“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (preface)
A friend I greatly admire recently announced to us that he had been “DOGE’d.” A retired senior twenty year military officer with deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been working in serious business at the highest level as a civilian for the Department of Defense on a war planning committee with others with three and four stars. He is smart, funny, unfailingly pleasant, and possesses the wisdom and experience necessary to be at the heart of strategic planning. But he was one of the newest members and fell on the vulnerable side of whatever line was drawn by the newly minted Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency bureaucrats and their arbitrary algorithms.
Another young woman, who is a personal favorite of ours, is the fish and wildlife ranger who manages the national wildlife refuge where we volunteer. She works extraordinarily hard as a steward of our irreplaceable shared natural resources and helping to inculcate in the many families with kids that come her love and respect for natural ecosystems and all things wild. Friends of hers with less seniority were within the probationary year of their hiring. Recruited, vetted, hired, trained, doing important work, gone.
No notice, many had never received a performance review. They weren’t laid off in a way that acknowledged their humanity or individual contributions and talents but unceremoniously notified by a boilerplate email sent in a group memo on a Friday afternoon to clean out their desks. Fired for “performance” with no explanation or documentation or decency and with all the compassion exhibited by the big boss when he fired people on his “reality” TV series, “The Apprentice.”[i] Many were exemplary employees, the future of their agencies. No reduction of force notice was filed that would have been required by law had there been a properly administered layoff procedure. Brutal, final, and rushed harsh edicts of the worst of the technocrat bureaucratic impulse. They have since tried to rehire some after they realized the cuts were too deep and the mission was in jeopardy. Many are reluctant to submit to more abuse, and the most talented have moved on.
Her boss, a wildlife ranger with over a quarter of a century of experience took a lucrative early retirement buyout at least partially due to the fear, chaos, and uncertainty that ran rampant in Fish and Wildlife as well as with the Park Service, Forestry, and Bureau of Land Management, which received similar treatment. Collectively, they are the stewards of our most precious natural resources and irreplaceable lands. Her superior planned months of an orderly transition of leadership, passing on to her successors her experience and judgment. Her end of career hand-off, the notes that came to her mind as she reviewed what she most wanted the next generation of wildlife rangers to know and intuit while she trained her replacements, her love of it all, was cut short by the buyout deadline, gone like a late summer leaf blown off too early.
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence
Have no doubt that the zealous DOGE young Turks with their AI tools and search algorithms imported from the mega Musk, Inc, are every bit as much bureaucrats as those found in some of the governmental departments to which they are taking a scythe. Bureaucrats marching to different orders from different managers handing out a different mission: not the usual plan to metastasize, entrench, and harden their silos as would be normal to bureaucracies, but radical deforestation. Are the right branches being whacked off? Or are only the unhealthy trees being culled? And are the skills of the cutters up to the job? Those are pertinent questions.
Stephan Covey’s perennial business best seller, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” comes to mind. In one section he describes perfectly the difference between leadership and management that I have never forgotten. The manager given the marching orders to cut down a forest sets up productivity tracking indices, spreadsheets, daily plans and objectives, gathers sufficient tools and labor, assigns the tasks according to skills and experience, and daily monitors the progress of the project and state of his organization. Leaders climb the tallest tree, survey the land, and yell down to the managers, “Wrong forest!!”
The managers are not the primary problem, not that they are innocent of errors and clumsy implementation, but leadership barking out quotas with impatient, imprudent, and imperfect planning are clear cutting productive timberland and leaving other land choked with brambles and thorns and invasive species.
As a forty five year conservative, I am confident there is plenty of judicious pruning to be done in the Federal government, but choosing the right sections and selecting the right trees must be done with great care, wisdom, analysis, and judgment so as not to destroy the marvelous forest and drop the wrong trees.
Democrats “are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores
One of our most loved nostalgic pleasures is to ride where we once took our kids on the back roads of Maine forty years ago, stopping along the way to remember. This week we took the long loop around Rangely Lake up Phillips Road from Weld, then Route 4 to the center of Rangely before turning back south towards Dixfield on Route 17. We meandered along the west side of the lake with splendid vistas around every corner of the four hundred million year old, glacier carved valleys and northern Appalachian Mountains. Ancient things, ever new.
On the way north, we stopped at Small’s Falls, a state rest area adjacent to a four tier, fifty four foot drop on the Sandy River in Township E. The Sandy River, lower on the river, is slower, wider and deeper with warm pools along its serpentine route from the Sandy River Ponds to the Kennebec River. The same river provided our most frequent swimming holes when we lived in Farmington forty years ago. Upstream, Small’s Falls was a geological accident along the Sandy River’s way.
The multiple drops each create deep pools surrounded by ten or fifteen or twenty foot cliffs, which we, our kids, and others visit during the few weeks of hot summer days each year. Picnic, swim, slide along some of the centuries smoothed rocks like a free Water Country slide, and gathering our resolve, jump with a quick adrenaline thrill from the highest cliff we could muster the courage to climb barefoot, leaping out to drop at thirty two feet per second per second acceleration into the shocking cold water.
While walking there this week, full of memories, we ran into fellow Rhode Islanders and struck up a conversation with a young couple in their late thirties with their first baby. He worked remotely out of his home as a virtual family psychologist. She had recently taken her generous buyout from the DOGE largesse after working for fifteen years for the Veteran’s Administration health group with the VA Hospital in Rhode Island. She left not because she no longer thought what she did was valuable and had lost her love for the work with the PTSD and disabled veterans (she hadn’t), but because she feared her job would be eliminated and leave her cut loose with no notice. She said many others were making similar decisions. Like the wildlife and park rangers, younger, newer employees were being summarily fired. Her level of experience was offered the buyout. Fear and uncertainty did the rest.[ii]
The VA had always been considered almost sacrosanct, a safe job as the nation did the best it could to honor IOUs it could never fully repay its wounded warriors. No longer. She told us the damage being done would have to be undone sooner rather than later because wait times were blowing up, veterans who desperately needed help would not get it, and an outraged public would demand quick restoration of services. The problem was that new hires would not have experienced staff to train them properly, the close to retirement folks with fewer options were getting burnt out and counting their days until retirement. Essential mid level competence that sustains any organization was being eviscerated. She thought the damage would not be an easy fix. Absolutely necessary to reconstruct, but not readily remedied. “Decades of damage,” she said.
She sighed sadly. Decades of damage.
“Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.” Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
[i] Fake, sensationalized entertainment, an occupation for which he is much better suited.
[ii] This is a disaster being visited upon many agencies: losing their most competent core of professionals. NASA is one. “Nearly one in five NASA staff (and scientists) opt for voluntary exit.” Another decimated critical group are those predicting, tracking, and warning us about devastating storms.” Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said.”
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