A Primer on Bureaucracy
As usual, liberals and conservatives are both wrong
Within the context of Elon Musks’s and Donald Trump’s attempts to slash the federal bureaucracy, and the utterly-predictable-because-wholly-partisan cheering and booing of that effort, I’d like to present a more nuanced perspective of the federal bureaucracy – really, any bureaucracy – than you’re going to get from either camp or their respective media outrage machines. I’m not going to address my own doubts about the legality, motivation, and ultimate effects of their actions. I have doubts about each of those things, but they’re not my focus here.
Three Visions of Bureaucracy
The following descriptions of the liberal and conservative visions of bureaucracy are mildly simplified caricatures and every individual may vary in specific details of their perspective, but they accurately represent the gist of those visions.
The Liberal and Conservative Visions
The Liberal Vision of Bureaucracy
Most government programs (with a handful of exceptions) are created in response to democratic demand to meet real social needs that can only be effectively handled at the national level, from environmental protection to various kinds of social welfare to education to national security. Bureaucrats - government employees working in the executive branch – are generally honest and well-meaning experts trying to do their best to manage the important tasks assigned to them. Civil service protections are important to ensure a professional and expert workforce continually threatened by badly-intentioned conservatives, who would destroy vital programs by firing qualified people and either not replacing them or replacing them with other badly-intentioned political appointees whose goal is to undermine them. Without these programs, America will revert to a hellhole of unmet societal needs.
The Conservative Vision of Bureaucracy (shared by many libertarians)
Most governmental programs (with a handful of exceptions that, of course, include those that benefit the individual conservative) are entirely wasteful and ought to be eliminated or at least radically cut down in scope. Bureaucrats are lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and don’t give a damn about what the American public wants. Civil service protections enable this bad behavior, making it impossible to clean up the government. These programs, and the bureaucrats who seek social control through regulation of our every activity, hate America and are trying to turn it into a hellhole of socialism and fascistic social control.
As usual, each side has enough foundation in facts that they can always retreat to safe ground when their less-solid claims are punctured, creating a motte-and-bailey challenge to the potential for reasoned democratic deliberation about the federal bureaucracy.
The Public Choice vision (also shared by many libertarians)
Bureaucrats are neither noble nor ignoble, neither angelic nor demonic. They tend to be relatively hard-working, and most are as honest as anyone else, but they may be too idealistically committed to the programs they implement. They are indeed generally experts, not idiots, with knowledge gained through years of experience, but they may have tunnel vision or have overlearned their area of specialty to the point they are incapable of considering any challenges to their knowledge.
That level of expertise can lead them to disregard the opinions of both their appointed superiors and the general public. They may not respect their nominal superiors, who often have less knowledge. And having civil service protection, they can often outlast the political appointees, who will be leaving the building for good long before the bureaucrats do, by slow-walking demanded changes in policy or implementation. They also frequently do not respect the general public, who they correctly know to be ignoramuses about their issues. It’s not that they simply desire social control and power – nobody genuflects to a bureaucrat at a cocktail party, after all – but that they desire to make the world a better place. But it’s their vision of a better world, not necessarily the vision that the people’s representatives have asked for.
Being merely human, they also respond to incentives. Unfortunately, Civil Service protection frequently forbids creating good incentives such as rewards for excellent performance and punishments for bad performance. There’s a reason for that, which is the potential for those to be used for merely political reward and punishment. But a powerful incentive they do have is to be as free from oversight as possible. None of us like having a boss breathing down our necks, especially if that boss doesn’t know the job as well as we do. Autonomy is ideal.
Autonomy is also the technocratic vision (often shared by liberals). The reality that technocratic autonomy can be anti-democratic, that it can lead to all the dangers that a lack of oversight poses in any context, is not generally a concern of the bureaucrats. Others might act badly without oversight, they might think, but we, in my agency, won’t; we’re good people doing good things.
One way autonomy can cause bureaucrats to act badly is that it enables them to de facto set policy without being accountable to the public they are supposed to serve. It’s natural and inevitable that bureaucrats with some degree of autonomy push the envelope on policy, transforming Congress’s vague vision into their own desired outcomes. In traditional policy theory, it was thought that legislators made policy and bureaucrats simply implemented it without acting on independent policy preferences. That perspective was exploded long ago, and we now know that policy implementation bleeds into policy formation, particularly when legislators create vague goals (often hoping that bureaucrats will do the hard work of deciding on the details).
