Shining a Floodlight on Federal Bureaucracy

Efficiency, Weaponized

According to The Heritage Foundation, in 2019, the federal government spent more than $28,100 per person in poverty — providing benefits $15,000 above the poverty threshold for each person. To the layperson, this could sound extraordinary- to the point of leaving them to believe that the federal government is cutting a check for nearly thirty thousand dollars to every “welfare queen” in the US.

Make no mistake: a very small percentage of that $28,100 results in actual money in the intended beneficiary’s pocket, food on their table, or other direct assistance.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that The Heritage Foundation is the architect of Project 2025, the roadmap for the “restructuring” of the federal government that is currently underway. One of the cornerstones of Project 2025 is the demonization of oppressed people in the interest of giving the general public a profile for the general public focus its ire on as large swaths of federal government- in particular, the agencies that administer the 134 programs that address poverty to the tune of 1.1 billion dollars annually- become privatized.

For the sake of “efficiency”.

That said, ample evidence exists to dispel the myth that privatization of federal programs increases efficiency by eliminating excess bureaucracy, waste, and fraud. For instance, Medicaid, as the result of being privatized in 42 out of 50 states, is a program that now experiences a threefold bureaucracy at the federal, state, and Managed Care Organization (MCO) levels. Additionally, despite the fact that one of the arguments for transitioning Medicaid administration from states to MCOs has been that, by doing so, Medicaid fraud would be significantly reduced. However, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) acknowledges that MCOs have, instead, simply become an additional level for such fraud to occur.

(As an aside, according to the Cato Institute, the federal government spends over 181 billion dollars a year on “corporate welfare”, which can include subsidies, loans, bailouts, and other cash-based interventions. By and large, this particular manifestation of welfare is largely ignored by Project 2025, and is not subject to the onerous anti-fraud mechanisms from eligibility determinations to post-payment audits.)

Public Bureaucracy, Lionized

Meanwhile, stakeholders on the other side of the aisle are countering the pro-privatization actions of the Trump Administration by highlighting the stories of individual members of the federal workforce who are experiencing job losses- scientists, researchers, and park rangers, for instance- to humanize their pro-federal bureaucracy rhetoric.

At present, Americans are seemingly being presented with two “choices”: “private” or “public” bureaucracy.

“Public bureaucracies are not designed for efficiency,” (American University Professor Robert) Durant noted in the Harvard Political Review article, “Under the Hood: The Cost of Bureaucracy”. “They are designed through negotiations and compromise among competing interests to ensure that they will have power, access, and influence over later policy decisions made by agencies.” According to Durant, federal bureaucracy is designed to be resistant to change, in part, because, the members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee the various federal agencies enjoy the positional power and prestige that comes with such roles “When you try to reorganize agencies, you have to simultaneously reorganize the congressional committee structures which oversee those agencies.  And members of those committees are going to resist.”

The system of bureaucratic control over government services and benefits in turn gives elected officials power, influence, and control.

But it’s not just members of Congress who like public bureaucracy.

It’s the bureaucrats themselves.

According to the Harvard Business Review:

The cost of excess bureaucracy in the US economy amounts to more that 3 trillion in lost  economic output, or about 17% of GDP. Here’s the arithmetic. According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation. In total, then, there are 21.4 million employees in the U.S. workforce — 12.5 million managers and the equivalent of 8.9 million individual contributors, who... are creating little or no economic value. This means the U.S. could achieve current levels of economic output with 15% fewer people in the labor force. That would, in effect, boost GDP per worker from $120,000 to $141,000.

Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service is one of many stakeholders who argues that the notion that federal bureaucracy is excessive is erroneous because, as he notes, “The head count today of the [U.S.] federal workforce is essentially the same as it was in 1969.” However, what Stier and others fail to mention is the fact that a significant amount of the work of the federal government has been delegated to contractors and that federal contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than 100%, which, in many respects, outsources the “grunt work” of public service to private entities and renders the federal employee less a “public servant” and more an “administrator”, or bureaucrat- or De Facto Queen of a Federal Welfare Program- who delegates and oversees her public service tasks to contractors that are, in many respects, their subjects.

Who’s Really Doing the “Serving”?

It would be prudent to not underestimate how appealing such an arrangement could be, as it affords ample opportunity to covertly assert a significant amount of power at the federal level, no matter which political party is in the majority. Not just for the bureaucrat employed by the federal government- but for the entities that said bureaucrats select to work as contractors, as well, many of whom are, with regard to the social services sector, nationally renowned nonprofit service providers and advocacy organizations. These entities, in the interest of courting favor with the public bureaucrats who hold the purse strings, perceive “relationship building” with them to be just as essential as doing so with federal elected officials as far as the care and maintenance of their respective political positions in DC are concerned.

After all, these organizations need to ensure their financial sustainability, as they have bureaucrats of their own to compensate.

But where does all of this leave people who are oppressed by the system to the point of needing whatever aid the system is willing to provide them in order to survive?

To reiterate, contrary to any allusions perpetuated by entities like The Heritage Foundation or their ilk regarding people in poverty being, on average, the recipient of nearly thirty thousand federal dollars a year, Uncle Sam is not simply cutting checks to poor people in the US- the vast majority of federal spending that pertains to people in poverty is in-kind, not in cash. Although some forms of in-kind aid such as Medicaid, Head Start, and Meals on Wheels are examples are widely deemed valuable by participants, others, like job training programs and information/referral-type services often prove to be irrelevant to participants.

Nevertheless, the organizations that public bureaucrats continue to contract with entities that provide irrelevant services and the entities that provide irrelevant services continues to do so because they are financially dependent upon the federal funding they receive for doing so.

Additionally, in-kind federal aid is fraught with excess bureaucracy, which creates pitfalls to access for people who are not well-versed in navigating the tangled web of services that are federally funded. That said, the bureaucracy of in-kind services isn’t just confusing- it inherently strips people in poverty of agency and forces them to engage with representatives of the system that, despite altruistic titles such as “public servant” and “advocacy organization” aside, maintain  a maternalistic grip on them.

Among the myriad disparities people in poverty experience in the US, because of our commitment to bureaucracy, we all experience a disparity in access to universal healthcare in the US. This is not hyperbole. According to Voice of America (VOA), US insurers and providers spent more than $800 billion in 2017 on administration, or nearly $2,500 per person — more than four times the per-capita administrative costs in Canada's universal healthcare system. Dr. David Himmelstein of Harvard Medical School notes that “(t)hat money could be spent for care if we had a 'Medicare for all program'.”

Ultimately, federal bureaucracy is the code that programs the system of oppression in the US. It’s the same system that offered formerly enslaved Black Americans empty promises regarding forty acres and a mule, yet swiftly gave those who had enslaved them reparations to compensate for “loss of property”. It creates an ornate table for everyone involved in the funding and execution of in-kind federal poverty aid to sit at-

Everyone, that is, except for the “persons served”… on the menu.