Want To Really Fix The Deep State? Trump Should Take A Play From The British Empire
The problem is that it employs the wrong people, selected by the wrong methods, arranged in structures designed to prevent anyone from ever being responsible for anything.
Conventional wisdom holds that the federal government’s dysfunction is primarily a question of size. Too many bodies, too many bureaus, too much budget. This theory was the entire basis for DOGE, which used to publish headcount reductions like a fat woman announcing pounds lost. The assumption, theological to the Musks and Massies of the world, is that bloat is the original sin, and austerity will set us free. It’s compelling, but it’s also unfortunately wrong.
The problem with American government is not just that it employs too many people. The problem is that it employs the wrong people, selected by the wrong methods, arranged in structures designed to prevent anyone from ever being responsible for anything. Let’s consider Marco Rubio’s reforms at State: he axed some 1,300 employees and plans to shutter some 132 offices — good, I’m sure a lot of those people needed to go — but has anything meaningfully improved? Take a typical cable on, say, Iranian nuclear negotiations. Under the old system, it went through the desk officer, the office director, the deputy assistant secretary, the assistant secretary, the under secretary, maybe a few other layers depending on sensitivity, each adding their edits and caveats. Under the new system? Same process, perhaps with slightly fewer layers.
And who’s occupying those layers? Based guys like Gavin Wax, former president of the New York Young Republicans turned State Department monkey, a man whose primary achievement is allegedly leaking racist text messages to Politico in what his enemies claimed was a “highly coordinated” character assassination. Whatever actually happened there, this isn’t exactly the resume of a man selected through ruthless examination for intellectual brilliance and administrative judgment. All we’ve done, really, is replace the old credentialed mediocrities with new ideological mediocrities whose main virtue is having attended the right parties and appeared on the right podcasts.
If Trump, Rubio, or whoever wants a model for what actually works, he shouldn’t be looking to McKinsey “slide decks” (I find this insistence on calling PowerPoint presentations “decks” totally nauseating). He should be looking to the British Empire, specifically the Victorian-era administrative apparatus that governed a quarter of the Earth’s surface with fewer bureaucrats than currently staff the Department of Agriculture. Bristle all you want at the horrors of colonialism, or whatever, but the British had a system that actually worked, and its success had almost nothing to do with headcount.
