is hilarious for this reason - he goes in to the building expecting to find it full of the kind of car-hating eco-weenies that the average American conservative would expect to find in the Civil Service and is somewhat horrified to discover that it is full of car guys who religiously read his car journalism (which, despite his reputation as a political satirist, was probably his main source of income as a freelance writer in the 1980's). So the chapter turns into a sympathetic account of how people who mostly share PJ's attitude to cars end up feeling forced to order a recall of the Audi 5000 in response to senile drivers pressing the accelerator when they mean to press the brake.
In so far as Parliament of Whores has a story arc, it is PJ shifting from the view you would expect of a 1960's-communist-turned-libertarian (that Big Government is a hostile occupying force that Americans need to defeat) to seeing Big Government of something that Americans do to themselves as a result of the ignorance and apathy of the median voter and the fecklessness of the Congressmen they elect.
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