Prophecy Made Easy; Answers Remain Elusive

Nex-Gen Bureaucratization Is Doing The Damage Predicted: Now What?

The entry in my mother-in-law JoAnn Kocher’s 1946 edition of Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary on Cassandra points out that the beauty of this future sister-in-law of Helen of Troy was so powerful as to persuade “Apollo to confer upon her the gift of prophecy, upon her promising to comply with his desires” (The entry was written in 1910 so use your imagination to figure out ‘the desires’ of Apollo.) Granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo, she refused to fulfill her promise. Thereupon, Apollo, the God who punishes, unused to refusals “ordained that no one should believe her prophecies.” During my time in large organizations, I sometimes felt like Cassandra, but the comparison stopped there: so far I’ve managed to avoid getting murdered by some crazy named Clytemnestra.

In my most recent prophecy about the effects of what I’m terming Nex-Gen Bureaucratization and what others are calling the self-driving car crash of federal government cuts by Musk and his minions, my prophecy of a “recipe for disorganization” came true so quickly and fully that it took some of the fun out of it. Like predicting a thunderstorm when you’ve just seen lightning.

The bad news (and with us Cassandras our divinations always spell doom) is that to call what’s going on with the federal firings a shit show is to be very unfair to waste products. Still don’t believe me? Check out this WaPo article from today February 18^th

The latest wave of personnel actions already prompted an administrative complaint on behalf of workers at nine agencies, adding to more than a dozen legal tests of Trump’s power filed one month into his term.

The good news personally is all this proves that I was right. Yes, I am one of those guys who has to always be right. Don’t take my word for it: Family, friends, and especially adversaries in corporate straight jobs over three decades will submit affidavits to my annoying attribute.  I’m not always right, of course, but when I strike properly prophetic notes reminding people that such was the case is necessary even though it doesn’t change anything. Any added credibility for me the next time around is marginal because it’s the next time around and people want for their ideas, decisions, actions to be right, and mine to be wrong.  Welcome to human nature.

My last piece on Nex-Gen bureaucratization was barely converted into pixels when various headlines were verifying my conjecture: the demolitions  of Elon and his elvets created chaos immediately by ignoring the 3^rd order controls of federal bureaucracies —department or sub-departments’ norms, culture and special language that manifest sneakily in forms, logs, and procedures. The most egregious screw-up in this blitzkrieging of the bureaucracy emerged as the Trump administration fired nuclear weapons workers only to realize doing so was a massive DOGE cock-up. Attempts to bring those workers back amounted to a recognition that because there are many levels of this government that the wrecking crew does not understand we risk catastrophic cavities forming in our governmental capabilities.  

But this misadventure prompted absolutely no one to hit the pause button. Consider this statement: “I’d understand a strategic reduction in force if needed,” said one USDA employee, who was fired over the weekend. “But this was a butchering of some of our best. Does the public know this?” Well, if they read the Washington Post or if they subscribe to this or other sub stacks covering the subject, they would. So what does that come to? Certainly, fewer people than watched the Kardashians. Or rioted errr… celebrated in Philadelphia last week.

Our friend above from the USDA will soon learn that the company of the informed is magnificently outnumbered, but not alone. One of the developments that pleases know-it-alls like me is when a famous person like Paul Krugman comes to the same conclusion about the disarraying dismantling of government, but a little bit after we did. Speaking of what “the mostly very young people Musk has hired to work at the Department of Government Efficiency” whom he labels ‘The Muskenjugend’ (really wish I thought of that one) have wrought in just a few weeks, Krugman notes that “essential government functions were being compromised and the damage became obvious almost immediately, and some of it looks very scary indeed.” Even just taking a look at the names of the government agencies where the cuts are occurring insinuates the idiocy of it all: Federal Aviation Administration, the part of the national forestry service the protects against wildfires, the Centers for Disease Control. Here is Krugman again: “Large layoffs have struck at the Department of Health and Human Services, including, according to CBS, half the officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes called the ‘disease detectives,’ who play a crucial role in identifying public health threats. There have been layoffs at the FDA, which monitors the safety of food additives and medical devices.”

