How To Eradicate the Bureaucracy
There’s a lot of excitement on many fronts about Donald Trump’s return to the White House, especially with Republican control of Congress, but perhaps nothing should stir that excitement more than Trump’s promise to pulverize the administrative state.
Trump, with the aid of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and others, is promising to plunge deep into the deep state with a constitutional machete to whack away the bureaucratic weeds, which are an invasive species in the waters of our democracy, if ever there was such a thing.
Remind me exactly where the administrative state is in our constitution. Way back in 1994, in “The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State,” Northwestern law professor Gary Lawson answered that question by analyzing the enumerated powers granted to the federal government: “None of these powers, alone or in combination, grants the federal government anything remotely resembling a general jurisdiction over citizens’ affairs.”
Lawson concluded way back then: “The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.”
So yes, it is an invasive species and we all know what invasive species do to a habitat, right? If not, just ask a bureaucrat, who will likely be hiding from Trump beneath a bed somewhere.
At least they should be if they aren’t. While the incoming president and his team have plenty of tools at their disposal, there is one in particular that Trump is promising to wield, and it strikes terror in the hearts of bureaucrats everywhere: Schedule F.
Schedule F, as in “you’re fired, bureaucrats.”
In October 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump signed an executive order enabling the administration to reclassify certain categories of career federal employees—known in upside down progressive terminology as ‘civil servants’—into a “Schedule F” category of employment. Mostly policy-related positions were up for reclassification, but those moved to Schedule F would surrender their civil-service protections and become, essentially, at-will employees.
Biden repealed the order, but now Trump is back and so will be Schedule F, and this time at the beginning rather than at the end of his term. With Schedule F, tens of thousands of federal workers—those whose jobs involve “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character”—could be, well let’s just say, guided toward more responsible and productive private sector work.
What a way to reduce the size and scope of government. And once the Trump administration has begun to cleanse the waters of the federal government, one would hope and expect that a similar purification would take place right here in Wisconsin.
It’s long overdue. If ever there is a bloated state government, this is it, and an outsized state bureaucracy should be front and center in any Republican running for governor in 2026. After all, draining the Washington swamp is just half the battle. Draining the Madison swamp is the other half.
From the Old Bossism to the New Bossism
Cutting down the size of the bureaucratic infrastructure is not only about its cost to taxpayers and to the economy, as important as that is. It’s also important because the bureaucracy, through its rules, robs us of day-to-day control of our lives. It stifles innovation and opportunity and entrepreneurship; it snuffs out our dreams and hopes.
Progressives will tell us otherwise, that the bureaucracy is the benevolent protector of democratic rights and vulnerable populations, but nothing could be further from the truth. Today the civil service is a saboteur of democracy and an enslaver of vulnerable populations. Still, the myth persists in the minds of many, so to understand why that is, we must step back for a moment and review the history.
Turns out there’s a grain of historical truth in the progressive argument. There’s no doubt that in the late 19th century and early 20th century the nation’s political machinery was shot through and through with corruption by political machines, captured by a politics of bossism and bathed in its distinctive back-room flavors. And though the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 brought a merit system of employment to the federal government, the spoils system continued in the states, where the heart of machine power and electoral delivery operated.
It wasn’t until Robert La Follette became governor of Wisconsin in 1901 and pushed through statewide reforms that the idea took hold below the federal level. He and his Progressive counterparts pursued and enacted such reforms as direct election of senators and open primaries, thereby disrupting the party machine’s ability to control elections, as well as civil service reform, which played havoc with the party bosses’ patronage machine inside state government. As Joseph A. Ranney wrote about Wisconsin, “The 1905 civil service law was one of the landmarks of the Progressive era. It created a merit-based system, based on competitive examinations, for virtually all state government jobs.”
Public workers could thus only be discharged for "just cause, which shall not be religious or political." What the civil-service system did politically was ensure that those who ran state agencies would survive any attempts in succeeding administrations to bypass scientific application in administering natural resources laws or due process and fairness in carrying out administrative and economic tasks.
This is how John R. Commons, the author of the civil service reform bill and a professor of economics and political science at the University of Wisconsin, put it, as quoted by Ranney:
“Without that law, and the protection which it gave to [La Follette] and succeeding governors in making appointments, [the new] administrative commissions would soon have broken down....Their enactment depended on confidence, on the part of the strenuously conflicting economic interests, in the public officials to whom the administration of the law should be entrusted.”
