The intellectual mix that helped produce the AI-DOGE chimera isn’t something I’ve seriously looked into, in much the same way that the prospect of cleaning out the strainer in my kitchen sink fills me with horrified revulsion. This post, and the paper on which it is based, seem like a good entry point into that topic.
Over the last few months, Cosma and I have been writing a new paper, “AI as Social Technology.” It’s now out, in the Knight First Amendment Institute’s series. I’m obviously terribly biased, but I think it’s a banger. Go read it.
Finally, and most directly, it argues that one particular variety of dubious AI thinking helped fueled the rise of DOGE.
AGI-centric accounts depict bureaucracy as centralized coordination, the key problem being how lower layers fail to implement the priorities of the top … Speculative arguments about AGI helped inspire Elon Musk’s DOGE project, which sought to hack away great swathes of America’s administrative machinery. Much of DOGE’s work and aspirations involved the application of LLMs and AI ‘agents’ to accomplish a variety of open-ended tasks, often very badly. … We certainly can’t blame AGI speculation alone for DOGEmaxing and the Trump administration’s evisceration of the federal bureaucracy; there are many overlapping causes. However, if you believe that the duty of a bureaucracy is to implement the leader’s program, and AGI is nigh, it is not hard to conclude that the latter offers a providential way to accomplish the former.
Lambert here: The theory of the unitary exective is another horror I have to understand and refute. I can’t believe Madison would have advocated it, so WTF?
“[E]ffective accelerationism” is an important part of the intellectual mix that helped produce the AI-DOGE chimera…. Claims about how our world will be radically remade in the image of machine logic are nearly ubiquitous, whether the authors view the machine-god state as something to be feared, celebrated or both at once. Equally, as as we suggest in the quoted excerpt above, AI speculation is only one justification for the Trump administration’s efforts to disembowel the administrative state. I’d be startled to discover that e.g. Russell Vought has been reading technology-fueled neo-reactionary online manifestoes.
Second - and this is something I figured out belatedly when writing, is that there is a fundamental difference between the disastrous [for whom?] DOGE project and the apparently similar push by both center-right and left-leaning people to create a more effective and responsive government bureaucracy. That has in fact been the source of considerable confusion. The two approaches differ crucially on the question of who should the government be responsive to?
Lambert here: United States Digital Service vs. United States DOGE Service.
DOGE/AI Thought starts from the premise that bureaucracy should be primarily (perhaps even exclusively) responsive to the people at the top. From this perspective, the problem that AI solves is a mixture of regular institutional inertia and specific “deep state” resistance.
The effective government bureaucracy people, in contrast, are not in the business of making sure that Dear Leader’s commands get implemented as they ought. Instead, they are primarily interested in freeing bureaucrats to do things that are obviously the right things to do, rather than burying them beneath the concrete of top down mandates. The impulse, then, is to trust bureaucrats more, and give them the means and autonomy to respond to obvious needs. This involves creating better feedback loops between top and bottom, so that measures, tools and perhaps even goals are redefined as the problem becomes better understood. But it also means creating interfaces through which bureaucrats can engage more with the public, and respond better and more quickly to public demands, as well as helping them work sideways with others in the bureaucracy who have necessary skills and knowledge, without getting smothered in red tape. The general bet is not on better subjugating bureaucrats, but on making them more autonomous. This is more or less the opposite of DOGE, and its vision of AI is murkier.
Comments
In Federalist 69 the author argues how the president of the government in the then-contemplated constitution was different from a king, with sarcastic references to how the president would be less powerful than the governor of New York. I would suggest that time has rather worn away at all of the distinctions drawn by the author between our presidents and kings with the remaining exception of heredity. Lambert, you will find cold comfort in Federalist 69.
… its authors regarded the legislative branch as by far the most important, and considered the executive department as, well, trivial is too strong. Checks and balances are carefully built into not only the three branches, but within the legislative branch as well. It is impossible for me to believe, therefore, that textual justification will not be found for checks and balances within the executive as well, making “unitary” wrong. That said, “impossible for me to believe” is just a heuristic.
is not that federalists supported a king-like presidency. It is that time has proven the antifederalists correct: the presidency has become king-like. The federalists were wishcasting. We now have kings, pro temp. This had been true since at least G. W. Bush, the decider, first of his nickname.
Grabbing dictionary.com because I’m too lazy to move from my chair. Here is the definition of king:
[A] male sovereign or monarch; a man who holds by life tenure, and usually by hereditary right, the chief authority over a country and people.
(I myself would change “usually” to “almost always”.) Trump does not have life tenure, and there’s no line of succession (with, I assume, Barron as next in line). We just had an actual King, Charles II, visit. Male, life tenure, hereditary right. So in what sense is Trump “king-like” (and “like” is doing a lot work there). Only a poet would call a red balloon “tomato-like,” except that it lacks sexual characteristics, seeds, and skin.
That’s one of my many objections to resistance types: the incredible analytical sloppiness and incoherence. You should not have a “No Kings” rally if Trump is not, in fact, a king; all you are doing is educating those most loyal to you in falsehoods. Similarly, you should not simultaneously develop a critique that Trump is a fascist dictator. Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco weren’t kings either. Different political systems entirely.
