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You can just read the wikipedia on itSmith-Mundt was a restriction on State. It did nothing to restrict the CIA, or USAID for that matter.
It was also motivated by concerns that State harboured communist sympathies. Saying the Act was motivated by concerns around "what would happen if [American propaganda] was turned inward" is factually false, unsupported by contemporaneous accounts of the bill's backers.
> I am, fyi, not right wing; and not pro-trump
Didn't think you were (and neither am I).
Deep State comes in two flavours. One is the lizard-man crap that appeals to people who can't handle uncertainty. The other is a hypothesis about power in America. The section of the latter that overlaps with the left is based on a sub-hypothesis: that money buying messaging equals power.
The problem with this linkage is it's empirically false. Jeb Bush outspent Trump. Harris outspent Trump. Cambridge Analytica was 2016's AI scare (and Democrats' turn at election denial). Money buys power, but through direct messaging, the acquisition of proximity and--sometimes--bribes.
> we have, during the pandemic, the deployment of all of this machinery at once
And? Nothing happened. People who dissented had the space in which to dissent. They did so openly, peacefully and in spaces old and new.
To put it bluntly, we don't give our adversaries abroad that room. To the extent DOGE might help America, it's in showing us what a real deep state looks like. I'm hoping it doesn't come to it. But someone's e.g. Social Security or government-contract payments failing after an offensive tweet, not due to civic action or private citizens' actions, but due to a Kafkaesque arm of the state--that is the power of the deep state.