––Joseph A. Ranney
Back then it all worked, to a point. It was a brief point, though. In the beginning, even many progressives never envisioned a system in which one powerful class—robber barons—would be replaced by another equally powerful class (unionized bureaucrats, otherwise soon to be known as scientific experts, legally protected from dismissal). The original idea was to provide an internal check and balance to frustrate the spoils system and the dominance of a powerful political class while guarding against a system so protective that it would create another dominating political class. The idea was to return power to the people, not merely stage a coup to redistribute it to another special interest.
But where there is a bureaucratic will, there is a bureaucratic way. For example, the Pendleton Act only covered about 10 percent of the executive branch, while the vast majority of federal employees remained at-will employees. That was the check and balance. Presidents, though, could expand the scope of the law’s jurisdiction, and expand the scope they did: In just five years the number of protected workers grew to about half the federal workforce.
On the state level, it was pretty much Katy bar the door from the beginning.
For a while, too, during an era when legislatures delegated very little authority to the executive branch, the various federal and state departments became vehicles for helping people rather than bulldozers of their rights. It sustained itself for a few decades. But, as the delegation of power from the legislature to the administrative state grew from a trickle to a raging river and became a predominate feature of the governmental landscape, and as public sector unions and civil service protections transformed the bureaucracy from a merit-based enterprise into tenured lifetime employment, the emphasis within the bureaucratic ranks shifted over time from applying expertise in the service of the people to applying ideological preferences in the service of the bureaucracy itself.
And so progressive civil service reform was not only a key factor in ending the politics of the old bossism, it also played a pivotal role in the rise of a New Bossism. Thanks to the inevitable expansion of civil service protections, thanks to the rise of public-sector unionism, thanks to legislatures’ abdication of their constitutional obligations, the swamp was born. The progressives created a spoils system they could call their own. As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the combination of those factors was as close to absolute power as the bureaucracy could get.
In a classic way, the bureaucrats practice sect behavior and strategy as the Left has learned to do so well over the years. They go deep down underground in conservative times, where they spend their days writing theory and planning for the leftist resurrection, and then enact those finely tuned and well-rehearsed strategies when the times become liberal enough for them to find an opening.
Here’s how the democratic socialist leader of the 1960s and 1970s, Michael Harrington, put it in his autobiography Fragments of the Century, as he recalled the conservative years of the 1950s and the tiny band of socialists he cavorted with in their tiny loft on New York City’s Fourteenth Street:
“Indeed, our isolation may have been an advantage,” Harrington wrote...
“Little sects, Marx had once remarked, are only justified in times when there is no mass working-class movement of the Left, but under such circumstances they play a necessary role. The media were not looking over our shoulder as they were with the New Left of the sixties. We could, therefore, commit our stupidities in private and painfully work out our ideas without being required to defend them instantly before a television camera. Since we were so short on practice we had nothing else to do but become long on theory.”
––Michael Harrington
That they did, and, when the civil-rights movement blossomed in the late 50s and early 60s, Harrington and other members of that tiny band of warriors were ready. Many, including Harrington, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, and others became leaders of the broad 1960s movement for social change. The change they were seeking may not have been the right change, but they were well prepared to put into practice what they had planned for all those years.
And so it is with today’s bureaucrats. In conservative times, protected by civil-service laws, they burrow deep inside the halls of the bureaucracies, the modern equivalent of those New York City lofts, and debate and plan and write rules for society. They fly under the radar as the media focuses on the conservative president or governor; often the media actively diverts scrutiny from the partisan bureaucracy by calling attention to a president’s or governor’s latest attempts to roll back regulations they say serve the good of society. All the while bureaucrats weave cobwebs in the corners, waiting, and when a Joe Biden or a Tony Evers comes along, they are ready to leave their tiny lofts for loftier things.
And that’s just what they have done both nationally and in Wisconsin.
Progressive Denial, Republican “Reform”
Progressives, of course, charge that conservatives merely want to return to the spoils system, conveniently ignoring the history of their own spoils system. Just this past week, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a dead-on-arrival bill that would require the president to seek approval from Congress before instituting any new job categories within the federal civil service. It was just one of several anti-Schedule F bomb bills Democrats have floated. Here’s how he explained it in a press conference:
“It took about 100 years for our country to realize that merit employment is better than the previous spoils system that just rewarded loyalty. All Americans, whatever their political inclination, rely on our federal employees. We know from past experience and from commitments made by the incoming president that he would dramatically change the federal workforce and make it a loyalty-based system. That would impede the work of the federal government, expose people to intimidation, and bring people into jobs that are not qualified to do them, thus risking the American public’s safety and quality of life.”
