DOGE and the Question of Persistence and Change in Reforming the Federal Bureaucracy

Regarding our federal bureaucracies, many Americans earnestly desire to implement the kinds of changes that DOGE has recommended. However, they also fail realize why it is so hard.

“A truly pluralistic and free society is averse to the nostalgia of unitary religious orders that imagined a past that never was, to the utopian unitary eschatology of socialism that envisions an order that will never be, and to the naïve engineered unitary vision of bureaucratic order that is not.”

The interaction between persistence and change is an important and interesting element in the examination of social processes. There is interaction because the antithesis of one is what creates the contrast to understand the other. In a world where there are only birds, we need non-birds to fully recognize and understand what a bird is. It follows that our understanding of things is shaped by the interaction of the mind with the diversity of forms in the world. Much has been said and theorized about this interaction.

How Our Minds Work

Long ago, Immanuel Kant referred to a sort of grid in our minds allowing us to discern the world of impressions outside ourselves and create in us a structure of consciousness for accomplishing intelligibility. Prior to experience, innate categories conform to this grid. He called these categories a priori forms of cognition, and the type of knowledge these forms facilitate he called “synthetic.” Experience is structured and interpreted by the mind using the mind’s grid as a road map to grasp a world of perceptions and make judgments about the world. There is the mind, the image between us and the external world or order outside of the mind, and our judgment of that world.

Another important aspect of Kantian philosophy is the distinction between "understanding," which deals with empirical knowledge, and the “Geist,” or upwelling of knowledge from the core or essence of things. Geist is a German concept often translated as “mind” or “spirit.” The Geist is a type of obscure and quasi-mystical special mental ability that transcends individual experience, allowing for the generation of original and meaningful thoughts that can be universally communicated. The concept is central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Hegel understood the Geist as applying not only to individual human minds but also to human society in each given historical period. Each era is informed by a spirit (Zeigeist), worldview, or supra-individual mind, predominant idea, or cultural imperative, which is then challenged from within itself in a process of “sublation.” This sublation produces a leap in consciousness into a more advanced era. Although there is continuity in human society, there is also true variance.

The Application of Group Theory

These brief comments may offer an analogy to the interaction between persistence and change in social institutions, without pretending any mathematical rigor to the comparison. What knowledge exists within institutions? What kind of change is generated within structures? What is our perception of reality within closed systems? In our analogy, the universe in question, the order outside the mind, is the bureaucratic structure, and our judgment of it, informed by our perception of it as given by the mind, is shaped by our existence within that universe. It may be the case that one of the most important theories in classical mathematics and physics in the twentieth century can give us further bursts of illumination. That theory is known as Group Theory.

A necessary connection obtains between elements and the whole in any grouping. Each element is called a member. In biology it would be a specimen. Maybe within governmental institutions it is called a client or a bureaucrat. Another characteristic is that all members must possess at least one common trait. That common trait renders each member a part of the group, making it possible that any combination of members, regardless of any dissimilar characteristics, gives you members of the group. Take a baseball team, for example. Let’s say it contains twenty-four members. Any combination of players will give you players. Our synthetic knowledge of reality in a bureaucracy will always refer us to that characteristic shared by its members. What we see is that each combination of members produces change, but this is only internal change. There is no sublation of ideas that brings about a new set or group. Instead, from one possible state to another in the system, we remain within the system. A leap of understanding that contains previous and acquired knowledge within new concepts cannot be generated within the system. The system’s changes are like rearranging the same furniture within a room. For a little while it looks nice, but nothing really changes. It is as if the grid of our understanding within that universe cannot transcend its own limitations.

Grouping allows us to make sense of the world and of reality outside ourselves, a reality about which we do not have direct and intuitive knowledge. Our knowledge is always mediated by images to create a judgment, and grouping provides a way out of the randomness and phantasms of unedited images, supplying a structure to our apprehension of reality. However, if we look carefully, grouping also produces more of the same. It keeps invariance alive, as outcomes are always members of the group. We remain within the system, regardless of what appears to be an almost inexhaustible number of possible combinations. Going back to Kant, our a priori grid of understanding within a bureaucratic system allows judgments of things and collective differentiation, but it allows only characteristics of recognition that invariably remain the same within each system. Grouping is akin to hardware that can read only a certain type of software, while any other is interpreted as an error. The grid is calibrated to maintain invariance.

