What The Hell America!

The pressures American civil servants face also stem from the fact that, contrary to the right’s nightmare, the U.S. bureaucracy is distinctively nonautonomous—uniquely permeable by and subject to the influence of outside political forces and organized interests. (This is true even under normal circumstances, when a world-historically rich tech oligarch isn’t empowered to wander agency to agency yanking out wires.) It is a truism of scholarship on U.S. political development, but of no less momentous importance for being so, that the United States democratized before it bureaucratized. Whereas, through the crucible of continual warfare, Western European nations developed powerful and professionalized administrative states long before they transitioned to mass democracy, the United States across the nineteenth century grew as a sprawling democratic polity and economic juggernaut without building out a proportionally large and powerful central administration in government. (What the national state did in the nineteenth century—and it did plenty—it typically did indirectly and invisibly, delegating to states, civil society actors, and private individuals the task of carrying out major state projects like continental expansion and capitalist development.) The preexistence of a precocious and robust democratic polity meant that once Congress finally began, piece by piece, to construct new bureaucratic institutions staffed by large merit-based cadres of experts, it was compelled continually to ensure that this new administrative state would be reined in, watched over, and suffused by political forces.

In comparative perspective, the American civil service is lean, and leaned on. U.S. federal agencies include a vastly higher number of political appointees—approximately 4,000 officials—who occupy several more layers of organizational leadership than is typical in other long-standing democracies. The ranks of the federal civilian workforce, hovering around three million, have barely budged in absolute numbers and outright declined as a share of the American labor force for the last 50 years—during the same period that government expenditures have nearly quintupled. (This is why the fiscal rationale for DOGE’s assault on the bureaucracy is so absurd—you could eliminate every single civil service position in government, and the impact of the savings, about 5 percent of overall federal spending, would barely rise above a rounding error.) The work that civil servants perform, moreover, is enmeshed in thickets of political intervention and interest-group pressure. As formalized in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, the process by which bureaucrats formulate rules to implement legislation entails mechanisms for public input and review and extensive opportunity for appeal through litigation. And in their day-to-day tasks, the procedural red tape so often bemoaned as emblematic of bureaucrats’ own inefficiency typically comes as the by-product of both Congress’s and the president’s efforts to monitor civil servants’ behavior and limit their autonomy. Little wonder they tend to keep their heads down.

As a trope about government, “waste, fraud, and abuse” is a hardy perennial, and it’s no surprise to see it now utilized in service of a right-wing government’s assault on perceived enemies burrowed in the organs of state. And just the thing that makes the bureaucratic hagiography in Who Is Government? such a novelty—the pervasive stereotype of government workers as nonentities pushing pencils on the people’s dime—would seem likely to make DOGE and the broader assault on bureaucracy good politics as well. But, remarkably, the sheer scale and careening recklessness of what the Trump administration has already executed are generating public blowback that only promises to swell as the rolling effects of service disruptions, benefit interruptions, and job terminations are felt in every congressional district in the country. In his classic account of the development of federal administrative capacity in the United States, Building a New American State, political scientist Stephen Skowronek described nineteenth-century Americans as lacking a “sense of the state”—a felt connection to a visible and pervasive government exercising power. Whether or not they’ve consciously thought about it in this way, the gambit currently being carried out by Trump, Vought, and Musk amounts to a kind of bet that Americans in the twenty-first century still lack that sense of a state—of day-to-day connections to the federal government that they’ll miss when they’re destroyed. As constituents flood town halls and congressional inboxes with complaints about lapses in VA health services, skyrocketing wait times at the Social Security phone lines, and friends and neighbors tossed out of work, that bet looks less and less likely to pay off.