All that said, the anti-Federalists might have had a point. But since the Federalist papers are a founding text, it would be nice to derive my desired result from them, if possible.
I am not a Demparty person. I am not a member of or believer in their “no kings” thing because I am quite certain that they have been and will be in future quite happy to have all these powers when their team is in office. I was on the “presidents are kings” hill before them and they’re ruining it with their obvious hypocrisy.
Federalist 69 makes explicit comparison between the office of president and kings. You are complaining of a sloppy analytic framework and in the next graph wishing for an argumentative source in the federalist papers. Well, let’s see some of the federalist papers:
The first thing which strikes our attention is, that the executive authority, with few exceptions, is to be vested in a single magistrate. This will scarcely, however, be considered as a point upon which any comparison can be grounded; for if, in this particular, there be a resemblance to the king of Great Britain, there is not less a resemblance to the Grand Seignior, to the khan of Tartary, to the Man of the Seven Mountains, or to the governor of New York.
So the author is himself trying to address criticisms brought against the plan of centralizing power in a single executive person. There was much gnashing of teeth when the supremes recently affirmed exactly this and the immunity of the president from prosecution for crimes in office unless they are impeached and convicted first, something expressly said just a bit later in federalist 69:
The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.
So, should the author of federalist 69 have been less sloppy analytically for your taste 230 years later? Authoritarian governments with power vested in one person. King, dictator, decider, autocrat: these are synonyms. Maybe you’re engaging is spurrious precision. Maybe the American presidency (Trump, Obama, Bush) are becoming their own as yet unnamed variant. But in our lives, one autocrat is like another. Both Obama and Trump have engaged in the extrajudicial assassination of minor citizens, siblings no less. Are they less dead because we do not call the decider a king?
First. The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the Union. The king of Great Britain and the governor of New York have at all times the entire command of all the militia within their several jurisdictions. In this article, therefore, the power of the President would be inferior to that of either the monarch or the governor.
Does this federalist argument even vaguely resemble how our military and guard (militia) operates in the 21st century?
Secondly. The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the DECLARING of war and to the RAISING and REGULATING of fleets and armies, all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature
How quaint, the notion that the legislature will have the war power. Every president since the War Powers Act was passed has held it to be an unconstitutional restraint on the president’s article 2 authority.
I could go on, but I won’t. If I am too sloppy analytically for you then perhaps I ought to refrain from bothering you with my commentary.
If you think I respond well to threats, perhaps indeed you should find a more congenial environment.
That said, here is the central and simple issue: Trump is not a “king” (Democrats) and cannot usefully considered to be “king-like” (your formulation), because he doesn’t have essential properties that kings have. Whatever our present situation with executive authority may be, treating Trump as king or king-like is, well, sloppy.
Hopefully I will have time to dynamite the theory of the unitary executive (important to do, and my hidden agenda here) by taking the text of the Federalist Papers as a starting point.
i was threatening nothing. it’s your blog. if you find me onerous i can buzz off.
i hope you are able to damage the unitary executive theory of presidential power, but i suspect, as in the case of whether former presidents can be prosecuted without having first been impeached and convicted (removed from office,) that your project will find limited support in the federalist papers other than the authors’… optimistic ideas about the wisdom our presidents and legislators will be endowed with, as in the case of the war power.
and that leaves to the side the fact that the federalist papers, like the declaration of independence, have no force of law or any direct influence over anything resembling the exercise of power. as far as our betters are concerned they are historic novelties. our betters are even now continuing their long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object. governments, ours included, do not look kindly on revolutionaries. ours doesn’t even look kindly on foreign revolutionaries that admire our own revolution, like in Vietnam.
…. an impasse, where we have a debate over the plain meaning of words.
when i adopted the term “king, pro temp” i did so to rhetorically challenge unitary executive advocates. it was pretty effective. it’s directionally correct in a world where Obama’s attorney general was saying things like:
Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. “Due process” and “judicial process” are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2012/03/holder-due-process-doesnt-…
There is very little daylight between that kind of assertion of power and “L’etat, c’est moi.” Especially if national security is defined by the same person as is killing citizens in its name. And there goes consent of the governed.
I am dismayed that we are yet further down the executive power singularity’s gravity well, but it is also clarifying about what is needed to remedy it as its exponents can no longer claim we’re all “mistaken and that really these are narrow exceptions where reasonable people must accede to presidential responsibility to act…”
it is also interesting to consider how the king of England no longer conforms to your definition of a king, as he is a figurehead and indeed there is a non-trivial movement in England to abolish the monarchy. times change. power ebbs and flows. if we’re not careful we may end up with an actual hereditary king, though the hereditary part will be sprung on us late and with many excuses as to how it was unavoidable, really.
i’m not expecting you to agree with me. i’m simply explaining where i’m coming from and why i view the ways in which presidents are yet distinct from kings as ephemera, largely unrelated to how they exercise power.
Federalist 69