Interestingly, even if the sequence of combinations within the system changes, we arrive at the same destination. In other words, within groups or systems, internal changes can occur, but the outcome remains the same. Group Theory adds that all groups possess an identity marker that maintains the group as such but also makes it so that every action of a member does not make a difference, as the identity marker impedes variance. As an example, in additive groups the identity marker is 0 and in multiplication it would be 1. (You can add any number to zero or multiply any number by one and the result is the number added to zero or multiplied by one (e.g., 7 + 0 = 7; 7 x 1 = 7). Just as Hegel posited concerning the Geist of an era, a group possesses its “spirit,” its core idea, or identity marker. Yet, the identity marker is never sublated into a new one, permitting new knowledge that can be used to transcend the confines of the group. We remain entrapped within a closed system.

A Focus on Bureaucracy and the Challenge of Achieving Change

All these rudimentary explanations of Group Theory may be illustrative of the interaction between persistence and change within social institutions, with our focus here being the bureaucracies of the state. The bottom line is that state bureaucracies have shown themselves to be incapable of generating within themselves the necessary changes that create authentic systemic variance. The system can promise real change, be involved in internal recombination, but its identity marker impedes transcendence. That limitation is what allows a group to remain as a group, so it pulls itself inward to impede the loss of its internal coherence. Only first-order change emerges within the existing structure, as we tinker with the system. First-order change appears to be an authentic solution and the commonsense alternative, while second-order change is seen as obtuse meddling, puzzling, and weird. With first-order change, however, the ends of the system remain the same.

It seems to follow that for real change to obtain—that is, for second order change to appear—the exertion of change must come from outside the structures of state bureaucracies. Second-order change cannot come from within the universe in question in a closed system. The mind and the eyes and the interests of internal reformers are parts of the universe in need of reform and, being part of the problem in question, even with a reformist mindset, they maintain what is called a Game Without End. The game never ends because change within the system never touches, and cannot touch, the premises upon which it is built. If the premises (or identity maker) are not challenged, what may appear to be stark change is actually a mirage, and everything stays the same. Just as with economists, the déformation professionnelle of bureaucrats or, as Wilhelm Röpke puts it,

“their occupational disease of the mind, is the belief that their efforts exhaust the possibilities to properly address a problem. The closed bureaucratic system is concentric and gravitational; it sees every layer or community within society as dependent on their internal activity and society as a whole pulling to the center, where the expert remains. This attitude exists at the very least in the belief that no area in the social order can have an independent existence where the bureaucratic intervention may not reach it if necessary.”

As the primary relationship in a bureaucracy is that of superior and subordinate, it is a system of internal political transactions. Success and promotion rely on subordinates pleasing superiors and on superiors pleasing elected officials. Elected officials enter the system as transitory but invested members within a closed system that must perpetuate this linear chain of decision-making. State bureaucracies mostly collect information about types of people and enforce transfers. They depersonalize in order to attend to a task that cannot be accomplished otherwise. This is why bureaucracies trade in the quantifiable, not the existential. Members of bureaucratic groups oversee making decisions by using centralized information and the enforcement power of government for their own benefit. This leads to distortions and rents for politicians and for the bureaucracies as such. Contrast the motions of this system with economic markets, where the relationships are transitory but often between equals and where success depends on meeting ex post the needs of the parties involved.

Moreover, political markets are contrived; they are social constructs created in such a way that they seem averse to what F. A. Hayek called “adaptations to the unknown.” In his magisterial work The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, philosopher Michael Novak reminded us that “a plural social order is designed to fit within a world process open to liberty, evil, and surprise.” As every human action fits within a narrative, we can perceive that the one for closed systems is contrived and narrow while the one for open systems is of emergent possibilities. As economic markets spontaneously arise, they are fit for these adaptations and for the partial knowledge that is of necessity possessed by any individual or group in this organic process. There are no members here but actors and a horizon; that is, it is a journey, an enterprise. The narrative of an open system depends on, as Novak again explains, a particular habit of mind:

The habit of mind designated by a term like “enterprise” depends for its very existence upon belief in a world of emergent probability—a world not logical, geometric, perfectly predictable, on the one hand, nor on the other hand totally mad, irrational, and impervious to intelligence.

