MBGA—which stands for “Make Bureaucracy Great Again”—doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue the way MAGA or MAHA do. But embracing the idea, if not the acronym, is necessary to fighting Trumpism effectively. The word “bureaucracy” often has strong negative connotations for contemporary Americans, conjuring up images of endless paperwork. But a bureaucracy is simply a system of experts—or bureaucrats—who make important decisions. Throughout our history, bureaucracy has been key to making this country great for most Americans. If we want to become great again, we must revive that legacy.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his allies are going in the opposite direction, attacking and dismantling bureaucracy, a longtime goal of the far right. Recall that well before the 2024 election, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), called federal bureaucrats “villains” and said he wanted to put them “in trauma.” Back in power, Trump deputized billionaire Elon Musk to do just that as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Wielding a chainsaw onstage at a Conservative Political Action Conference this past February—a gift from Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist leader Javier Milei—Musk enacted his nauseating, juvenile giddiness for cutting alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” from the federal government. 

Since then, DOGE has laid waste to critical national infrastructure that took generations to build, and that provides vital government services, research, and consumer protections. DOGE has also fired droves of federal workers, who under this regime are valued not for their expertise or their commitment to public service, but rather for their loyalty to Trump and his agenda. While many Americans now appear to disapprove of DOGE’s actions as well as Elon Musk, many nevertheless continue to believe that “government is inefficient” and that “DOGE is a good idea.” This raises the question: What has gone wrong in American society that has given us DOGE?

DOGE is the product of a crisis in the relationship between American citizens and government experts. This crisis—what I’ll call the “citizen-expert divide”—has roots in two long-festering problems. First, Americans rarely see the federal government delivering tangible public goods. Second, the federal government is failing to communicate effectively with the public about the things that it is doing to improve their lives. 

In the 1930s and ’40s, certain federal bureaucrats who carried out the New Deal understood that a large gap between the citizen and the government expert, like the one that exists today, imperils democracy, and that it was their duty to guard against it. They did this by engaging citizens on a large scale in thinking about how to define the work of government, and how to create a better world. Solving America’s problems today requires recognizing that we need knowledgeable, public-spirited bureaucrats who, like their New Deal predecessors, are empowered to deliver things people need, and who are committed to democratically building public support for the administrative state.

Professional Government Matters

The federal bureaucracy refers to the federal government’s permanent professional branches—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on. Collectively, these branches constitute the “administrative” or “regulatory” state. The civil service refers to the federal workers who staff the federal bureaucracy: the experts (or “civil servants”) who protect consumers from fraud, protect our natural environment, monitor the weather, keep our food and drug supply safe, respond in emergencies like hurricanes and floods, and generally make the country work in ways that many Americans take for granted.

Despite Musk’s delusional narratives, federal workers are not part of the “deep state,” but rather public servants who are here to serve the American people. To ensure this remains the case, civil service workers have long enjoyed unique labor protections. But this wasn’t always the case. Back in the 19th century, a shockingly corrupt “spoils system” doled out federal jobs as rewards for loyalty or for political favors. The Trump Administration and DOGE have effectively revived that system, stripping many federal workers of their civil service protections and making them easier to intimidate, demoralize, and dismiss. But institutionalizing the potential for rampant gangsterism, as we’re now seeing, is problematic, which is why Progressive-Era reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fought for a system in which, as historian Gary Gerstle writes, “merit rather than patronage would guide hiring decisions.” That is all now crumbling under DOGE.

Chipping Away At The Administrative State

Trump didn’t cause the breakdown of the citizen-expert relationship, as anyone who remembers the Obama-era “Keep Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare” campaign can attest. (Medicare, an expansion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s concept of Social Security, is a federal health insurance program for older and disabled people launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, so the government’s hands should be on it by definition.) The process has been ongoing since the New Deal, and has involved a gradual and bipartisan transformation of American government away from meeting the needs of the general public and toward serving private capital and the rich. Much has already been said about this, how it set the stage for Trumpism, and the role of presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. Suffice it to say that this transformation has remade the U.S. into a country in which most people can’t afford a decent quality of life, do not trust in government to reverse this reality, and do not—or cannot, because they are worked to the bone—participate in public life.

Trump has skillfully exploited this public misery, whipping up anger at civil servants and promising Americans that instead of “woke” bureaucrats and experts, he would prioritize their everyday concerns. But he is mostly failing on this count. As journalist Liza Featherstone recently reported, New England fishing industry workers hoped Trump would create “more of an opportunity for working-class voices to be heard.” But DOGE gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides crucial weather and fisheries data on which the industry relies. 