These different perspectives on bureaucracy explain the divided reaction to the Supreme Court’s rejection of “Chevron deference” (deference to agencies’ own interpretation of the scope of their authority). Liberals objected because they believe bureaucrats are well-meaning experts striving to meet critical needs. Conservatives cheered because they believe bureaucrats are control freaks. Public choice theorists mostly approved, I think, because they recognize that even well-meaning people ought not be allowed to be the judge of their own scope of power.
The great danger there is that bureaucrats can substitute their own value judgments for that of their bosses. It’s one thing for experts to say, “OK, the public wants X, and here’s a cost-effective way to get there within the value constraints imposed by Congress.” It’s quite another to say, “Here’s what the public ought to want, so that’s what we’re going to give them, whether they like it or not.”
Another way bureaucrats can act badly is to become sloppy in monitoring programs and spending. There are two issues here. One is a carelessness about costs and benefits. Although these can be hard to measure, in general we would like all programs to have a positive benefit to cost ratio. But true believers in programs often resist benefit-cost analyses, fearing what they might find. The real benefits of programs we like, we tell ourselves, are not measurable, and because we know in our hearts that this program is good, we know the real benefits outweigh the costs. This is, of course, self-serving bullshit, and in no way limited to bureaucrats. But, again, bureaucrats are just like us.
The other issue is a carelessness about tracking spending. This overlaps with not doing benefit-cost analyses, because unless one’s feet are held to the fire, almost nobody wants to spend their time carefully reviewing the effectiveness of their favored programs. It’s not intrinsically rewarding work for most people, it is potentially threatening to their programs (or even their jobs), and there are other things they’d rather spend their time doing. This is where corruption comes in, but it’s not usually the corruption of the bureaucrats; it’s the corruption of people who figure out how to illicitly benefit from the program, and it’s simply bureaucratic inattentiveness – there being no rewards for attentiveness – that allows it to prosper.
And to some extent, we should have sympathy with bureaucrats there. What conservatives realize that liberals too often overlook is that anytime goodies are handed out, there’s an incentive to get some despite not deserving a share. Every government spending program incentivizes some bad non-governmental actors, that is, thieves. It’s a pain in the ass to monitor and capture thieves. It’s much easier to not look for them, tell oneself they’re just a small problem and don’t really matter in the big picture. That’s not evil, corrupt, or stupid in itself; it’s just psychological self-interest. It’s the same problem academics face in dealing with cheating students; nobody becomes a college prof because they really want to be a cop, and for many, it’s the most demoralizing part of the job.
So What Does This Mean?
The overall point of this is to say that bureaucracies do need oversight. Technocracy is not just anti-democratic but creates bad incentives even for good people. Liberals who ignore that reality are not thinking carefully. And of course they don’t hold that position consistently – they want bureaucratic autonomy for agencies that are pursuing goals they agree with, but not for agencies pursuing goals they disagree with (even if those other goals are as strongly favored by the public). But contra conservatives, that doesn’t mean bureaucrats are either stupid or evil. It just means bureaucrats act as you would likely act in their position, and you’re no angel.
Bureaucracy is necessary so long as we demand the federal government engage in large public policy activities, from farm subsidies to national parks to highway funding to food and drug regulation to etc., etc., etc. But as we demand more policy, and particularly as the policy issues become too complex for Congress to understand and reach any more refined agreement on than “make things good on this issue,” it becomes both metastatic and sclerotic. And then it is no longer truly democratically responsive. That’s as true for the EPA as for the CIA. Oversight is necessary, but it’s hard.
And transforming the bureaucracy into an efficient operation is not possible. Simply cutting the number of staff does not create efficiency. If you are employing five people to move one wheelbarrow of dirt, then yes, eliminating staff does so. But that’s frequently not the case, and if eliminating staff means the wheelbarrow doesn’t get moved because the one person tasked with and given the time to move it has been fired, then you’re not improving efficiency at all.
And bureaucratic efficiencies exist for a reason: the obsessive rule-compliance does actually limit corruption; thievery. It doesn’t eliminate it, but it makes it harder. Whenever a government decides that an emergency requires suspending open-bidding on contracts, for example, we find the rate of thievery skyrocketing. And that’s the public’s money, so that matters. (That doesn’t mean I’m a big fan of rule compliance, but that’s a topic for another day.)
So bureaucracy is inevitable, and the more we ask government to do the more bureaucracy we’ll get. But as economists like to say, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, and the tradeoff of hiring a bunch of people to do the work you want done is that we also get the inevitable problem of bureaucracy.
Ranting about it, as conservatives are wont to do, is childish. Ignoring it, as liberals are wont to do, is naïve. I prefer a politics that is neither childish nor naïve, but I’m not childishly naïve enough to expect we’ll ever achieve it.