I'm not convinced. Pretty much every federal department, maybe excluding the military ones, is going to have a lot of catching up to do when we have a functional executive branch again. President Pence trying to pound his bullshit through a hostile congress, and the bureaucracy functioning normally again, still looks like the less dire scenario to me.
Presupposes a hostile congress. Suppose Democrats win house and senate. Suppose they shoot the moon. It's not like Mitch McConnell is going away. At 255-179, under a Democratic president, the 111th Congress barely passed Obamacare. We don't get to "all better" from here. We get to "maybe a little less fucked." And in the meantime, the less skill and artistry employed by the executive branch the better off we shall all be.
McConnell is old, and if he loses the Senate I'm not so sure that he would retire rather than face re-election in 2020 at the age of 78. Then again Kentucky would just replace him with an Alex Jones/Breitbart ultra winger who wants no public education funding and would work to bulldoze the Appalachians for the last crumbs of coal.