What will also happen next will be a repeat of flubs like the nuclear worker firing rehiring dance but in less dramatic functions, which suggests that it may be months or longer before we discover all the mishegoss Musk has made. Not the most daring prophecy, I know: wanting to be right means waiting to predict. I don’t know who the next pope will be either or whether Travis and Taylor will stay together. But there are a few things about bureaucracy that I’d like to clear up. One of the effects of having a now more popular post on Substack, Medium, etc. is fielding comments that enrich the conversation. Rather than letting them get lost, I want to highlight a few of them here as a way of correcting a misconception and enlarging this dialogue.

Some commenters took my appreciation of some aspects of bureaucracy to mean that I am an unabashed fan. Or that I thought the average federal worker resembled Clarence the Guardian Angel from It’s A Wonderful Life. Not so. I thought I made it clear that where bureaucracy is concerned I believe everyone has a love-hate relationship, what the Germans who know from bureaucracies call hass-liebe. I’m not against improving bureaucracies; a health insurance one right now is eating up large strips of my time. In warning about what is going on with our federal bureaucracy, I hold no illusions as to its perfection or likability only to its necessity and durability.

A post from Freddie DeBoer today provided an illustration of what love-hate relationships regarding bureaucracies look like. In talking about the New York Times and its its recent kerfuffle with the exit of longtime and very popular columnist — we just can’t get enough of him — Paul Krugman, Freddie made two comments exemplifying the hate and the love of bureaucracies:

First: “As has happened in so many institutions in American life, it’s the [New York Times] bureaucracy cracking its knuckles, reminding everybody who’s boss.” 

BUT then he writes

“The Times is genuinely a hyper-competent publication, forever finding new ways to deploy their immense talent pool. They employ a remarkably deep bench of talented and committed reporters.”

As a judgment from Freddie, these words constitute something like a love note on the best of a bureaucracy abetting the possession of ‘hyper-competence’. Bureaucracies are bullies and bureaucracies are beneficial. It’s not either/or, but rather both/and.

Old friend and veteran federal worker, Dan Thompson, concurred with my forecast of the dismantling of the bureaucracy, but read my comments on 3^rd order controls as suggesting that they evolved to serve the interests of the people, which he thought inaccurate. Eager to avoid that misconception, I responded to Dan that “3rd order controls are rarely about something that’s benevolent and altruistic, but rather about how to make things work in such a way that you avoid catastrophe and retain control.”

We could make bureaucracies better but the Methode à la Musk currently on the menu is both unlikely to achieve that worthy goal and liable to create some serious problems.

But is this all even about the bureaucracy? As the screenshot above shows — it’s a word search of the word ‘bureaucracy’ in the Washington Post — on we have been talking about reform through pretty much every recent administration. (look at those dates: 2017, 2014) At the time of this change in administrations, one authority — yes, it was Krugman again — wrote that the federal work force was no larger than it was under Dwight Eisenhower. And true to his tendency for 180° shifts, it was Donald Trump who enlarged the bureaucracy during his first term to what Paul Light via the Brookings Institution said was an all-time high.

Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Trump opened the contract and grant spigots instead, adding more than 2 million jobs to the blended federal workforce, including 1 million in the Departments of Defense, Transportation, and Health and Human Services alone.

The Volker Alliance report of September 2017 outlined ways in which the first Trump administration could reform a system that according to many experts needs reform, but that didn’t happen in any substantial fashion. What’s occurring now seems to have a different purpose. Some see it as a purge of anyone who might be disloyal, others as a way to cut costs to allow for further tax breaks. A comment to our previous post on Nex-Gen bureaucratization suggested a more dastardly aim of these Musky maneuvers . My good friend, Hans Sandberg, a former journalist and a witness to more regimes globally than me, offered a comparison that I found persuasive: the real purpose of all this upheaval here is to distract us from other things like the Trumps enriching themselves via government actions like crypto pushing or a Gaza real estate deal:

“Elon Musk’s shenanigans reminds me of Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and his parole “Bombard the Headquarters!” It was a destructive distraction aiming to deflect responsibility for the “Great Leap Forward” which led to the death of tens of million Chinese. The Cultural Revolution threw the country into chaos by destroying the “bureaucracy” which got in the way for Mao’s reckless rule. After the Cultural Revolution, there was talk of rule by law instead of Mao’s rule by men. The return to order under Deng Xiaoping (but in no way a move towards democracy) made China’s economic explosive growth possible, but the return to autocracy under Xi Jinping is undermining China’s future prospects both politically, socially and economically. The Trump/Musk oligarchy is likely to lead the U.S. and the world to global catastrophe.”

