Bureaucracy Breeds Incompetence

Thursday, December 4, 2025

Two major stories are floating around right now that are extremely important, but not getting huge traction.  One is just how the National Guard shooter got in the country and what motivated him.  Lots of investigation and investigation angles.  The other is the breathtaking scandal erupting in Minnesota wherein Somali nationals have immigrated and are bilking the taxpayers out of enormous sums of money.  (None of the links just provided give a complete picture of these situations, just enough to make the point and to serve as a jumping off point for your own look into the problem.)  There is a tendency to want to assign malfeasance to these situations – and there certainly was in the actors proper – but it would require a very large scale conspiracy (in other words an impossible one) for the government actions, or inactions, in these circumstances to be anything other than incompetence – sheer bureaucratic and leadership incompetence.

Which Brings me to this Substack entitled, “Why Modern Institutions Expand Forever.”  The piece is written very tersely written, but in a nutshell:

So managers optimize for not getting punished, not for dynamism….

Over time you need whole classes of people whose job is to prevent mistakes….

That’s not to say these problems aren’t real. Many are. But big institutions address them according to their own survival logic, not a coherent emancipatory project. The core aim is always to reduce risk and discomfort inside big rich organizations, and the tool is always more rules, more procedures, more bureaucracy….

Without some countervailing discipline, the bureaucracies keep growing, consuming larger and larger chunks of the economy.

The mission gets lost in the risk prevention.  Which brings us to the Biden regency – characterized by a total lack of leadership, otherwise referred to as, “without some countervailing discipline.”  It also explains why Trump is to this class such an anathema.  Trump is a developer – big risk, big reward just hoping the successes outnumber the failures.  He is the precise opposite of the risk minimizing bureaucratic mindset – especially a bureaucratic mindset that operated for four years without any guardrails whatsoever.  (Here is the scenario in novel form.)

American politics in my lifetime, maybe a little longer – starting with FDR, has been a pendulum swinging ever wider.  The bureaucracy grows and then we elect someone to tame it for a bit, but once they are out of office it begins its cancerous growth again.  Reagan was certainly such a taming figure, but his success was also limited.  Trump is trying, but seems to be operating in a purely tactical fashion, without an overwhelming strategy.

Dems on the other hand threaten us with even poorer leadership than Biden’s complete absence of it.  Harris?  Newsom?  Walz? (on whose watch the Minnesota fiasco came to be) do not even pretend to leadership – they, and the rest of the slate of Democrat hopefuls, are creatures of the bureaucracy.  They will not only fail to check the bureaucratic cancer – they will promote it.  If they succeed it will require a force even more radical than Trump to try once again to rein things in, even just a bit.

In biological systems growth is necessary, but when it happens in an uncontrolled fashion we call it cancer and it consumes the normal functioning of the system.  Hence my metaphorical references in the prior two paragraphs.  We have made major advances in the treatment of cancer in recent years – it is no longer an automatic death sentence, which it was in my youth.  But our treatments are quite radical, once described to me by a physician as “swatting a fly on a glass table with a sledge hammer.”  The treatment can put the entire organism at risk.  Hence the need for early detection – the smaller the cancer, the less radical the treatment needs to be.

As time proceeds, and the bureaucratic cancer that infects our government grows, the necessary treatments will grow more and more radical.  This is no time to postpone treatment.