How Bureaucracies Work

Commentary

I’ve been curious about the subject of bureaucracy for as long as I can remember. It’s obvious that they run governments at all levels and define our experience with governments. That’s unavoidable when the government is tasked with so much. And those bureaucracies build more of the same in all institutions managed by governments.

Today, there are roughly 444 federal agencies in Washington, with millions of employees and contracted service providers. The labyrinth of departments, rules, processes, and relationships within them defies description and even understanding.

Even as a young student, I read every book on the topic, from Max Weber (1922) to Ludwig von Mises (1944) to Gordon Tullock (1965). Here, you learn how they are financed, how they are established as insular bubbles, the mind-numbing processes that constitute their daily work, how most people loathe them but no one knows how to live without them. “Iron cages,” Weber called them.

The literature is interesting, but nothing compares to actually experiencing one. There is, of course, the Department of Motor Vehicles, something about which everyone knows. Odd places, all of them.

The customer feels like an annoyance. The employees, who might otherwise be great people, seem mostly unhappy. The main job is ticking boxes, even when it makes no sense. No one seems to be in charge of the whole. It’s a strange machine that just runs without human volition, gears grinding away without regard to rationality or effect.

We know this one well because we are forced to deal with it. Most of them we try to avoid as best we can.

Years later, I found myself in a journalism program in Washington at a time when the agencies were mostly open to researchers and even the public. No more, of course, but those were different times. I was looking into a topic related to transportation and went to the Department of Transportation.

The experience was exceedingly strange. The halls were long, dreary, and musty, barren of art except for pictures of the come-and-go agency head. The place seemed to lack all energy and even humanity. I got to my destination, and there was one older man there, feet on the desk, smoking a pipe. He was somehow in charge of something, the details of which escape me.

We spoke for an hour, but he wasn’t particularly engaging. It was almost as if he didn’t have a real job at all. He certainly didn’t seem to know much, even though he had been there for years and was ostensibly in charge. There were thousands of others just like him, quietly inhabiting nooks and crannies of this giant structure, and probably most were like this person, bored and surviving until retirement.

What puzzled me then and puzzles me now is how it is that these agencies and their activities are rarely—if ever—given a grilling by the media. Washington is packed with journalists looking for stories. Why wasn’t the obvious waste and absurdity of these tax-funded palaces the subject of exposés by the journalistic armies? They are mostly just ignored—or, worse, they are used to generate stories, and such a source naturally evades criticism.

That’s where I left it decades ago, and these bureaucracies have only grown in budgets, reach, staff, and responsibilities. I came to learn that federal law protects most of the employees from termination. You have to do something truly awful to get canned. It’s rare. In short, this million-man army is permanent.

To be sure, the president can appoint agency heads, and they can have a staff. But all the institutional knowledge is with the permanent staff. The political appointees—mostly ignored by everyone working there except to be amused by them—are pretty much powerless unless they cooperate with legacy staff. Political appointees are easily driven out with leaks to the press and a media frenzy that harms the president.

The bureaucracies know this. They specialize in surviving every attempt to break them, especially when it comes from a politically appointed agency head. The “director” gets a great parking place, fields media inquiries, and enjoys temporary stardom on the Washington cocktail circuit before moving on to a lucrative position in the industry that his former agency regulates.

This is not a cynical take. This is just how it always works. The notion that any agency head is actually in charge is mostly an illusion.

The Trump administration pledged to be different. It would break the deep state, uproot waste and corruption, bring the bureaucracies to heel, and even abolish whole agencies. This was a major part of its appeal. I was highly optimistic that this could happen with enough focus and determination.

The sticking points came early on. Courts from all over the country issued strange edicts declaring that the president cannot manage the executive branch, even though the U.S. Constitution states that this is the first job of the president. It’s literally in the first sentence of Article II! The Supreme Court was enlisted several times to weigh in and said the obvious thing, namely that the president is actually in charge.

That much settled (more or less) the next problem, which is funding. Congress is the branch that throws money at all these agencies. Is the president obligated to do the bidding of Congress even though the agencies are not technically listed under the legislative branch? The Department of Government Efficiency tried to cut the spending and even delete whole lines of fraud and waste, but these efforts were thwarted.

So you can see the snarl here. Let’s say you take a job as head of a business, but you have no control over the finances of that business. That’s a serious problem that is destined to lead to conflict. Someone will have to fix that before the business can function.

The Founders set up checks and balances, and that’s a great idea, so what is it that goes wrong here? The problems really began in the late 19th century, once Congress started creating and funding executive agencies. Nothing like this exists in the Constitution, so it stands to reason that the Constitution did not address this problem.

Then-President Thomas Jefferson dealt with a problem that is analogous here. He was allocated money for the Louisiana Purchase and a possible war. He did not need the money, so he simply refused to spend it. Everyone understood why: He was head of the executive branch.

“The sum of $50,000 appropriated by Congress for providing gunboats remains unexpended,” he wrote Congress in 1803. “The favorable and peaceable turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary.”

It was all fine back in those days! These days, it’s another matter. The struggles between the entrenched bureaucracy and the Trump administration are unending and seemingly intractable until the Supreme Court can step in and legalize impoundment by the trillions.

Meanwhile, we have many agency heads right now who are daily wrangling with grim and arrogant agencies determined to ignore everything coming from anyone elected by the people or appointed by the people’s representatives. They especially have it in for Trump, who has declared himself to be the enemy of all bureaucracy.

This is the core of the drama with which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dealing as head of Health and Human Services (HHS). He had tapped a group of top experts and fanned them out to the agencies under the HHS, including the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are daily under fire, from the legacy bureaucrats and the industries that have their hooks in the agencies.

These problems are far from being resolved and likely won’t be in the entire Trump term as president. Even if the effort mostly fails for now, the public is now newly aware that the system does not work. That realization is not going away.

Draining the swamp means destabilizing and uprooting the whole of the administrative state. This cannot happen easily, but it must happen. The systems in place are designed to be impervious to change. Regardless, change is coming, if not in the coming months or years, then eventually.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.