This fall I came to dwell in the Land of Bureaucracy. I made a temporary home there, in the world of five-year plans and policy papers on the social cost of carbon, of legal convenings on regulatory strategy, of discussions on how best agencies might implement recent legislation in the face of ongoing neoliberal attack.
One does not travel to Bureaucracy with the expectation of finding hope. Who thinks to seek that warm ephemeral wisp in gray hallways and poorly lit conference rooms? Or in the corner filing cabinets, behind scraped and flaking beige paint? Surely tedium is the more typical reward for those who find themselves lost in the depths of the Federal Register and its kin.
Yet it’s in these places—or at least their digital counterparts—that I caught the scent of hope drifting by with surprising frequency. I could hear it, too, in the voices of people as they spoke, even as they talked of difficulties and challenges. There! Can you hear it? Listen to that blend of determination and possibility: something that sounds like purpose.
It’s not as though I didn’t catch sight of Bureaucracy’s famous monsters lurking in the wings. There were the heavy shadows cast by sorcerous figures in black robes. There was the all-too familiar presence of individuals in suits who—masks loosened and lifted—are found to be mere shells of former humans, animated only by the eerie energy of corporate money. And so many ghosts: all the ghosts one can imagine haunting a machine that’s been churning on for centuries.
But here, too, look through a doorway and find the small team carefully watching over their shoulders for those corporate suits as they discuss their plans and turn to one another in delight, a treasure chest of resources newly at their feet, and next to it, a strange kit of tools crafted by some forgotten sage. As they forge together a new set of tactics and strategies for fending off both ghouls and gremlins in new ways, their future success is not guaranteed, but their chances higher than they have been in years. Those who have dwelled in Bureaucracy in recent years understand the magic that is at last being allowed back in, even if its source and strength remain uncertain.
Why am I here, another ghost haunting these spaces? I came with what I thought was a simple enough question, about one person and the impact of their work. I thought I would, as usual, go and learn a bit, then come back home and share. Only I found that what I expected to learn was a rather small story in comparison to what is happening.
The smaller, familiar story—with which I aimed to round out a review of the Interior Department under Deb Haaland’s first bit of time there—is familiar, a mixed bag of grand hopes and intentions: a climate plan full of phrases like “traditional ecological knowledge” and “climate equity,” or an initial pause on gas and oil leases, both sit alongside business done in all its usual ways—the USGS mapping more of the continent’s precious minerals, a likely precursor to more extractive mining—as well as some unexpected interference, such as the requirement for new gas leases approved by Congress.
But the bigger story—a story, I might argue, that warrants serious attention—is one of tapping the most unlikely heroes and then breathing new life into a philosophy that has come seriously under question in recent years: the basic liberal philosophy that suggests that collaboration and coordination between experts and designers of systems—especially when well-funded—can deliver serious public goods and make people’s lives better, not worse.
But the bigger story—a story, I might argue, that warrants serious attention—is one of tapping the most unlikely heroes and then breathing new life into a philosophy that has come seriously under question in recent years: the basic liberal philosophy that suggests that collaboration and coordination between experts and designers of systems—especially when well-funded—can deliver serious public goods and make people’s lives better, not worse.
There are many legitimate reasons why people no longer overtly trust this set of beliefs. There are many who have been harmed by it and by its more naïve champions. But some of us, I think, have abandoned our hope in the ability for large institutions to deliver truly beneficial outcomes without fully considering our reasons for or the effects of doing so; maybe we haven’t even realized that we have abandoned it. This is troubling, for it means that many of us are unwitting accomplices in the destruction and attack upon the administrative state by reactionary right-wing forces, even when we think we are denouncing that very attack. And we look at moments like the upcoming election with something like despondency, for we feel like there are no good options, and we wonder if the forms of the state and political figures we have to choose from can really lead to anything good. Certainly the headlines we hear day after day suggest only never-ending failure.
Yes, there’s plenty to have misgivings about in these times. But after these last few weeks in Bureaucracy, I firmly believe that we have a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of good, and about to do a whole lot more, if we can give them the breathing room to continue on. Some questionable things as well, yes (say, implementing corporate tax credits for carbon storage). But there is so much being built, or about to be built; so many changes in the works, especially at the federal level.
