The recent controversy of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the waste and corruption it is exposing, has created outrage among those who support the bureaucratic state. This outrage is based on a belief of technocracy, the idea that experts know how to manage things better than the common people do, and as such, they should be given unaccountable powers over their spheres. This is nothing new with the bureaucratic state, a tradition that, in America, started with Woodrow Wilson, and globally has existed as long as human states have existed (Chinese Dynastic Mandrins, advisors to royals and kings, the court class, etc). This system, however, is an affront to the liberal tradition, and is wholly against American self governance. The fact that Americans as a whole are not insulted by what amounts to a nanny state, is deeply troubling.
The idea that experts should be in charge of governance is nothing new when it comes to governance in general. If kings were wise sages, who only knew who to govern all aspects of life, we would not need a government. However, no man can rule alone, and every leader needs advisors. Of course, a leader would ideally only want advisors who are competent at whatever they are advising on, so leaders would look for those with expertise in whatever they are governing. It makes sense to choose someone with a military background to run military affairs, or someone with financial experience balancing the books. Throughout history, classes of government administrators have always existed, and were always close-knit communities that operated as their own class. They tended to exist with special privileges/rights. Rulers tended to be deferential with advice from their advisors, although this does not mean that rulers blindly followed whatever their advisors said.
As with anything that factors in the human dimension, some expert advisors were exceedingly competent at their job. Otto von Bismarck is the poster boy of skilled bureaucrats, as he was more or less the man that made Prussia one of the dominate leaders in Europe. However, history is also filled with plenty of examples of experts who drove their nations into ruin. There are countless stories of kingdoms, city-states, and nation-states, driven into the ground by poor management by the Mandrin class. For every example of a good administrator, there are at least two or three dozen examples of poor administrators.
It is for this reason that we ought to be skeptical of an expert dictating how we should live, and what the rules of society are. More often than not, these experts have a single factor analysis of an exceedingly complex system, in which human society functions. It is easy to model a system with a handful of variables in two dimensions. However, human society is far more complex than that, and the amount of information that is unknown versus known, is the principle reason administrators are ineffective. States that are highly bureaucratic, especially those that have a highly centralized/top down approach to governance, are slow to react to a complex and changing world. The USSR “industrialized quickly” a core area of the USSR, and left the overwhelming majority of territory undeveloped, with much of modern Russians living in areas without running water, or sanitation services. The same is true with modern China, a highly centralized urban society, with lots of rural areas existing almost unconnected with modern society as some of the undeveloped areas on Earth. Even in more liberal societies, such as in Europe, wild animals are faster at infrastructure development than governments do.
What’s even more interesting, is the idea that inefficient administrators should not be held accountable to those they are administrating. Especially in America, where we live under the idea of self governance, and the legitimacy of government deriving from the consent of the people, many seem to believe that the aforementioned DOGE audits and reforms are somehow hurting the nation. Worse yet, many are arguing that the President of the United States somehow does not have the authority to manage the branch in which he is Constitutionally bound to administer.
This leads us to a situation where the administrative state is accountable to no one, not even the office from which they derive their own power and authority from. This is an affront to the American ideals listed above.