The term “bureaucrat” has held a negative connotation pretty much since it was invented, especially when applied to governments. Described by Irish novelist Lady Morgan as “office tyranny” in 1818, bureaucracies have been widely loathed ever since, from the literature of Franz Kafka to a catchy animated song in “Futurama.”
Government bureaucrats are often depicted as wasteful and inefficient bleeding hearts with secret, sinister and sometimes “socialist” agendas. Former president Ronald Reagan famously denounced bureaucrats throughout his political career — and, four decades later, Donald Trump and his acolytes did so in their own way by decrying a supposed “Deep State.”
Trump, the current Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to fire career civil servants en masse and replace them with loyalists, specifically laying out how he will do this through Agenda 47 and Project 2025. He even recently said he will appoint billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to help him cut “trillions” in government spending through a “government efficiency commission” to audit the entire federal government.
Yet according to experts who spoke with Salon, this kind of anti-bureaucratic sentiment can have profoundly negative policy consequences, especially when it comes to regulations that protect the planet. Scholars who study bureaucracies agree that these organizations are actually more important than ever. Indeed, humanity’s ongoing survival as a species will depend on many of the bureaucracies that Trump and Musk wish to eliminate, such as energy regulatiors, environmental agencies and any institution that holds fossil fuel and other companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
“Repression of social problems by governments allow bureaucracies to rot and become sclerotic as the social pressure builds to the point where bureaucracies are exploded.”
The Trump/Musk perspective is distinctly ahistorical. Bureaucracies have already helped Earth avoid potential life-ending catastrophes: International coalitions of governments and private entities worked together to protect the ozone layer when they learned releasing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was destroying it, and did so again to reduce the impact of acid rain when environmental activists raised the alarm.
Conversely, history is riddled with examples of occasions when a well-managed bureaucracy might have averted considerable calamity. Perhaps most infamously, the incompetence and corruption of the Soviet bureaucracy was so severe that, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine experienced a disaster, the bureaucrats threw their own citizens under the bus to cover up their mistake. Decades later, the ruthless march of deregulation implemented by neoliberal presidents like Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush resulted in the economic crash of 2008. Climate change is as severe as it is today in part because fossil fuel companies subsidized spreading misinformation to justify energy deregulation during the Bush era.
While reactionaries, red-baiters and the rich have long tried to weaken regulatory bodies, there have also long been public figures who recognized their value. Other Americans have advocated for strong bureaucracies to monitor potentially apocalyptic activities like testing weapons of mass destruction as far back as Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign.
On a global scale, American scientists realized starting in the late 1960s that pollution could make the Earth uninhabitable to future generations, with 1972 presidential frontrunner Edmund Muskie famously staking his candidacy on the need for stronger regulatory bodies to protect the environment. (Muskie’s campaign was later sabotaged by Richard Nixon as a target in what later became the Watergate scandal.) Meanwhile, calls for strong financial regulations can be traced all the way back to the Progressive Era.
“Bureaucracies are designed to manage complex tasks through standardized procedures, which can indeed lead to slower decision-making processes,” Sounman Hong, a distinguished professor in public policy and management at Yonsei University, told Salon. “However, this very structure also ensures consistency, accountability and fairness, which are crucial in democratic governance.”
In short, bureaucracies are a tool, neither inherently good or evil but only as effective and virtuous as the bureaucrats who run them — and, of course, the politicians who operate over the bureaucrats.
Although bureaucracies implement regulations and procedures that some may find restrictive, “these rules are often in place to protect public interest, ensure equity, and prevent abuses of power,” Hong said. “The challenge lies in balancing these controls with the need for flexibility and responsiveness.”
When bureaucracies fail, it is often because the people who staff them become resistant to change and therefore rely on out-of-date knowledge.
“Effective bureaucracies are those that continuously adapt to new information, technologies and societal needs,” Hong said. “The perception that bureaucracies are slow to change often overlooks the many instances where they have been at the forefront of adopting innovative practices.”
Indeed, when bureaucracies do not innovate, it is often not because they are structurally unsound, but rather because they are held back by politicians who have their own agendas.
“Bureaucracies respond most and best to crises: when the system they manage cannot proceed as normal, confronts a problem it was not prepared for, and — perhaps most importantly — finds itself under intense criticism from the public it ostensibly serves,” Richard D. Wolff, an economist emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon. “Repression of social problems by governments allow bureaucracies to rot and become sclerotic as the social pressure builds to the point where bureaucracies are exploded.”
Wolff added that often the most nefarious bureaucracies are the ones controlled by private entities like corporations rather than governments. For all of the boilerplate conservative denunciations of bureaucratic structures, capitalists observed their effectiveness in government structures and therefore applied them to their private businesses.
“Bureaucracy was once applied to government alone,” Wolff said. “Capitalist enterprises were then relatively small and many in number; their regulating institution could be and was the market. That time is long past — except in the minds of apologetic ideologues. Nowadays, and for many decades, the dominant form of capitalist enterprise is the corporation and its dominant size is large. In short, corporations have had to develop bureaucracies to manage their affairs alongside governments.”
