I agree that Trump's Schedule F is generally not a good thing, but I find the arguments that our current system has an accountability advantage unpersuasive. Like most Americans, I want a non-partisan, *but accountable*, civil service. "Non-partisan" should not be defined as "unaccountable." But that is exactly what it has become. You make a passing reference to fraud and wasteful spending as valid concerns—and they are—but the real problem is the complete absence of accountability, and the facelessness behind which it hides. You gloss over this significant flaw in our current bureaucracy. Forget about Trump for a moment and speak to the inherently anti-democratic nature of our current leviathan of an administrative state. What would be more productive in our current polarized state would be not just to insulate this bureaucracy from a Trump assault, but to acknowledge its serious flaws and restore it to something that is actually accountable to the people.
I think its worth taking serious what you mean by accountability. Civil servants are, if anything, overly constrained by administrative rules and requirements that their private sector peers do not face. If they mess up, its is politically salient in a way that private sector failures are not (when GSA had an event in Las Vegas, it was covered in the media, leading to new rules that constrained work travel). Every decision is subject to layers of legal review. Your email is subject to FOIA requests. You have to answer to political appointees, and judges, and oversight committees. Generating a new rule takes months or years because of the requirements that must be followed. It is harder to fire civil servants - that much is true. But the idea that they are not subject to accountability is simply wrong.
I agree in part, but that is at best *indirect* accountability. If I screwed up on the job in private sector work, I paid a price, and it was generally commensurate with the scope of my error and our culture. That was one reason I was there: culture and accountability. But simply getting bad PR or new rules or FOIA requests, internal review layers, are not what I mean, as a voting citizen, by accountability. And only a bureaucrat with what amounts to life tenure, or perhaps a lawyer [I am one, I get it], could characterize it as such. What you have described is inconvenience, and possibly, maybe, embarrassment. But that's not accountability.
But all of those you list were started and led by politicians, not civil servants. Civil servants work at the behest of politicians and political appointees, the current administration. And as so well stated earlier, they must adhere to existing laws passed by elected congress and regulations approved by the current administration. And are subject to judicial scrutiny at every move. We need to teach basic civics again as a requirement of high school. I’d wager most Americans don’t understand our government well, not surprisingly, unless they’ve worked in it,
At least 2 were done in direct opposition to the president at the time. Another 2 were disssavowed (in earnest or not) by the president at the time. The other two are more interesting:
Waco was in fact a result of polocy perscruptions reccomended by politicians, I concede that. But the WMD hoax did not start with bush, or even cheney (though I dont buy the official narrative that they were none the wiser) but inside of the security state.
There are also quite a few instances of the security apparatus knowingly misleading the president( gulf of tonkin , U-2 Incident, troop numbers kn syria). Likewise no one was punished
Actually, the WMD hoax was the result of Bush creating a "cell" within the DOD precisely to do an end run around the more measured assessment of the non-political appointees.
Not really true, the yellowcake documents came from outside the govt. The govt then squashed or desconsidered all evidence to the contrary. This was not done only jn one group, but as a concerted effort
I have some sympathy for your concerns Greg, as we discussed here. But Trump is not addressing a reasonable critique of the administrative state and proposing reforms accordingly. He wants to coopt it for his ends He does not offer a useful starting point for a conversation about reform. To the contrary, what he's proposing needs to opposed and resisted if we are to avoid authoritarianism in the country: https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/how-not-to-reform-the-deep-state?r=6jqoy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Unfortunately, there is no basis, no evidence, no analysis behind your sweepingly idiotic claim—just a talking point absorbed from right-wing media and then, like a loyal foot soldier, uncritically echoed on internet comment sections.
Well don't you know that history, science, truth all seem to have a liberal bias?
Civil servants may be loyal foot soldiers for the agencies for which they work but they also have worked over many partisan changes in administrations and Congress. They have institutional The idea that these career employees can just be replaced by people whose only qualification would be loyalty to "The Dear Leader" is ludicrous and will end up with a 19th century level of cronyism and corruption far worse that mere partisan bias.
