We all tend to think of bureaucrats as wasters of our tax money and our time, rather than people getting fat off the system. Sir Humphrey Appleby was happy with a salary that saw him kept in modest comfort, while allowing little things like attending operas, with his pension to provide the same in retirement, and a knighthood. You never got the impression that he was greedy.

Those were the old bureaucrats, and in Britain. The following are the new bureaucrats, in America:

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

The unit existed to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses, but it never seems to have done much of anything in its lifetime, all while its employees lived like kings and hiring friends and family into La Dolce Vita:

One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

Read the whole thing. Smile at the fact that Trump shut it down a few weeks ago. Grimace at the fact that an investigative reporter nailed all this a decade ago and nothing changed.

There’s plenty more where that came from of course, with the following being most un-Sir Humphrey-like behaviour from some unit inside the State Department called the US Institute of Peace (USIP):

Much of USIP’s leadership, including Moose, barricaded themselves on the building’s fifth floor, closing window shades and blocking access points in a last-ditch effort to resist DOGE’s entry, the official told the DCNF.
…
Over the weekend, Moose and other USIP leaders intensified their resistance plot by holding an emergency meeting, firing the institute’s security contractors (a company called Inter-Con) to block DOGE access…. and implementing lockdown measures, including removing the electronic access systems Inter-Con employees used to enter as well as destroying physical locks entirely, the official told the DCNF….The obstruction didn’t end at damaged doors. Prior to Monday’s confrontation, USIP leaders disabled telephone lines, internet connections and other IT infrastructure, forcing communication among staff through walkie-talkies…

What a bunch of entitled pricks! DOGE finally did get inside, along with the police, using a master key supplied by the security contractor to open up an emergency stairway.

There’s a lot of history here that Trump and DOGE are trying to untangle (it’s an XCancel link that allows a long thread but I’ve included the text here in case readers can’t get the link to work):

I’m concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.

The reality is very different, and I’m not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too.

Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller.

Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured.

No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control.

This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue.

All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all.

The Biden years underscored the point. We didn’t even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing.

How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes.

The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great.

Trump refused the deal and look what happened.

Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may.

They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes. It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible.

They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.