These descriptions are anathema to bureaucratic rigor. The unknown threatens any closed system where quantification is so important to determine a course of action. What cannot be quantified must be seen as irrelevant or even nonexistent. They see the bureaucratic maze, to quote Röpke, as an “enormous pumpkin engine with all sorts of ducts and valves and thermostats,” unaware that such an exhaustive view of social processes is not amenable to freedom and surprise. A free society made up of complex and free individuals is not akin to a quasi-mystic order of centralized decisions. A truly pluralistic and free society is averse to the nostalgia of unitary religious orders that imagined a past that never was, to the utopian unitary eschatology of socialism that envisions an order that will never be, and to the naïve engineered unitary vision of bureaucratic order that is not.

To simplify complexity, we need depersonalization of the individual into a client, or a member into an employee number, and the quantification of need, because what is quantifiable is accounted for. A ledger becomes of the essence to maintain stability in a process dependent on interdependent subordination to survive. This is why we see often that failing to eliminate a problem for which a bureaucracy is created does not end in the elimination of bureaucracy but in clamoring for more resources. Failure calls for the perpetuation or even expansion of the bureaucracy. Maintaining an impervious approach to externalities isolates bureaucracy from accountability to external claims.

Bureaucracies are steady states of political subordination where maintaining the status quo is essential. Bureaucracies depend on a Game Without End of circular transactions. What is the reified identity marker of state bureaucracies? It is self-preservation. Without this, the bureaucracy does not exist. This is why it will resist external input and will find ways to attack it as a body attacks a virus. The Overton Window for the bureaucracies of the state exists within the space of action that perpetuates the system, and that space is shaped by an ethos of shared values justifying that status quo.

Fixing Bureaucracy

The recent DOGE effort to reform our federal bureaucracy is a good illustration of a system impeding external accountability. Self-preservation being its identity marker makes the system continually challenge any attempt at making sense of it from the outside, as with the fictional character in Kafka’s 1930s novel The Castle. “You are very strict,” said the Mayor,

“but multiply your strictness a thousand times and it would still be nothing compared with the strictness that the Authority imposes on itself. Only a total stranger could ask a question like yours. Is there a Control Authority? There are only Control Authorities. Finally, it isn’t their function to hunt out errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don’t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?^”

Non-member outsiders meddling is a threat to the system qua system. All internal processes and the outcomes that emanate from the system have the ultimate goal of preserving the system. Even the social problem that provoked the creation of bureaucracy must serve the purpose of preserving the system. There is eventually an investment in the continuation and aggrandizement of the problem, as both serve system self-perpetuation. Negative outcomes must also be reframed in such a way that they serve perpetuation. The reframing presents the ineffectiveness of the system in eliminating or diminishing the problem as evidence of the need for more resources and greater powers. The main difference between socialism and bureaucratic state-capitalism is that in socialism everyone becomes a group member as the concentric circles engulf the whole of society and everyone is invested in perpetuating the system. Some are invested for the sake of power and privilege and others for survival, but no one escapes the pumpkin. A change in the public’s perception of the capacity of the system to create second-order change always precedes the creation of expanding bureaucracies. However, such change in perception took a long while. In fact, as Marvin Olasky shows,

“One of the current historical myths concerns American attitudes during the Depression: how rapidly attitudes changed; how ‘forward-looking’ they became as economic pressures mounted; and how conclusively the old order of the late nineteenth century passed away.”

The apprehensions eventually waned, but not without many top-down promises based on a rhetoric of self-reliance. Heartbreak ensued as second-order change never came and could not have come.

As an example, the Great Depression was presented to the public as an obvious case calling for federal intervention, although observers note that there is good reason to believe that intervention prolonged the crisis. The public bought into the idea that an activist government could end poverty in America, and early efforts to intervene gave way to what was pronounced a “war on poverty” and the institutionalization of federal bureaucracies perceived as part of the fabric of the nation, even at the most local levels. In open systems, failure to accomplish a task is a great information-rich element that dictates change or even the elimination of the enterprise, as the various actors mobilize to better allocate resources. As the actors are not members of a closed system, they are not invested in the perpetuation of the system as a primary goal. The system’s value remains instrumental in open systems. In closed systems the value of the system as system is absolute.

Thus, persistence and change in reforming the bureaucracy collapse within the identity marker of self-preservation that erases change as a relevant interpretive factor when change emanates from within. In a closed system the subject is the system and the members are instrumentalized and commoditized for the sake of the system. If we want to reform the bureaucracies, the effort must come from outside the structures.

Photo Credit- The Week