Cutting 100,000 plus federal workers may have downsides. Even libertarians might want government to do its unseen work of averting catastrophe, such as preventing sabotage of the electrical grid or nuclear weapon leakage. Doge’s initial mass firing of nuclear staffers removed, among others, the “acting chief of defence nuclear safety and other emergency personnel”. Waste and fraud indeed.
Elon Musk’s crusade to root out fraud in government is piling up evidence that, in fact, federal workers are overwhelmingly clean and useful.
Doge is an extreme iteration of the Anglo-American tradition of bureaucrat-bashing pioneered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Russell Vought, who heads the Office of Management and Budget, has said in private: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” This “villain” fantasy misunderstands why most people enter public service.
The avatar of support was British educationist Tim Brighouse. In 2003, he took charge of London’s failing state schools. I myself had graduated in 1988 from a typically poor one, where working-class kids were expected to leave at 16. Brighouse assumed that teachers and pupils wanted the best. He handwrote thousands of letters to individual teachers. He advised one nursery teacher upset by a “reform” to set fire to the relevant paperwork in her garden and dance around it. He added: “It won’t make any difference, but it might make you feel better.”
For countless reasons, probably including Brighouse, London’s schools jumped from worst-ranked in England to best. I suspect Musk is rooting out quite a few Brighouses.
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