Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently addressed the issue of what happens after the Trump administration’s assault on America’s administrative state is over. The work needed to restore the country’s governing capacity, he argued, involves more than just putting the bureaucratic Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The next president can’t “go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say: ‘Here you go. I give you the world as it looked in 2023,’” Buttigieg said.
The Trump team is “destroying a lot of good, important things,” he added. “They’re destroying some useless things, too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.”
The list of “good, important things” destroyed by Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding attack on government is long:
- More than 200,000 federal jobs were eliminated. That includes 7,000 employees at the Social Security Administration, another 7,000 at the IRS, 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health, and 1,300 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. No federal departments escaped the slashing, and some agencies saw virtually all of their positions eliminated.
- The U.S. Agency for International Development was dismantled, bringing an abrupt halt to food aid and disease prevention efforts all over the world.
- Employees at other agencies, such as the National Nuclear Security Administration, were fired without an understanding of exactly what they did, necessitating a panicked rehiring effort.
- Contracts and grants were summarily canceled, sometimes after using rudimentary artificial intelligence programs to identify programs affiliated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
When DOGE burst onto the scene, chaos ensued. Yet the crusade failed to come close to Musk’s promise to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget. DOGE’s claim to have saved taxpayers more than $200 billion is suspect due to accounting errors. And even if that figure is accurate, it represents a small percentage of the federal budget. DOGE was a thoroughly haphazard operation, lacking any significant degree of planning or strategy. It operated according to the whims of Musk—then one of Trump’s strongest allies—and of Trump himself.
In that sense, DOGE was a key part of the president’s shift to what scholar Jonathan Rauch has argued is a form of government new to the United States: patrimonialism. This type of regime is based on personal loyalty to a country’s leader, driven by the leader’s ability to dole out rewards and punishments. This explains why Trump has moved so aggressively to expand his own power via executive orders and to politicize the career civil service, especially at the senior executive level.
The enemy of patrimonialism is bureaucracy, a well-functioning administrative state that is not driven by personal fealty to a ruler. A highly functioning country of the size and influence of the United States needs bureaucracy. It requires rules and regulations, not just norms, to provide guardrails against ill-advised policymaking and public administration—or worse, corruption and illegality. It needs a large cadre of nonpartisan experts to administer complex programs and provide support to policymakers.
It’s easy to take for granted what the federal government, and its attendant bureaucracy, have accomplished. In just the last two decades, federal agencies have:
- Facilitated the development of a covid vaccine
- Averted financial catastrophe in 2008
- Expanded access to health insurance
- Improved children’s health
- Increased infrastructure investment
- Significantly improved highway safety
That’s just a short list of achievements at the federal level. The first step toward ensuring government can take on these kinds of challenges again is restoration. That doesn’t mean trying to piece things together exactly as they were before, but it does involve reopening shuttered agencies like USAID and rehiring the workers necessary for agencies like the IRS to do their jobs.
In their popular and influential book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer a critique of bureaucracy from the left. Government at all levels, they argue, has prized procedure over results. Layer upon layer of regulations have made it too easy for opponents of initiatives to manipulate systems so that action is all but impossible.
It’s not just conservatives who feel this way. None other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., said last year, “If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy—absolutely correct. It is terrible.…That is common sense.”
The solution to that problem is not dramatically fewer bureaucrats and more constraints on their actions. It’s redesigning systems so they don’t overemphasize laudable goals such as fairness and diversity at the expense of efficient operations and real-world results.
For example, it has long been too hard to hire federal employees, and to fire those that aren’t measuring up. That’s a result of risk aversion baked into a system encrusted with restrictions on managers’ ability to manage. The solution is more trust in them to do their jobs and to help elected leaders implement their agendas while following the rule of law.
This kind of recalibration of government is essential. And it can’t be accomplished with a chainsaw.
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