America Isn't Run by a President -- It's Run By a Bureaucracy
The bureaucracy is the administrative state that implements policy. It is staffed by professional civil servants who are unelected and thus unaccountable.
In four months, Americans will head to the polls. With millions of voters getting battered by the economy, hot wars raging overseas, and the rapid proliferation of job-disrupting technologies, this election will arguably be one of the most important in U.S. history.
The nominee for the Democratic party is the sitting president, Joe Biden. An octogenarian with decades of experience, Biden has been part of the political establishment in Washington since the Nixon Administration.
His challenger is former president and newly convicted felon Donald Trump. Three years Biden’s junior, Trump started his business career in the early 1970s. He offers Americans prior work experience in the White and with decades of business management.
With the election cycle now in full swing, CNN recently hosted the first presidential debate between the two frontrunners. It wasn’t pretty.
Both candidates performed poorly, but there was a definitive winner — and it wasn’t President Biden. What was alarming wasn’t his answers to the questions — it was his inability to form coherent thoughts altogether.
Since Biden’s election in 2020, the Right has argued the president is too cognitively impaired to do his job. He’s fallen, tripped, and frozen in front of the cameras numerous times. Each time an incident happens, he’s quickly swept away by members of his staff, and any story that could emerge in the media is quietly buried.
The Left has resisted these claims. They argue that the president is fine and that any assertions to the contrary are borderline conspiratorial. But after Biden’s recent performance during the debate, it’s clear that the obvious can no longer be ignored. Even the Democratic party leadership party is concerned.
As one would expect of a man his age, Biden is frail and weak. Even if he’s re-elected for another term, it’s unclear whether or not he will have the stamina to perform the duties of President of the United States.
Now, the Democrats are thinking the unthinkable — running a new candidate. This is unheard of in American politics. The last time an incumbent lost the opportunity to run for reelection was Franklin Pierce in 1856 — during the run-up to the Civil War.
While this is one of the main questions almost everyone is focusing on right now — whether or not Biden will remain on the ballot — there’s a much bigger question that ought to be asked.
If Biden doesn’t have the capacity to do his job, who the heck is actually running America right now?
That’s what this essay will dive into. This isn’t going to be a Biden vs. Trump piece, nor will it be an attempt to forecast the outcome of this year’s election.
Instead, this essay will dive into the state’s administrative apparatus to look at how decisions are made and executed. It will draw on my own personal experience living and working in Washington, DC, to bring to light the shadow administrative government that exists underneath the political one.
If Biden isn’t capable of running the country right now, thousands of unelected and unaccountable professional bureaucrats certainly are.
The bureaucracy represents the administrative operations of a government. It comprises hundreds of departments and agencies, making the federal government the largest employer in the country.
Before we jump into the political issues facing America right now, it’s important to make sure we’re on the same page with regard to what the government actually is and how it works.
A government is a system that provides order and control for the people living within a country. During elections, each political party vies for influence over this system. Democrats and Republicans fundamentally agree that the system should exist; they simply have different strategies for how the system should operate.
Within the government are institutions that help the ruling party maintain law and order. In political science, an institution is defined as:
“a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain social behavior…Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.” (Wikipedia)
Institutions can be formal or informal. The Supreme Court is an example of a formal institution while the church or The New York Times are examples of informal institutions.
Together institutions provide structure within society. That structure makes it possible for you and I to go about our daily lives largely free and unencumbered by the machinations of government politics.
In Washington, a subset of institutions exists that go beyond merely helping society run. These institutions govern the administrative functions within Washington itself and guide the working professionals responsible for executing and implementing policy there. This creates a shadow government of sorts within our nation’s capital.
These institutions are subtle and innocuous, largely operating outside of the public eye. Institutions like think tanks provide thought leadership to help political leaders formulate key policy issues. Meanwhile, private social clubs provide discretion for political operatives to negotiate in private. And, of course, you can’t forget K Street, the epicenter of lobbying that funnels money from the pockets of special interest groups right up to Capitol Hill.
The most important institution in Washington is arguably the bureaucracy. This is the cadre of professionals who take a policy — like arming Ukraine — and turn it into the actions that are necessary to implement it. The bureaucracy and the professional class employed by it represent the administrative state that exists within a government.
According to German sociologist Max Weber, a bureaucracy is defined by six key criteria:
Hierarchy of authority
Division of labor
A formal set of rules and regulations
Competency
Standard selection process
Impersonality
When these criteria are met, the government should be a well-oiled machine, manned by individuals who are professional in demeanor and competent in performance. They show up, follow orders, and do their job well, not just for themselves but for the benefit of the American people.
The purpose of having a bureaucracy, according to 19th-century sociologists, is to enable the government to effectively allocate and distribute resources. The goal is for the bureaucracy to be an arbitrary mediator that ensures the communal needs of a society are met.
Collecting and remitting taxes is one example of this. In theory, a government taxes its population and redistributes the tax revenues it collects from them through public service projects like building roads or providing military defense to mitigate threats.
By distributing resources on behalf of the government, the bureaucracy plays a crucial role in upholding the rule of law. It ensures resources are distributed as intended rather than hoarded and collected by political elites at the top. (Of course, this doesn’t always happen in practice, but that is a topic for another day).