First, a disclaimer: My viewpoint is informed by the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
That said...
"Career civil servants" don't operate as servants, but as the self-seeking members of a self-seeking bureaucracy -- "expert" components of a nomenklatura that specializes in developing and administering the very standards and procedures that delineate its own expertise.
In other words, far from being apolitical, the nomenklatura (and its allies in academia, the media, the "helping professions," etc.) constitutes a political faction (seeking to approximate a "permanent government") unto itself -- always, however, subsidized by corporate oligarchy (and its decadent progeny of NGOs).
What's needed are checks and balances. Schedule F might not be the ideal vehicle: After all, if Trump is able to remake the federal bureaucracy in his own image, one could well imagine his adversaries longing for an opportunity to fire the ideologues and cronies he's put in place. The entire process stinks. We need to come up with something better.
Meanwhile, however, I'm worried by the prospect of a Brave New World where "experts" increasingly mandate all the activities of the citizenry so as to conform to their definition of "behavioral health."
The more our civil so-called "servants" come to resemble Nurse Ratched, the more they add to the appeal of a Trump who purports to be McMurphy. The entire situation (yes, on both sides!) is insane!
So what's the solution?"
The process may be cyclical. I fear that our entire civilization (at least in terms of the prospects for liberal democracy) might have reached its limit for complexity. We've had a good run, and it seems likely that we (as a species) are speeding headlong toward an evolutionary bottleneck.
As for what happens next? Sorry, that's beyond my pay grade. The event is in the hand of God.
Can I suggest that its worth getting information about government services that does not come from art? kelsey and Kafka is great, but not all of bureaucracy is the Castle or Nurse Ratched. Its not some massive cabal. Most federal employees live outside of DC, they are your neighbors. Research shows that they possess an unusually high intrinsic desire to help people relative to private sector employees. They are harder to fire, yes, but are also accountable in a myriad of ways in their work (think FOIA requests, highly formalized decision processes, Inspectors General oversight).
I'd already expected a response like Ann22's, along the lines of "Would you want a car mechanic performing your brain surgery?" That was not my point. Brain surgeons will always be in demand; my problem is more with the administrators, the busybodies running around with clipboards in a system where the administrative function itself has metastasized.
Try calling your family doctor: "If this an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Please listen closely, since our menu options have recently changed" - and when you finally get a live person, they offer to send an electronic message to your doctor's staff, who'll respond within 48 hours.
(This is true in the private as well as the public sector -- maybe worse -- no argument there! Just try calling your local pharmacy!)
Unfortunately, highly formalized decision processes can all-too-easily add to the cumbersome overhead. In other words, process queens are great at generating more process. The best practitioners don't need to be handed a list of "best practices"; they've internalized the process. By the time we get to the list-makers, the process has ossified. That's how you get a "nomenklatura." It's not a mysterious cabal: see Schumpeter on how capitalism devolves (through corporate bureaucracy) to the administrative State.
As I suggested, Schedule F might not be the solution (and might well make the problem worse) -- but it's not merely a solution looking for a problem. The problem is real -- all the more so if the backlash gives us a Trump.
(I might also mention the already relatively massive pre-WWI German bureaucracy, but I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law.) ;-)
And I appreciate the civility of your response. Let me just say that your point about highly formalized processes is correct. Most of my research is about how to reduce administrative burdens within government and upon the public. There are ways to do this, including providing more flexibility for public servants! But giving that flexibility to allow political hacks to remove institutional capacity does not solve any of the underlying problems. It just makes them worse, adding chaos and removing accountability. The civil service needs to be modernized, not politicized. For more on this point: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-bipartisan-group-of-government
Thank you (again) for your own very civil response -- and for the link! While I've said that solving the "Kafka problem" is beyond my pay grade, you definitely seem to be on the right track. Another Substack added to my subscription list. :-)
I've noticed that in Europe, even a visit to the post office is a far more user-friendly experience than it is in the States. Much of this isn't rocket science (and certainly not of the sort promoted by Elon Musk). Keep up the good work!
