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By: BILL FIANDER
University lecturer specializing in public administration, urban planning, and state/local government
Make no mistake. It’s coming. An invasive non-native species of podcasters, influencers, tech-bros, reality TV stars, and spurned college students aboard the disinformation train destroying a healthy democratic habitat faster than out of work loggers at a spotted owl convention.
While much focus is on the vanishing checks from Congress or Supreme Court on presidential powers under Trump 2.0, the most endangered check, or species, may be the professional bureaucrat. In the biggest reshaping of the federal workforce since the Gilded Age, coerced mass layoffs impacting 284,000 workers and presidential loyalty tests have burned wide swaths of their habitat.
To some that’s not a bad thing. Bureaucracy is typically a pejorative term. One that values processes over people and impersonalized service. Red tape. That’s fair. An old DMV comes to mind. But to others, vanishing professional bureaucrats is the proverbial canary in a coal mine.
Let’s take the curious tale of Kansas Department of Labor’s (KDOL) modernization project.
Since 2002, KDOL had been trying to modernize a Byzantine unemployment insurance IT system equivalent to Atari Pong technology. Governor Brownback officially pulled the plug in 2011 before it was complete. By the time Governor Kelly could re-start the project, Covid hit in 2020 with an avalanche of unemployment claims frying the archaic system. This perfect storm vastly delayed payments to angry laid off workers while fraudsters made off with $460 million in claims. Under a new Labor Secretary with a long career modernizing local government technology, the $43 million system finally launched last November. Score one for the professional bureaucrat.
But we’re not done.
Six months later, what’s left of the U.S. Department of Labor’s bureaucratic expertise absurdly decided to claw back $1 million of a $1.7 million grant intended to safeguard the new system from fraud because “equity” was in the grant description. Never mind “equity” would make software useable on ALL our devices and for rural Kansans without broadband. Now fraudsters have equitable access.
Downstream impacts to localities of exceedingly politicized and bonkers incompetency doesn’t stop there - birth rates tied to transportation funds, shutting down FEMA call centers amid horrific flooding, walking back diversity goals in the home of Brown v Board. It will be endless. As a long-time public administrator, I see these as microcosms of graver concerns echoing the age of spoils.
In the 1830s, newly elected President Andrew Jackson ushered in an era of politicized civil service under his “to the victors belong the spoils of the enemy” philosophy swapping out non-partisan workers for his partisan loyalists regardless of aptitude. A philosophy Mark Twain would bluntly scorch decades later… “We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a teacher who does not know the alphabet…but when it comes to our civil service, we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses.”
Thanks to Twain and rampant political corruption, Congress formalized a new era of merit-based hiring in 1883. A new discipline of public administration transformed government from the dark age of spoils to a professional bureaucracy of expertise that puts American people first using efficacy, efficiency, economy, and equity as guideposts.
As I’ve experienced, public administrators can be the only adults in the room “checking” the veracity, narcissism and sheer incompetence of politically tinged decision-making. Losing them is a harbinger for our democratic ecosystem.
There is no “I” in running government. Only ruining government.
Bill Fiander is a university lecturer specializing in public administration, urban planning, and state/local government.
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