In Praise of Bureaucracy

Charles Kurzman, “In Praise of Bureaucracy,” May 5, 2025

Everybody hates government bureaucracy. The very phrase brings to mind long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, endless paperwork, absurd regulations, and wasteful spending.

Government bureaucracy has “crushed our freedoms, ballooned our deficits, and held back America’s potential in every possible way,” President Trump declared to Congress in early March, as he pledged to slash the federal workforce. “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy,” Elon Musk, Trump’s “tech support,” chimed in. He called bureaucracy an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which has, in a lot of ways, currently, more power than any elected representative.” (That description might apply to Musk himself these days.)

Hostility toward bureaucracy is not new. A half-century ago, Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party called bureaucrats “conceited,” “complacent,” “truculent,” and “arbitrary.” “Government offices grow bigger and bigger; things are more confused; there are more people than there are jobs,” he complained. “Documents are numerous; there is red tape; instructions proliferate.”

In the middle of the 19th century, novelist Charles Dickens warned that Britain was “bound hand and foot with red tape” by bureaucracies like the (fictional) “Office of Circumlocution,” whose sole purpose was to avoid serving the public.

So why did Max Weber, one of the most brilliant minds of 20th century sociology, say that bureaucracy “is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings”?

When I teach classes in sociological theory, my students object to the idea that bureaucracy could ever be considered efficient. Then they read Weber’s essay.

Weber proposed that bureaucracies are all about the consistent application of rules. It shouldn’t matter whether you are a big-wig or a friend or a relative – nobody gets special treatment. The rules are supposed to be applied consistently over time – that’s why bureaucracies have to keep meticulous records. Qualified personnel need to be hired and paid sufficiently to limit the risk of bribery or self-dealing, and they need to be protected from threats or retribution by powerful people who think rules shouldn’t apply to them.

The opposite of bureaucracy, according to Weber, is patrimonial authority, which has governed almost all of human history. In patrimonial organizations, officeholders are selected for their loyalty or their ancestry, rather than their qualifications. They make decisions based on personal discretion, not on rules, so they are free to favor allies and donors and bullies. The absence of a consistent and predictable legal environment is unjust, by modern sensibilities, and introduces risk in planning, which is inefficient. That’s why all sorts of modern organizations, including efficiency-minded businesses, have switched from patrimonial to bureaucratic methods. Even fast-moving start-ups, as they mature, build bureaucracies to maintain consistency across multiple branches and offices.

“However many people may complain about the ‘red tape,’” Weber wrote, “it would be sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices” – by which he meant bureaucracies.

In the century since Weber’s essay, bureaucracies have reached into every aspect of our lives, with regulations that seem maddeningly complex. At their heart, though, most regulations involve either law enforcement or fiscal accountability. Both of these functions are conservative priorities.

Take the laws against murder. If you are poisoned with fentanyl, the laws and regulations are fairly clear. Only medical and scientific institutions are legally allowed to possess fentanyl, for research purposes, and we have bureaucrats overseeing the distribution and handling of the stuff. Thank you, Drug Enforcement Agency.

What if you are poisoned with botulism? That involves a different set of laws and regulations to guarantee the safety of the food industry. Presumably, companies don’t want to kill their customers, but to be sure, we have a government bureaucracy to identify best practices and enforce them. Thank you, Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration.

What if you are poisoned with coal ash, a toxic by-product of coal-fired energy plants? We might hope that companies don’t want to kill their neighbors, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Many companies poisoned their community’s air with coal ash until environmental regulations prevented them. Some companies have poisoned their community’s water by building skimpy containment structures – here in North Carolina, Duke Energy spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River – so new regulations had to be written to prevent more poisonings. Thank you, Environmental Protection Agency.

Greedy, clever people are always looking for new ways to make money, even if it means hurting other people in the process, so regulations will inevitably grow in order to keep up with all of this deviousness. Understandably, perpetrators don’t want regulation. But the rest of us, as potential victims, need an independent, well-trained bureaucracy to protect public safety.

Every regulation of this sort is a crime-stopper. But in the early months of Trump’s second coming, all of these agencies are facing budget cuts and layoffs.

Many regulations involve fiscal accountability, another conservative priority. When Congress spends taxpayer money, the country has a right to know whether that money is being spent correctly and responsibly. Keeping an eye on government expenditures requires bureaucracy: qualified personnel to develop standards for proper disbursement, determine eligibility for recipients, track the use of the funds, and report back to Congress. The more detailed the rules that Congress sets, the more staff are needed to carry out these tasks.

I’ll give an example from a federal grant I helped manage for a dozen years, supporting Middle East studies at schools in North Carolina. For more than half a century, Congress has authorized funds each year, with bipartisan support, to subsidize the teaching of less commonly taught languages and the development of expertise on world regions, including the Middle East, that the government deems important for the national interest.

An office of eight staff members at the Department of Education manages this program – a relatively small number of bureaucrats to oversee $75 million in grants to 131 centers and institutes at 49 universities across the country.

Congress created rules for the program through the Higher Education Act, in order to specify who is eligible for the program and what sorts of activities are to be funded. Over the years, Congress amended the Act to add further instructions, such as a requirement that funded activities reflect diverse perspectives on world regions. The bureaucrats’ job is to make sure that taxpayer funds are spent in accordance with this law, and to intervene if there are problems.

My colleagues and I found parts of this bureaucratic oversight to be irksome, such as the outmoded software for submitting annual reports. But the program officers were knowledgeable and efficient. They ensured that we were doing the good work that Congress asked us to do: improving Americans’ understanding of the Middle East through language learning and specialized training.

President Trump shut the office and fired the staff in mid-March, along with many other offices in the Department of Education and other agencies. The funds for this year have already been disbursed, on Congressional orders, but nobody is monitoring their use.

Destroying the bureaucracy that provides fiscal accountability is a counterproductive way to “minimize Government waste and abuse,” a supposed goal of President Trump’s initiative “to dramatically reduce the size of the Federal Government, while increasing its accountability to the American people.”

No doubt some bureaucracies are inefficient. Some regulations are useless, and some offices are overstaffed. The solution to problematic bureaucracies is not to do away with rules and enforcement, but to prepare better rules and better enforcement. This involves careful work, not arbitrary wholesale cuts.

Recent surveys suggest that Americans increasingly object to Trump’s attack on the federal workforce. In all six national polls on the subject since mid-February, respondents who said Trump’s cuts had “gone too far” outnumbered respondents who supported the cuts.

Perhaps people are starting to understand the value of bureaucracy? If you have a better way to organize a fair, consistent, rule-based system to address national problems on a national scale, let’s hear it. In the meantime, putting a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy is irresponsible.