It’s all the aftermath of the political skirmishes dominating the first part of Biden’s term, with the Inflation Reduction Act as the most recent example. The story there is not, as the headlines might lure us into believing, just about the political fights. It’s really about the work of implementation that follows. (If news about the IRA already feels like ancient history, here’s a quick breakdown to remind you of just how much funding is at play, and for what.) That we might get something better than promised in the legislation on its face is not due to Biden himself but to the many, many people that he has hired to fix the absolute disaster left at just about every agency after Trump’s time in office. Just repairing that damage would have been a minor miracle, but the staff of the Biden administration is going beyond repair to some new levels of administrative wizardry.
Cory Doctorow has a good phrase for some of that administrative wizardry; he calls it “kicking the printer.” In a piece Doctorow wrote just last week1:
You know the joke.
Office manager: "$75 just to kick the photocopier?"
Photocopier technician: "No, it's $5 to kick the photocopier and $70 to know where to kick it."
The trustbusters in the Biden administration know precisely where to kick the photocopier, and they're kicking the shit out of it. You love to see it.
Last July, the Biden admin published an Executive Order enumerating 72 actions that administrative agencies could take without any further action from Congress – dormant powers that the administration already had, but wasn't using…
Doctorow’s post is about the Right to Repair and the FTC, not at all the spaces in Bureaucracy I was visiting (though the Right to Repair is surely on my list of “good things we already ought to have”). Still he draws some similar conclusions about particular appointees and their “administrative competence”:
But it's also included lots of extremely skillful ju-jitsu against the system, using long-neglected leverage points to Get Shit Done, rather than just grandstanding or demanding that Congress take action.
That “skillful ju-jitsu”? That’s all about to be unleashed on a scale we’ve never seen to address climate and fund various forms of energy transition as $40 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act goes to the EPA—yeah, the same EPA whose authority the Supreme Court just attempted to limit in the West Virginia case. This is funding unlike the EPA has ever seen. As one lawyer at a recent climate law gathering put it, “EPA has never administered anything at this scale… I assume folks at EPA are kind of freaking out about this.”
Freaking out, or newly empowered to kick some printers really damn hard? I think the latter. And given West Virginia, they’ve all the more incentive to do so in a way that will be safe from further power grabs in the form of excessive use of judicial review.
If you really like the notion of “administrative wizardry” and feel like my account of it here is a little light on details, let me recommend “Reclaiming the Deep State,” by Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect.
Kuttner details the shift going on at what may be the bureaucratic heart of Bureaucracy: the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, inside the Office of Management and Budget, from its anti-regulatory heyday and its especially sad times under Cass Sunstein (Obama’s appointee) to its current pro-regulatory approach. This isn’t an accident; one of the executive orders Biden signed his first day was “to use the OIRA regulatory review process to ‘promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.’”
Can bureaucracy do that? Go read Kuttner’s piece, and if you’re already inclined to any form of policy wonkery, see if your faith isn’t revived at least the tiniest bit. Myself, the chance to let these experiments continue at least a little longer—to increase the likelihood that we’ll see some of the benefits of the IRA truly come through, and not stalled by new members in the House or Senate or further down the line; and that we might come out of the Biden years with a more functional federal system than when we left it, despite the repetitive media chorus that only the opposite is presently possible—all this has me once more invested in working on mid-term elections, something I haven’t done for a few years.
And that should tell you there’s something truly different afoot. I traveled to Bureaucracy, and I returned saying, “Let me get back into the political arena.”
I’m just following that whiff of hope, knowing it’s a strange creature that grows and becomes more real and more visible the more we pursue it. Even an outlet like the New York Times is beginning to catch its scent; just yesterday they published an opinion piece by some Georgetown policy professors on the bureaucratic efficiency of the student debt relief application.
I still have my own concerns regarding the limits of what the administrative state can offer us in an era of climate turbulence, and questions about the balance we might strike between improving bureaucratic processes and developing alternatives that allow local communities to attend to needs often neglected by the present systems of governance. We’ll be poking at this tension and some related questions in upcoming pieces over the next few months. The terrain there promises to be a little messy—yet what might we find if we traverse it anyhow? I hope you’ll come along and find out.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg
Thanks to M. Emerson for sharing Doctorow’s post.