If you beamed in from Mars, you could learn everything about the state of the West and its politics through a split screen last week.
On one half is an unhinged b-rated street-theater, suicide-march of mostly geriatric Democrats protesting Elon Musk’s effort to cut fraud, waste, and abuse — dandies like an EPA grant of $50 million to a group that believes “climate justice travels through a Free Palestine,” $8 billion to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to use proper gender-fluid pronouns and grants for drag queen shows in Ecuador.
Across the Atlantic at the same time were the pursed lips and stone faces of the priggish European Union bureaucratic elites warned by Vice President J.D. Vance about their increasing illiberalism — in particular their censorship and criminalization of political views in conflict with the EU’s yawning bureaucratic decrees.
At its core then, the political fulcrum in the West seems to be the girth and accountability of the bureaucratic state.
For the progressive left in both the US and EU, bureaucracy is their everything because it has ushered in its cultural revolution on an unwilling public: Open borders, race preferences, and quotas achieved through standard-lowering, gender-transition surgeries for minors, EV mandates that are killing German automakers and undermining those in the US.
The problem for progressives is the bureaucracy is increasingly counter-majoritarian: voters on both sides of the pond do not approve of the cultural revolution or the layers of bloat and waste that accompany it.
By large margins, Americans are against open borders, critical race, and gender theologies, and want all of the above strategies on energy challenges.
In Europe, millions of unassimilated migrants have often resulted in huge criminal sub-classes, gang violence, and violent anti-West protests in the UK, Sweden, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
On the eve of Vance’s visit to Europe, an extremist proclaiming “Allah Akbar” struck 39 innocents in a car attack in Munich’s streets last week. Political correctness in the UK apparently led law enforcement and politicians for decades to turn a blind eye to thousands of systematic attacks on women by Pakistani migrants— a still-unfolding scandal.
EU authorities threaten arrest and prosecution for some of the verbal protests over the EU’s open borders and, as Vance points out, even for silent prayer at abortion clinics.
Political correctness in the UK apparently led law enforcement and politicians to turn a blind eye to thousands of systematic attacks on women by Pakistani migrants for decades — a still-unfolding scandal.
EU authorities threaten arrest and prosecution of some of the resulting anti-immigrant rhetoric and, as Vance points out, even for silent prayer at abortion clinics.
Not only are the policies of the bureaucracies often unpopular, but so is the very idea of the big central bureaucracies in this age of anti-institutionalism.
Even before revelations by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, 69% of Americans thought foreign aid should be cut, according to an AP/Univ. of Chicago poll (the numbers are even high with working-class Americans). A New York Times/Siena College Poll revealed the same percentage of Americans think our political institutions are archaic and in need of a rebuild, as political scientists like Ruy Teixeira have pointed out.
Some of the left’s addiction to bureaucracy may be also explained by self-dealing. Some 97% of political contributions from USAID employees went to Democrats (belying the notion of a quaint non-partisan technocratic bureaucracy) and over 35,000 Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are majority funded by government agencies like USAID.
CEOs of these NGOs often have salaries as high as $500,000 per year and many staff salaries are four times the median American income.
If the federal grant-making bureaucracy has become a backdoor to bankroll the consultant an activist class who then turns around to funnel support to Democratic candidates, then the indictment of the bureaucratic state becomes even stronger.
Democrats are promising an O.K. Corral-like fight against DOGE, pointing to US Supreme Court precedents like Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935) — where the high court stopped President Roosevelt from firing William Humphrey from the Federal Trade Commission (Humphrey had been appointed by the preceding president Herbert Hoover).
But these challenges are faltering in federal court. Further, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — the most influential jurist on the US Supreme Court on the bureaucratic state — has made clear his view that bureaucrats are no longer the polite, nonpartisan federal technocrats of the halcyon mid-20th Century.
Instead, they are increasingly partisan appropriators of federal and legislative powers that need to be tamed in accordance with constructional separation of powers. The result of litigation will likely be to strengthen Trump’s hand.
US presidents have enormous Article II powers, as they should, to manage the executive branch notwithstanding any limiting statutes.
Democrats didn’t protest when President Biden demonstrated this by killing the congressionally authorized border wall and threatening, as vice president, to withhold congressionally authorized security aid to Ukraine in 2016.
President Clinton, who himself advocated strong unitary executive powers to shrink the federal bureaucracy, used to say “mend it don’t end it” about federal programs whose value was undermined by excess. Many of the programs serve important purposes, like feeding starving children in Sudan.
But they can only survive with public confidence.
Here, Democrats should position themselves not as obstructionists in a fight they will lose, but as constructive partners to rid waste, partisanship, and cultural revolutionary agendas of the bureaucratic left.
They should start by being on the side of sunshine — sunshine over past abuses regardless of administration and for all future activities by the bureaucratic state whose star now seems to be in inexorable decline.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