Wolff described capitalism in the modern era as “a kind of revolving door between corporate and government leaders moving easily between the similar bureaucracies they manage on either side of those doors. Indeed, the two bureaucracies have become ever more similar because they borrow so much from one another, alongside the CEOs they borrow.”
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“A great deal of the anti-bureaucracy sentiment is associated with right-wing populism which often sputters between anarchism and fascism (turning all agencies into the playthings of a right-wing dictator).”
Bert A. Rockman, professor emeritus of political science at Purdue University, told Salon that the questions about bureaucracies remind him of the sociologist Max Weber, who argued that “the most proficient means of organizing is with a professional class of operatives with expertise in the relevant subject matter.” (Perhaps that’s why Weber is known as the “father” of the bureaucratic organization theory.)
“That’s true in business; it’s also true in government,” Rockman explained. “We’ve seen earlier experiments to eliminate bureaucracy that typically ended in anarchy.”
Rockman pointed out that modern conservative complaints about bureaucracies even ignore how American founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton advocated “the development of an institutionalized governmental apparatus.”
“A great deal of the anti-bureaucracy sentiment is associated with right-wing populism which often sputters between anarchism and fascism (turning all agencies into the playthings of a right-wing dictator),” Rockman noted.
The Supreme Court has recently drawn outrage over rulings limiting bureaucracies. In June, it overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine — i.e., the 1984 ruling Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council – which required lower courts to defer to experts in federal bureaucracies on how to interpret the law as long as the bureaucrats’ reading was reasonable. The Chevron doctrine simultaneously helped create consistent policy implementation throughout the United States and restrained potentially partisan and activist judges from overturning expert-crafted policy for political reasons.
Gautham Rao, a professor of legal history at American University, told Salon that the recent Chevron decision had similar “historic implications” as the January 6 insurrection, at least in the sense that it is an attack “on what we call the administrative state,” referring to people who have worked in government for their entire careers, learning how to best serve the citizens with whom they interact and developing invaluable stores of firsthand knowledge.
“Things like scientific matters pertaining to clean air and clean water, as one example, or complicated matters pertaining to labor relations between employer and employee,” Rao said, are generally best figured out by scientific and/or legal authorities. By empowering politicians to ignore experts, the Supreme Court puts the public welfare at risk.
“Let’s just say, for example, a court majority doesn’t believe in climate change, they can essentially take down all manner of regulation on environmental matters, as an example,” Rao said. He added that the court, rather than relying on historical precedent to reach its decision in these cases, can fabricate its own alternative facts.
“The Supreme Court’s now very specious reliance [is] its version of history, and rendering the founders of the United States into versions of what they want but in reality not what the founders actually were,” Rao said. “This is now a continuation with the Dobbs decision and others, where the court has looked to history and essentially created its own history that it finds very convenient to use as justification for undoing major governmental policies and traditions over the 20th Century.”
If someone genuinely wishes to reform bureaucracies — as opposed to simply disempower them for the sake of enabling one political party’s agenda to win over another’s — the best way to do so is make sure they remain reflective of the people they are supposed to serve. According to Hong, this requires that bureaucracies operate as close to the ground as possible, particularly through local government agencies or other community-based organizations.
“These entities often have a more direct understanding of the needs and concerns of the populations they serve, allowing them to respond more effectively,” Hong said. “Conversely, large, centralized bureaucracies may be less responsive to immediate public needs due to their scale and complexity. The multiple layers of hierarchy can slow down decision-making processes, making it more challenging to address local concerns quickly.”
Hong added, “According to my research on bureaucracy, however, it is important to recognize that the responsiveness of local bureaucracies may come at the cost of efficiency and long-term outcomes. This is especially true when electoral accountability is the primary driver of responsiveness.”
He added that electoral accountability can be a “double-edged sword,” since they can unintentionally encourage short-term thinking.
“Politicians and bureaucrats in local governments may prioritize policies that yield visible benefits before the next election, sometimes at the expense of longer-term investments that would benefit the public in the future,” Hong said. By contrast, “central bureaucracies may be better suited to prioritize long-term outcomes, which can be advantageous for policies requiring sustained efforts or where the outcomes are less observable to the public. This management-driven approach can lead to greater effectiveness in areas that require long-term planning and investment, although it may also result in a disconnect from the immediate preferences of the public.”
Wolff also encouraged social critics to not be hoodwinked by “simple-minded arguments” that attempt to turn people off from all left-wing politics through generic vilification of bureaucrats.
“Defenders of capitalism have crafted ideological arguments designed especially to block [and] thwart socialism,” Wolff said. “Such ideological projects conceive socialism as a movement aimed at expanding the role of government as a controller and regulator of capitalist economies. To prevent that, the ideologues have reified ideology, made it something to be analyzed in and by itself as if ‘its’ consequences were not over-determined by everything else in society that bureaucracies interact with and are shaped by. Bureaucracy is thus bad, enabling the argument to be extended to socialism because its governmental focus entails ‘more’ bureaucracy than the smaller government focus of capitalism’s defenders.”
Wolff added, “It is a simple-minded argument based on the false premise that the comparably large bureaucracies of mega-corporations and governments either do not exist or do not matter.”
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