People who get caught up on the supposed political underpinnings of various leaders might think a Mao / Donald comparison shaky. But look at the words that are used and not the supposed cultural backgrounds of the players. For example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth frothing at the mouth about ‘hard power’ being more important than values sounds an awful lot like Chairman Mao’s saying “All power is from the end of a gun.”

That dire comparison makes figuring out what we do next beyond urgent. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs spend most of their article The Path to American Authoritarianism — What Comes After Democratic Breakdown outlining the slide to competitive authoritarianism taking place in our country now but at its conclusion note that “Trump will be vulnerable. The administration’s limited public support and inevitable mistakes will create opportunities for democratic forces—in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box. But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling. Worn down by harassment and threats, many of Trump’s critics will be tempted to retreat to the sidelines. Such a retreat would be perilous. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root“

Great pep talk, but the what and how of defeating this self-coup or ‘autogolpe’ (Krugman!!!) remain to be defined. The comment of Robert Burnside, also a friend and like me part of that small fellowship of those who got to be Chief Learning Officers inside large corporations; i.e., enlightened bureaucrats, took the considerations of the current chaos in a different and actionable direction:

 “the negative qualities of Mao and Xi / Trump and Musk are also within us, but we can counterbalance them with our own efforts toward the good. When we try to eliminate them we fall prey to their illness of trying to eliminate us; instead, let’s stay in relationship with them / this part of us while we forcefully assert an opposite direction”

What does that forceful assertion look like? It’s early days and the lackluster, limp, lame leadership of the opposition party is not charting ‘forceful assertion’ for us let alone actually exercising it. Senators like Welch of Vermont and Fetterman of Pennsylvania stress that being in the minority limits their ambit; such limited ambition for politicians elected to what once was proclaimed as the greatest deliberative body in the Western world. There are protests by the public against the Eloniacs. So far, those assemblies are earnest, admirable, and underwhelming. There are expressions of negative opinion presented through polls that then get written up by columnists like Philp Bump who probably have zero influence within this administration but might light a fire under those lackluster leaders. But there are diehards on the Trump side who see this resistance as impotent and it’s hard to disagree with that aspect of their opinion even though they are wrong about what the bureaucracy does.

Finally, there are people like myself writing about the dopiness of DOGE and its expected and already evidenced deleterious effects. Katy at Anchoress Archives offers a subversive rationale for efforts like this one: “Write things down. If we know anything about authoritarian regimes, we know that the narrative is changed to reflect only the opinions and views of those in power. History can and will be rewritten to support an ideology. Record your thoughts on events, document your lives. We should all become archivists. Signed, an Archivist”

I can certainly claim to be earnest in writing things down, and I hope as a result to be part of a dialogue about all of this, which will start to generate some answers and more effective actions. We are not storming anything. The initial returns on the first of these posts was positive in that regard. Now what we need is to have the conversation turned to this question of what forceful assertion looks like. Paradoxically, my friend Robert Burnside argues that forceful assertion has to be done with love. He wrote as a coda to the Robert Frost poem Fire and Ice:

Yet others say the world goes on
In endless transformations;
Around the fire
Warm hearts thaw ice,
In hatred’s soil
Love grows
And carries on.

This idea places me in the position of admitting that I don’t know how to do that — to combine a love for my fellow citizens who through their votes placed us in this position with an assertion against these depredations. Maybe you do. Write a comment here or your own post to figure out how to resolve the seeming contradiction. Remember my contention that is at the heart of this blog: EVERYTHING IS A TEST. Some tests have high stakes, some have low stakes. This is definitely in the former category right near the top, and we should work hard to pass this exam.