A bureaucracy is an institution within a state that is designed to be the apolitical operator alongside the government. Elected officials create policy — goals, standards, and objectives — while the bureaucracy executes. Because the bureaucracy exists outside of politics, it is able to get things done, keeping society running smoothly.
This is how a bureaucracy exists theoretically, anyway. In practice, the lines between politics and administration are blurred. It’s hard to say whether members of the bureaucracy work for the American people — or themselves.
Bureaucrats are the ones who actually run a country — not elected political leaders. Bureaucrats are unelected and unaccountable, allowing them to govern without consent.
For the bureaucracy to exist in real life, it needs to employ people to implement the policies coming from a country’s political leadership. In the United States, there are more than 2 million workers in the federal workforce. While this includes political appointees, the vast majority are career professionals staffing government departments and agencies around the country.
Individuals who have successfully earned a spot on the government’s payroll are known as career civil servants. They specialize in specific administrative operations like awarding contracts or engaging in diplomacy. Their job is to carry out these administrative operations while also collecting institutional knowledge to provide continuity during transitions of power.
Civil servants are supposed to be competent, high-performers in their area of operations — the cream of the crop. But that isn’t always the case. In reality, the bureaucracy is staffed by those who can afford the convenience of living in close proximity to the jobs the government offers.
The problem isn’t necessarily the existence of civil servants but rather who gets to be one. This piece argues that the high cost of living and low salaries offered by jobs in the bureaucracy create a de facto plutocracy run by elites:
“If poor people can’t afford to take jobs in DC they won’t. Their voices will be left out of not just formal government policies, but the informal network of shadow institutions that inform those government policies too.”
While there are certainly smart, intelligent people executing the administrative tasks of the government, it’s a false assumption to assume everyone with a degree from Harvard or Yale who is working in the civil service is doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. The bureaucracy is composed of individuals who have personal agendas — either political or professional — and those agendas are executed through the prestige of the work they are able to obtain in our nation’s capital.
Let’s take the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an example to illustrate this point. Located a stone’s throw from the White House, the USDA is responsible for executing a number of programs, including providing food stamps for low-income families and certifying beef products before they hit grocery store shelves.
The USDA is more likely to be staffed by a Georgetown graduate who grew up in Potomac, Maryland, than it is to be staffed by the children of farmers from Iowa or someone who grew up in a household that benefited from food stamps.
The individuals responsible for implementing policies within the bureaucracy have the right academic credentials and proximity to employment opportunities in Washington, but few have real practical experience to actually meet the needs of the people being governed by these policies.
That means if the government is bifurcated between a public-facing political apparatus and a localized bureaucratic state, the people who are responsible for implementing political policies are unelected.
The people running the country aren’t elected political leaders or the sitting president for that matter — it’s professional bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats aren’t elected which means there is no mechanism to hold them accountable for the work they do. Instead of making decisions based on the principles enshrined in the Constitution or the wishes of the American people, Washington’s bureaucrats make decisions based on their own set of norms and values.
This is why America is so divided right now. The people governing and the people being governed no longer have a shared set of values connecting them. The bureaucrats of Washington cultivated their values while attending elite colleges or playing rounds of golf at private country clubs, while the average American’s values are shaped by showing up to their low-paying job and, increasingly, scrolling on social media.
Without the ability to hold bureaucrats accountable, there’s no way to rectify the misalignment in our “shared” values. Bureaucrats operate under their own values, playing a game where their primary goal is to outlive their competition. Even if they fail, they fail forward into positions of power and prestige. Whoever survives the longest ultimately rises to the top, and there is little, if any, recourse for failure.
Just look at the lack of accountability for the decades-long debacle in Afghanistan to find evidence of this.
In theory, America has a president and that president is supposed to provide leadership no different than a general over a military or a CEO within a company. But when the leader doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to lead, a cohort of shadow leaders rise to the occasion. And because these individuals have no skin in the game, they face no punishment for the decisions they make.
Final takeaway.
The existence of a bureaucracy is necessary for modern society to operate. For every person lining their pockets in Washington, there is another working overtime to ensure kids don’t go hungry or that veterans have a roof to put over their heads when they sleep at night.
The problem with the bureaucracy is that it isn’t staffed equitably. It doesn’t represent the diversity of interests that constitute the totality of American society. While special interest groups leverage money to shape policy, it’s the children of wealthy elites that do their bidding.
Unlike politicians who are exposed to regular election cycles, bureaucrats are not. There are annual performance reviews and opportunities for advancement — like any other job — but there is no mechanism to ensure bureaucrats are carrying out the will of the people they govern.
Given the state of the sitting president’s mental faculties, it’s reasonable to believe that a cohort of unelected and thus unaccountable federal employees are making decisions on his behalf.
And because the alternative — a second Trump presidency — isn’t favored by most Washingtonians, there’s reason to believe that the bureaucracy won’t be able to fulfill one of its most important duties when Americans go to the polls this fall — providing continuity during transitions of power.
To “fix” Washington, we first have to understand what Washington actually is. The institutions that exist in it wield power that affects your ability to live your life without your knowledge or consent.
The bureaucracy is important, but it is largely held unaccountable. Without accountability, the bureaucracy will continue to run the country while the president sleeps.
What do you think? How would you like to see bureaucrats held accountable?