"Career civil servants" don't operate as servants, but as the self-seeking members of a self-seeking bureaucracy -- "expert" components of a nomenklatura that specializes in developing and administering the very standards and procedures that delineate its own expertise.
Get real. If you want your next door neighbor, say a social worker, designing highways safe to travel on at 80 miles an hour, fine. If you want corporate scientists to determine safety standards for the pesticides and herbicides the farmer is using on the fields next door or on the food in your refrigerator, fine. Agencies and more likely, individuals within agencies, can be political and politicized, but that should be remedied case by case through agency employee regs or the courts.
I think you've missed my entire point. Please see my response to Don Moynihan, above -- particularly the part debunking the notion of a car mechanic performing brain surgery, and the entire concept of administrative bloat.
No, I don't want "corporate scientists to determine safety standards for the pesticides and herbicides the farmer is using on the fields next door," but there's a good chance that the bureaucrat doing the assessment (or setting the standards) has more in common with the folks at Monsanto than he does with me or the farmer.
As for your neighbor who's a social worker (i.e., busybodies with a clipboard): fire him (along with half the HR Department and all the consultants) and put them to work reading Kafka, or building something useful with their hands.
And let the engineers design highways that are safe at 80 miles an hour, rather than hiring urbanists to implement "road diets" that reduce every thoroughfare to a stop-and-go single-file crawl (whose true objective is to "get people out of their cars"). The bottom line is that the oligrachs don't want a(n electric) car in every garage, when they can stack us in apartments and have us riding bikes or running to catch a bus -- or take us out of the driver's seat (as autonomous drivers) so that we can be picked up by "autonomous cars" that will take us to dinner at whatever restaurants have paid to be on their list. If the social workers should be reading Kafka, these folks should be listening to odes to driving from the Beach Boys or Springsteen. ;-)
I think your point about regulatory capture of bureaucrats by industry is absolutely correct. There is a revolving door between the private sector and gov agencies. But one of the sad things about Schedule F is that instead of talking about that capture, we have to now spend time discussing capture by an authoritarian.
If anything, regulatory capture would get worse on Schedule F. Corporate donors could just call an appointee and say that a certain regulator is not a team player, and suggest they would be more comfortable working with someone else. No protection for employees to push back against corporate wishes.
The irony of course being the deconstruction of the patronage state came in the wake of the assassination of James Garfield and its undoing will be done at the hands of another "Republican."
The "Blob" as the great James Howard Kunstler calls it is a cancer on America. It needs to be excised. I'm excited about Elon having the opportunity to carve out the tumor.
Next time you drink a glass of clean tap water, thank a civil,servant. Next time you see a hydroelectric dam, Next time you are awed by our National Parks ( if that penetrates your cold soul) , Next time you drive our highways, Next time you fish a clean river, Next time you fly safely from point a to b, next time you are treated at a clinic or hospital, next time you breathe clean air….thank a civil servant.
Yes, it’s great to see a millionaire and a billionaire up there scratching each others’ political back, isn’t ? Musk is drooling over the possibilities….Story and scourge of American capitalism.
Source? Many agencies have required their workforce to go back to the office. Some were remote prior to Covid such as USPTO. If someone is going to slack off, they will, no matter what location.
I agree that Trump's Schedule F is generally not a good thing, but I find the arguments that our current system has an accountability advantage unpersuasive. Like most Americans, I want a non-partisan, *but accountable*, civil service. "Non-partisan" should not be defined as "unaccountable." But that is exactly what it has become. You make a passing reference to fraud and wasteful spending as valid concerns—and they are—but the real problem is the complete absence of accountability, and the facelessness behind which it hides. You gloss over this significant flaw in our current bureaucracy. Forget about Trump for a moment and speak to the inherently anti-democratic nature of our current leviathan of an administrative state. What would be more productive in our current polarized state would be not just to insulate this bureaucracy from a Trump assault, but to acknowledge its serious flaws and restore it to something that is actually accountable to the people.
