The Complexity of This Machine

22 Feb, 2025

Back in the 1950s, one of the cool things in American political science was to analyze the newly expanded bureaucracy. The bureaucratic state had ballooned as a part of the war effort and was still heavily part of the American way of life up until Reagan started this downward trajectory in the 80s ¹. The 1950s public administration scholars had some concerns about the administrative state: that its bureaucrats were interested in their own positions more than the organization as a whole, that they valued conformity and would thusly make society more conformist, and that it would be threatening to democracy. It is true that there are different interests for citizens and bureaucrats, but there were substantial things that were forgotten in the fright of the bureaucratic state ².

While bureaucrats are often seen as bespectacled busy-bodies or Kafkaesque nightmare people, they serve some pretty important goals. As our administrative state becomes more and more complex you do need people inside the state to manage edge-cases and day-to-day operations. Each complexity isn’t a mistake; they come to us from the blind-spots of our everyday lives. If a merchant sells you something and later cancels this sale because it turns out they didn’t have the product, this would be considered illegal in most countries. This case could then go up into an agency body and the agency could help the consumer maintain their rights. These are typical consumer protection rights which are regulated by the now gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Most decent people recognize that it is in the public good to have consumer protection rights, right to privacy, property rights, and other kinds of rights. But how does one manage rights on your own? It is simply impossible.

The government, for whatever you would like to say about it, does have that sublime power to tell those who violates your rights to pay you back or to stop whatever they are doing. It depends on the intents and laws the government has to uphold through its executive branch, but when it is done right you know it. The government can also be weaponized against its people as you see in fascist and other authoritarian states. What fascists (or DOGE-employees) fail to see is that as society get more and more complex its caseload will expand and not contract. Trying to gut a bureaucracy doesn’t lead to efficiency – it leads to a badly managed bureaucracy and in turn, a worse society.

But the American government has – since the 80s – cut and cut of its most valued possession for maintenance. How do you maintain roads, bridges, and dams without the funds, personnel, and knowledge required to do just that? How do you create an energy grid that doesn’t turn off? And how do you prevent pathogens from contaminating food? Last year (or the year before that I forget) there was an acute shortage of baby formula. Many babies are dependent on formula and mothers might want to have the convenience of having it if they need it. But because of understaffing, this crisis was prolonged way longer than it should’ve been. So much for consumer freedom and abundance. When you cut in agencies it doesn’t become more efficient, it becomes less efficient because you have to deal with the fallout of failed preventive measures.

A bureaucrat doesn’t merely sit on his ass and collect a paycheck. They have a varied list of tasks that they have the responsibility for. Once upon a time we were concerned about the amount of money that a government can spend on its employees. Say you were a government employee on its way to a conference at a different state, how much money does the government agency gets to use on the networking dinner afterwards? These rules are regulated either internally at the agency or government-wide. Because the agencies are aware that spending exorbitant amounts of tax-payer money on things not directly related to operations is a bad look. But you cannot say that it can use no money on costs incurred from conferences and workshops, because then you cut off the opportunity for employees to learn and adapt to changes. No employee will go to these things on their own dime because it is simply too expensive to fly yourself out somewhere, pay for hotel-costs, conference costs, and the networking afterwards individually. So we recognize that it is in the public interest for bureaucrats to have some leeway in how they do their job and how they can accumulate new knowledge. When bureaucrats create standards, protocols, and interstate networks it becomes more efficient, not less.

The machine has become incredibly complex. For some it has probably become too complex for them to fathom, but it is nonetheless complex if they want it do be or not. You don’t create preparedness from understaffed and uncoordinated teams, you create it by maintaining well-staffed and organized units. So whether or not you fire treasury administrators, tax lawyers, or park rangers en mass doesn’t really change the fact that there will still be taxes due and national parks to be managed. What you create is the enshittification of the government (which really is the order of the day for these thoughtless rubes).

The political scientists of the 1950s did have good arguments for their positions. I wouldn’t in good conscience be saying that the forefathers of modern sociology were dumb. They weren’t. They had perfectly legitimate criticisms of the bureaucratic state as it existed in the 1950s. There are even things within modern bureaucracies that are eminently critique-worthy and you know who will tell you about those things: government bureaucrats. If the American people were at all interested in the plights of these often critically understaffed and underfunded agencies, they would only come to realize that most of their problems could be fixed with the things Americans seem to hate the most: the government.

As a last note, it of course isn’t lost on me that the people gutting government are the ones who have the most to gain from it. The same tactic happened in post-soviet Russia. Large government agencies and companies were sold for pennies on the dollar to what is now the oligarchs of the Russian Federation. Those who have a vested interest in less regulation are the ones who have something to lose from government. It always comes back to capital, income inequality, and the power that this leverage affords you. They want to privatize everything in order to squeeze the American populace for a little more money. The only things stopping the American plutocrats is the power of the government and judiciary. If that is bought and paid for, you have no rights. You have no safeguards. You are fucked.

But despite having the power of essentially infinite money, they are still people. As such, they are still vulnerable to direct actions, sit-downs, and occupations. Lets hope that the people boot these people from the government.

.dash

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#making-sense