A Bureaucrat Gets The Willies - Shaking In His Boots As DOGE And The Trump Demolition Team Come To Town

Mary McCarthy famously said that “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism”.  Anyone who has worked in a bureaucracy or been forced to deal with it can only be impressed by the inertial power of what can only be described as a living, breathing organism as self-protective as any individual, family, or other social grouping.  It is not ruled by any Administrator or Managing Director, but by the collective survivalist rule of its employees.  Changes in structure or operation happen only slowly and incrementally.  

The business of bureaucracies is to stay alive, to self-nurture, grow, and expand.  No one plans this expansion, the additional departments, the staffing up, the duplicate and triplicate layers of authority and responsibility, the little, minor arrogation of power which add to the inertial force of this unintelligent amoeba.  Bureaucracies simply ooze and spread until they absorb everything in their path.



These living organisms grow, multiply, and spread until they meet resistance; but when they do, their malleability and survival instincts enable them to change course, insinuate themselves in other new corners where they thrive, multiply and spread.  No one has found a way to stop the growth of bureaucracies because of this evolutionary advantage. After a time they gain inertia and their growth, spread, and infiltration becomes even harder to stop. At some point their original raison d'etre, their purpose is lost.  They exist only to exist and are inexorable and unstoppable.

Herman Axelrod was a mid-level bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture, and had been with the agency for almost three decades, first with the Rural Development Service, then the Rural Housing Service, and finally with the Nutrition Service.

He had been hired as a G2 but over the years thanks to seniority advanced to G7.  His responsibilities had increased marginally, but because the federal bureaucracy is so intricately layered with subdivision upon subdivision in each of its services, and budgetary and legal requirements to co-share, collaborate, and to cross-reference activities, individual responsibility was an oxymoron.  One could work in a government department for years without ever being called out for superior or inferior performance, so intricately interwoven and complicatedly textured was the bureaucracy. 

Bureaucracies are no different than any other complex system - networks of ganglions, synapses, junctures, and bonds, all so intricate that they are hard to disaggregate let alone understand.  They are not static but always moving, energy and resources passing from one link to another, shunted and diverted with seemingly no rhyme or reason, turning back on themselves before moving forward again and then backward.

If one sub-service is closed, its funds, staff, and brief are automatically transferred to another which because of the extra burden increases in size and weight until it too, for various internal, organic reasons, disappears.  No matter what, bureaucracies remain intact, living, breathing organisms with the flexibility and adaptability of an amoeba or a paramecium.  Many administrations have tried to address what over the years has become a behemoth.  Not only do bureaucracies change form and substance internally.  Not only do they remain intact, but they grow. 

There is no more secure employment than that of a federal bureaucrat.  Not only is he absorbed and subsumed within the whole, but there is little if any accountability for his performance other than assuring a most democratic, participatory collaboration. In any agency there are many different interests represented - decisions cannot ever be made unilaterally, and all groups must have their input.  Have women's interests been properly considered? Those of black men, gay women? Has the health and welfare of the environment been considered? Does the proposed intervention consider diversity, equity, and inclusivity? Are the economic concerns of the most vulnerable addressed?

For each of these interests, there are committees and subcommittees, caucuses, and lobby groups, and each and everyone must be canvassed and included. If a bureaucrat's day is not consumed with paper work, it is with meetings; and by five o'clock absolutely nothing of substance has been accomplished.

Bureaucrats with civil service status are unconcerned about any of this. Their lives are in happy suspension, free from the pursuit or performance, censure, or monitoring. Their jobs are a function of keeping the wheels of bureaucracy spinning, and if that reassuring hum is heard up and down the corridors, they have fulfilled their obligations. 

Long-distance bus drivers are chosen for their middle-ground intelligence.  Not smart enough to be bored by the mind-numbing routine but with enough intelligence to negotiate traffic.  This has always been the operational algorithm of federal employment offices.  To keep the bureaucracy running smoothly, one cannot afford to have overly ambitious, demanding, or out-of-the-box thinkers.  A federal bureaucrat, like a bus driver, need have only enough intelligence to stay on the road.  How else to assure that the mindless operations of the bureaucracy run smoothly?

So Herman Axelrod was a contented man.  His salary was more than enough to keep and maintain his modest split-level in Gaithersburg, he was assured of a secure, reasonable pension, and his weekends were free.  The spinning wheels of the Department remained back at the office. 

When Donald Trump won the election, there were stirrings on the fifth floor, but little more than murmurs and shifting of chairs.  Despite what the President-elect had promised about reducing the size of government, Herman knew that this was only electioneering and false promises. No administration, Republican or Democrat had ever succeeded in trimming the excess, and this time around would be no different.  At the end of the day he might find himself sitting in a different cubicle on a different floor doing much the same thing and answerable to a different boss, but nothing would be any different. 

Elon Musk and this Ramaswamy fellow, for all their billions and quick wit would run up against the same organic issues as their predecessors, and nothing would change; and even if it did, Herman was a protected Civil Servant who could be removed only for gross misconduct, not for some neophyte's pipe dream of 'efficiency'. 

 

Herman had no idea how quickly and how deeply into the bureaucracy DOGE would cut.  Even before taking office in January, the duo have already marked out their territory.  The only way to deal with bureaucratic bloat is to gut the bureaucracy itself.  If whole chunks of a department are summarily eliminated, paper shuffling and pass-the-buck inefficiency will end.  

The amoeba will not be able to squeeze itself into a new corner of the bureaucracy because collateral divisions will also be removed.  The Division of Human Interactivity, designed to promote collaboration between rural farm communities and the inner city end-users of farm products will end and so will the Division of Farm-to-Table Economics, the natural asylum for those sent packing from Human Interactivity, 

The DOGE will not be surgical.  It will be a wrecking crew. Whole Departments will be eliminated. Why have a Department of Education when of all public services education is the most decentralized, an affair of local school boards? Why a Department of Labor when industrial relations have always been a matter of private contract between labor and management?  Why a Department of Commerce when American private enterprise is among the most aggressive and competent in the world? In fact the Constitution provides for only one government department - Defense - and the rest have been added on to serve political interests.  

 

Once the triage has been completed, DOGE will go after Herman Axelrod and his compatriots.  They will not be let go - Civil Service and the American Federation of Government Employees union will prevent that - but their divisions, subdivisions, and services will and they will be sent packing along with them.  There will be nothing or no one to stop the wrecking ball. 

Of course Democrats will cry foul, a travesty, closing the very departments and services on which the American people depend for their security, their livelihoods, and their future.  But as one Washington wag observed as he drove down Independence Avenue and passed all the federal departmental buildings, you could eliminate a third of all jobs there, and nobody would notice, especially the American people who for the first time in recent memory would be free from federal intrusion, meddling, and political engineering.  They will be better off in a freer, less regulated, less ponderously over-reaching government behemoth. 

Ronald Reagan famously said, 'Government is not the solution. Government is the problem', and Donald Trump will follow in his footsteps.