The Federal Bureaucracy Will Never Be an Effective Tool for Conservative Goals

A word of warning to conservatives who have stopped wanting to shrink, reduce, limit, or scale back the federal government, and who, in recent years, decided want to use the sprawling and far-reaching power of the federal government to serve their own agenda. . . .

In case you haven’t noticed, the federal government is often incompetent. Or perhaps I should specify the federal bureaucracy — the one I wrote a book about — is a spectacularly inefficient institution that at best slowly and erratically lumbers towards its goals, hampered by its own red tape, inertia, waste, overhead costs, complicated regulations allegedly designed to make everything fair and ethical, slews of incompetent and hard-to-fire staffers, etcetera.

The federal government ends up achieving the precise opposite of its goals with surprising frequency. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose job is to stop or minimize the harm of pollution, accidentally released contaminated wastewater into rivers. “Cash for Clunkers” was designed to spur purchases of more cars, and tried to put greener cars on the roads and help U.S. the struggling U.S. auto industry; it ended up selling a lot of Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, Hyundais, and Kias.

The more the federal government expands its student loan program, the higher the tuition gets and the more students have more debt. Financial incentives for better outcomes by doctors created incentives for doctors to maximize their treatment of healthy patients and generated no measurable improvement in patient care.

Even federal programs that I like, like our efforts to create a functioning state in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from coming back and running a bed and breakfast for international terrorist groups, have a similar record of counterproductivity. A program to hire ditch diggers to clear canals and pay them well ended up paying better than teaching, so the local teachers quit and disrupted the local schools. Another program built lots of new school buildings across Afghanistan . . . but didn’t have the resources to staff the new schools, so the Taliban moved in and turned them into bomb-building facilities.

Even distributing money, the one simple task that the government has extensive experience with, can get loused up: Congress appropriated $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their rent because of the pandemic; after seven months, just 10 percent had been distributed to renters. A program designed to help the poor pay their phone bills reached just a quarter of those eligible.

During the pandemic, we’ve learned that the National Institutes of Health handed out grant money to institutions to help fight the next pandemic . . . and may well have accidentally helped start that pandemic. Even more recently, the vaccine mandates probably increased hesitancy, mistrust, and suspicion.

There’s even an argument that a policy that cost-conscious conservatives prefer, like a hiring freeze, designed to save taxpayer money, backfires by causing a backlog of unfinished work that needs to be addressed by more workers when the hiring freeze is lifted.

As I wrote back in April 2020:

. . . federal bureaucracies are full of perverse incentives that punish those who try something new and deviate from “the way we’ve always done things.” Any experiment that doesn’t work out is seen as reason to avoid trying any new approaches. Many federal offices are hamstrung by antiquated technology — see the description above of the IRS encouraging companies to fax in their refund requests. All sorts of rules and regulations that are supposed to make sure all contracts are fair and involve no favoritism have created a slow-moving process where ordering any new equipment becomes a major hassle with piles of paperwork. A process that was designed to make sure no individual person has too much power, and that each person would be watched over and held accountable to many others, has grown and morphed into a system where no individual person has too much authority to get things done, and responsibility is so diffuse that it’s hard to point to one person at fault when something goes wrong.

And yes, the federal bureaucracy has more than its share of incompetent people who are just about impossible to fire.

So when someone like Rod Dreher declares, “we need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power”. . .  I mean, have you seen state power? The left has near-complete control of the state, at least at the federal level and at least for now, and even they’re finding achieving their goals so much more difficult than they expected:

• National-security adviser Jake Sullivan recently lamented, “The thing that has surprised me the most is . . . frankly, the kind of incredible human effort that is required to move even as simple a decision as the allocation of some funding for development purposes in a single country. The number of steps that are required to get from a presidential decision to execution on the ground . . . the way resources have to move, the way instructions have to be communicated, the way allies need to be engaged and consulted. Until you stare at it square in the face from the seat I sit in, you don’t fully understand what you’re kind of dealing with as this massive machine.”
• The Biden administration is fuming that they were ready to offer boosters to all Americans, but career employees at “CDC and the FDA opted instead to only authorize boosters for seniors, people with high-risk medical conditions and people at high risk of infection.”
• California is still waiting for the federal Department of Transportation to issue regulations for inspecting underwater pipelines.

And this is a Democratic administration that has most federal employees agreeing with them!

In what world would the federal employees at the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the rest of the government be speedy, efficient, and effective enactors of a nationalist conservative policy agenda?

I know, I know, the federal government and the affiliated bureaucracy will change and get better, once your preferred candidate is in charge. Your particular reforms have never been tried before, and are certain to work where previous efforts failed. Got it.

You want to promote family values, or Christian values, or good citizenship, or responsible fatherhood, or the bonds of community? God bless you, and good luck. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that the federal government, with its maddening bureaucracy, unresponsive reflexes, systemic inefficiency, and sclerotic state, will ever be an effective ally in your cause.