––Senator Tim Kaine
It might come as a shock to Kaine, but multiple states have turned to at-will employment, and Rome has not burned. Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, and Texas are at-will states, and Florida imposed at-will status on managers and supervisors. Looking at those states, it’s safe to say Rome has been invigorated, even fire-proofed.
This political and economic dynamism is because the deconstruction of bureaucratic lifetime tenure has allowed elected executives to craft administrations that implement the expressed will of the people at the ballot box rather than the preferences of career bureaucrats. That’s called democracy, and yes, it involves installing loyalists in positions of power in the administrative state—loyalists to the will of the people.
As usual, many Republicans like to play around the edges. Just as they concoct continuing resolutions that give away the candy store to Democrats while on the very verge of assuming power (I’m looking at you, Mike Johnson), so too do they rarely rise up to truly challenge the bureaucratic state by enacting at-will government employment.
That’s why we have half-measures like the so-called Merit Act by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), which would expedite the removal of poorly performing federal employees and do away with certain employee appeals and grievance procedures.
Loudermilk says his bill is about “reforming our outdated civil service system.” His heart is in the right place, but, sorry not sorry, there can be no "reform" when it comes to the administrative state, as Ramaswamy has repeatedly stressed.
The civil service system must be scrapped, period.
In Controlling Bureaucracies, published in 1986, Judith Gruber long ago unwittingly explained why that is, pointing to examples of politically motivated bureaucratic misconduct. For example, she wrote, Nixon administration efforts to reduce public welfare expenditures were stymied by bureaucrats in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, who were unwilling to “monitor and limit the activities of the state and county officials whose programs were fueling the budgetary fires…” The same bureaucratic resistance could work in the opposing political direction, too, Gruber observed, as when “the New York City Board of Education sought to increase integration through policies such as open enrollment and comprehensive high schools” but found itself stonewalled by bureaucrats who refused “to disseminate information about the options to parents and to design new curricula.”
In the end, when it comes to controlling bureaucracies, the humanity of the institutions must be considered, Gruber asserted.
“Bureaucracies are not abstract administrative structures, however, but agencies filled with real people with their own interests and with considerable resources to resist control when it does not mesh with those interests,” she wrote. “The exercise of control is therefore inevitably affected by those being controlled, the administrators themselves.”
Being human, bureaucrats can be creative, too, at least in figuring out ways to avoid implementation of ideas they don’t like, if not when it comes to competitive enterprise and innovative public policy. Gruber points specifically to Donald P. Warwick’s argument in A Theory of Public Bureaucracy “that middle and low level administrators in agencies ‘can protect their interests by tactics ranging from artful sabotage to surface compliance.’”
People will be people, in other words, and they will seek to push their own priorities forward whenever possible, whether that priority involves illicit sex parties or political insubordination. They will be more or less successful, depending upon the administration in power, but in all events the civil-service laws protect their place in the system. Beyond the politics of it, civil service laws tend to protect nonproductive workers and penalize the most productive, and thus make it hard to recruit and keep a highly skilled work force.
It cannot be reformed because, by its very definition, it is a human-created system designed and created to protect the said humans’ power and privilege.
That’s true in turbulent times and it’s true in calm eras. In good times, the bureaucracy can drop its shields and go on offense, while in bad times the captains of the government class can yell, “Shields Up,” and wait until the threat has passed. Reform is not in the progressive or the bureaucratic DNA.
And that’s why real reformers like Donald Trump and JD Vance have slapped down the latest continuing resolution to keep the government running, and it’s why Ramaswamy and Musk and their team are looking not to reform but to dismantle the administrative state.
That’s what we need in Wisconsin. We need leaders who are not afraid to stand up and challenge the state’s massive bureaucracy.
In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker and company made history in Wisconsin, not by reforming public-sector unionism but essentially abolishing it, saving taxpayers billions of dollars and bringing home much power to voters, too. But, as we should have realized since 2011, that was only half the job. State government may have lost—for now—the union windfall behind their political sails, but that did nothing to curtail the raw power of the bureaucrats themselves, who live on inside state government to fight another day, all the while continuing to issue bureaucratic edicts on everything from shoreland zoning to building codes to psychotherapy ethics to aquatic invasive species to woke education requirements.
They live on because of the civil-service system, which protects partisan, activist bureaucrats who care not one whit about what the people and their elected representatives want. In every state and on the federal level, the civil-service system is a bulwark for the New Bosses.
We should promise not to reform their power and privilege but to abolish that power and privilege. When it comes to the New Bosses, we should use the ‘F’ word freely and decisively.
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