I think its worth taking serious what you mean by accountability. Civil servants are, if anything, overly constrained by administrative rules and requirements that their private sector peers do not face. If they mess up, its is politically salient in a way that private sector failures are not (when GSA had an event in Las Vegas, it was covered in the media, leading to new rules that constrained work travel). Every decision is subject to layers of legal review. Your email is subject to FOIA requests. You have to answer to political appointees, and judges, and oversight committees. Generating a new rule takes months or years because of the requirements that must be followed. It is harder to fire civil servants - that much is true. But the idea that they are not subject to accountability is simply wrong.
I agree in part, but that is at best *indirect* accountability. If I screwed up on the job in private sector work, I paid a price, and it was generally commensurate with the scope of my error and our culture. That was one reason I was there: culture and accountability. But simply getting bad PR or new rules or FOIA requests, internal review layers, are not what I mean, as a voting citizen, by accountability. And only a bureaucrat with what amounts to life tenure, or perhaps a lawyer [I am one, I get it], could characterize it as such. What you have described is inconvenience, and possibly, maybe, embarrassment. But that's not accountability.
Thank you! Your comment is the truth, and an important one.
Accountability means you get ounished when you err,or certainly at least when you err kn pourpouse, Who got punished for the following “mistakes”?
Fast and furious
Iraq WMDs
Operation chokepoint
Russia hoax
Waco
Fake news of Russian bounties on american soldiers
But all of those you list were started and led by politicians, not civil servants. Civil servants work at the behest of politicians and political appointees, the current administration. And as so well stated earlier, they must adhere to existing laws passed by elected congress and regulations approved by the current administration. And are subject to judicial scrutiny at every move. We need to teach basic civics again as a requirement of high school. I’d wager most Americans don’t understand our government well, not surprisingly, unless they’ve worked in it,
At least 2 were done in direct opposition to the president at the time. Another 2 were disssavowed (in earnest or not) by the president at the time. The other two are more interesting:
Waco was in fact a result of polocy perscruptions reccomended by politicians, I concede that. But the WMD hoax did not start with bush, or even cheney (though I dont buy the official narrative that they were none the wiser) but inside of the security state.
There are also quite a few instances of the security apparatus knowingly misleading the president( gulf of tonkin , U-2 Incident, troop numbers kn syria). Likewise no one was punished
Actually, the WMD hoax was the result of Bush creating a "cell" within the DOD precisely to do an end run around the more measured assessment of the non-political appointees.
Not really true, the yellowcake documents came from outside the govt. The govt then squashed or desconsidered all evidence to the contrary. This was not done only jn one group, but as a concerted effort
I have some sympathy for your concerns Greg, as we discussed here. But Trump is not addressing a reasonable critique of the administrative state and proposing reforms accordingly. He wants to coopt it for his ends He does not offer a useful starting point for a conversation about reform. To the contrary, what he's proposing needs to opposed and resisted if we are to avoid authoritarianism in the country: https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/how-not-to-reform-the-deep-state?r=6jqoy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is rather hilarious considering most federal civil servants are CURRENTLY “loyal foot soldiers”—to the swampy left.
Unfortunately, there is no basis, no evidence, no analysis behind your sweepingly idiotic claim—just a talking point absorbed from right-wing media and then, like a loyal foot soldier, uncritically echoed on internet comment sections.
lol - you don't live, work or know anyone in DC?
So you think all civil service people live and work in DC? 🤣
Well don't you know that history, science, truth all seem to have a liberal bias?
Civil servants may be loyal foot soldiers for the agencies for which they work but they also have worked over many partisan changes in administrations and Congress. They have institutional The idea that these career employees can just be replaced by people whose only qualification would be loyalty to "The Dear Leader" is ludicrous and will end up with a 19th century level of cronyism and corruption far worse that mere partisan bias.
You said it well. Thank you.
That is such an ignorant comment. Right wing lies, among the many.
First, a disclaimer: My viewpoint is informed by the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
That said...
"Career civil servants" don't operate as servants, but as the self-seeking members of a self-seeking bureaucracy -- "expert" components of a nomenklatura that specializes in developing and administering the very standards and procedures that delineate its own expertise.
In other words, far from being apolitical, the nomenklatura (and its allies in academia, the media, the "helping professions," etc.) constitutes a political faction (seeking to approximate a "permanent government") unto itself -- always, however, subsidized by corporate oligarchy (and its decadent progeny of NGOs).
What's needed are checks and balances. Schedule F might not be the ideal vehicle: After all, if Trump is able to remake the federal bureaucracy in his own image, one could well imagine his adversaries longing for an opportunity to fire the ideologues and cronies he's put in place. The entire process stinks. We need to come up with something better.
Meanwhile, however, I'm worried by the prospect of a Brave New World where "experts" increasingly mandate all the activities of the citizenry so as to conform to their definition of "behavioral health."
The more our civil so-called "servants" come to resemble Nurse Ratched, the more they add to the appeal of a Trump who purports to be McMurphy. The entire situation (yes, on both sides!) is insane!
So what's the solution?"
The process may be cyclical. I fear that our entire civilization (at least in terms of the prospects for liberal democracy) might have reached its limit for complexity. We've had a good run, and it seems likely that we (as a species) are speeding headlong toward an evolutionary bottleneck.
As for what happens next? Sorry, that's beyond my pay grade. The event is in the hand of God.
Can I suggest that its worth getting information about government services that does not come from art? kelsey and Kafka is great, but not all of bureaucracy is the Castle or Nurse Ratched. Its not some massive cabal. Most federal employees live outside of DC, they are your neighbors. Research shows that they possess an unusually high intrinsic desire to help people relative to private sector employees. They are harder to fire, yes, but are also accountable in a myriad of ways in their work (think FOIA requests, highly formalized decision processes, Inspectors General oversight).
I appreciate the response!
I'd already expected a response like Ann22's, along the lines of "Would you want a car mechanic performing your brain surgery?" That was not my point. Brain surgeons will always be in demand; my problem is more with the administrators, the busybodies running around with clipboards in a system where the administrative function itself has metastasized.
Try calling your family doctor: "If this an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Please listen closely, since our menu options have recently changed" - and when you finally get a live person, they offer to send an electronic message to your doctor's staff, who'll respond within 48 hours.
(This is true in the private as well as the public sector -- maybe worse -- no argument there! Just try calling your local pharmacy!)
Unfortunately, highly formalized decision processes can all-too-easily add to the cumbersome overhead. In other words, process queens are great at generating more process. The best practitioners don't need to be handed a list of "best practices"; they've internalized the process. By the time we get to the list-makers, the process has ossified. That's how you get a "nomenklatura." It's not a mysterious cabal: see Schumpeter on how capitalism devolves (through corporate bureaucracy) to the administrative State.
As I suggested, Schedule F might not be the solution (and might well make the problem worse) -- but it's not merely a solution looking for a problem. The problem is real -- all the more so if the backlash gives us a Trump.
(I might also mention the already relatively massive pre-WWI German bureaucracy, but I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law.) ;-)
And I appreciate the civility of your response. Let me just say that your point about highly formalized processes is correct. Most of my research is about how to reduce administrative burdens within government and upon the public. There are ways to do this, including providing more flexibility for public servants! But giving that flexibility to allow political hacks to remove institutional capacity does not solve any of the underlying problems. It just makes them worse, adding chaos and removing accountability. The civil service needs to be modernized, not politicized. For more on this point: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-bipartisan-group-of-government
Thank you (again) for your own very civil response -- and for the link! While I've said that solving the "Kafka problem" is beyond my pay grade, you definitely seem to be on the right track. Another Substack added to my subscription list. :-)
I've noticed that in Europe, even a visit to the post office is a far more user-friendly experience than it is in the States. Much of this isn't rocket science (and certainly not of the sort promoted by Elon Musk). Keep up the good work!
"Career civil servants" don't operate as servants, but as the self-seeking members of a self-seeking bureaucracy -- "expert" components of a nomenklatura that specializes in developing and administering the very standards and procedures that delineate its own expertise.
Get real. If you want your next door neighbor, say a social worker, designing highways safe to travel on at 80 miles an hour, fine. If you want corporate scientists to determine safety standards for the pesticides and herbicides the farmer is using on the fields next door or on the food in your refrigerator, fine. Agencies and more likely, individuals within agencies, can be political and politicized, but that should be remedied case by case through agency employee regs or the courts.
I think you've missed my entire point. Please see my response to Don Moynihan, above -- particularly the part debunking the notion of a car mechanic performing brain surgery, and the entire concept of administrative bloat.
No, I don't want "corporate scientists to determine safety standards for the pesticides and herbicides the farmer is using on the fields next door," but there's a good chance that the bureaucrat doing the assessment (or setting the standards) has more in common with the folks at Monsanto than he does with me or the farmer.
As for your neighbor who's a social worker (i.e., busybodies with a clipboard): fire him (along with half the HR Department and all the consultants) and put them to work reading Kafka, or building something useful with their hands.
And let the engineers design highways that are safe at 80 miles an hour, rather than hiring urbanists to implement "road diets" that reduce every thoroughfare to a stop-and-go single-file crawl (whose true objective is to "get people out of their cars"). The bottom line is that the oligrachs don't want a(n electric) car in every garage, when they can stack us in apartments and have us riding bikes or running to catch a bus -- or take us out of the driver's seat (as autonomous drivers) so that we can be picked up by "autonomous cars" that will take us to dinner at whatever restaurants have paid to be on their list. If the social workers should be reading Kafka, these folks should be listening to odes to driving from the Beach Boys or Springsteen. ;-)
I think your point about regulatory capture of bureaucrats by industry is absolutely correct. There is a revolving door between the private sector and gov agencies. But one of the sad things about Schedule F is that instead of talking about that capture, we have to now spend time discussing capture by an authoritarian.
If anything, regulatory capture would get worse on Schedule F. Corporate donors could just call an appointee and say that a certain regulator is not a team player, and suggest they would be more comfortable working with someone else. No protection for employees to push back against corporate wishes.
“Libertans” for govt bureaucracy
Excellent review of the threat.
The irony of course being the deconstruction of the patronage state came in the wake of the assassination of James Garfield and its undoing will be done at the hands of another "Republican."
The "Blob" as the great James Howard Kunstler calls it is a cancer on America. It needs to be excised. I'm excited about Elon having the opportunity to carve out the tumor.
It’s this thinking right here that is a cancer on our society.
Somehow, every new reply of yours has managed to be worse than the last. Remarkable.
It's a gift, my friend, thank you for noting my singular talent!
Next time you drink a glass of clean tap water, thank a civil,servant. Next time you see a hydroelectric dam, Next time you are awed by our National Parks ( if that penetrates your cold soul) , Next time you drive our highways, Next time you fish a clean river, Next time you fly safely from point a to b, next time you are treated at a clinic or hospital, next time you breathe clean air….thank a civil servant.
Yes, it’s great to see a millionaire and a billionaire up there scratching each others’ political back, isn’t ? Musk is drooling over the possibilities….Story and scourge of American capitalism.
Are you one of the migrants getting a free condo with flat-screens?
https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1842209731428978952
Most DC bureaucrats are still remote, correct? Which means they're napping, not working.
Source? Many agencies have required their workforce to go back to the office. Some were remote prior to Covid such as USPTO. If someone is going to slack off, they will, no matter what location.
Fuck him we should put him in jail now