Meanwhile, true to the fascist playbook, Trumpists continue to offer Americans easy scapegoats in the form of immigrants, academics, and other members of the professional-managerial class. Government workers are portrayed as lazy cogs who sit around devising ways to confiscate Americans’ hard-earned money and give it, as Musk reposted on Twitter, to undeserving “parasites,” like veterans, the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, the poor, and the elderly. At one point, Musk even shared a post comparing federal workers to the minions of dictators like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Among DOGE’s lies—which can be hard to keep track of—are that the Department of the Interior spent billions on a questionnaire about national parks, that dead people are receiving Social Security checks, or, as Musk claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, that Democrats want to use programs like Social Security, Medicare, and disability payments to lure “illegals” into the U.S. 

Far from making it more responsive to public needs, the true purpose of these attacks is to enshittify and dismantle the federal government. Trumpists’ ultimate goal is to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs by deregulating banks and corporations and expanding the surveillance state in terrifying ways. Musk is gone from government, but DOGE continues, with influential roles for different billionaires, like Joe Gebbia of Airbnb. So far, Democrats remain largely unable—or unwilling—to make an effective response. There is a palpable sense that the hollowing out of the Democratic Party is complete, its zombified leaders passively shuffling us deeper into a surreal nightmare. 

Old Anti-Government Wine In New Billionaire-Approved Bottles

Anti-government sentiment in America is, of course, not new, as I know from growing up in a conservative Southern family. “Do you know who the largest employer in the United States is?” I’d hear my Dad (may he rest in peace) rant over the Thanksgiving marshmallow sweet potato casserole, the din of a college football game on TV in the background. “The federal government!” This was clearly supposed to be a bad thing, but I never understood why. Wasn’t the federal government part of the larger economy? Wasn’t bureaucrats’ work vital to our health and safety? And wasn’t it good that people were employed?

Confronted with my childhood questions above, many Democratic officials today would likely still answer “yes,” which makes you think they might condemn DOGE’s attacks on the federal bureaucracy. But their response has been weak, and some in the party even support DOGE, like billionaire and Harris campaign surrogate Mark Cuban, who posted back in April on X that, while poorly executed, “DOGE had the right idea.” 

DOGE did not have the right idea, and any serious opposition would reject its entire premise. We need federal workers empowered to manage much greater levels of public investment than we’ve recently had, and we should say so. When our leaders proclaim that the federal government is “inefficient,” anyone who values the modern life expectancy enabled by a functioning public health system—which by definition cannot be achieved by private, profit-seeking interests, and which therefore requires federal government experts to run—should point out that that inefficiency is, in fact, a symptom of government shrinkage and evisceration, not bloat. 

It’s true that, since the year 2000, the absolute number of federal workers has steadily risen. It’s also true that when Biden left office in January of 2025, there were 143,000 fewer federal workers than when Ronald Reagan’s presidency ended 36 years prior. 

Chart by Doug Henwood, compiled from Bureau of Labor Statistics data.¹ Note the sharp drop around the time Bill Clinton takes office.

During that same period—from 1989 to 2025—not only did the U.S. population increase by about 35 percent, but many of our problems, like inequality, extreme weather, and failing infrastructure, worsened. This shrinkage in state capacity has been occurring even as our economy grows larger and more complex. Federal employment has been steadily declining as a share of total employment since the early 1950s, and even before DOGE was less than half what it was in the early 1960s. As economic journalist and broadcaster Doug Henwood put it to me, “We’re clearly underserviced now, have been getting more so for over four decades, and it’s going to get worse!”

A related problem is the evisceration of public-sector expertise, driven by the practice of outsourcing government work to an opaque system of private consultancies. In his 2014 book Bring Back the Bureaucrats, a treasure that everyone should read, political scientist John J. DiIulio shows how federal employees have been reduced to “chasing too many proxies, monitoring too many grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars.” This reliance on outside consultants is expensive and frequently inefficient, and is an important reason why, for example, critical infrastructure projects in the U.S. cost more and take longer than in countries that do more to cultivate and retain bureaucratic expertise, like the Netherlands or Japan.

But bringing back the bureaucrats, while necessary, won’t be enough. Those bureaucrats must also be empowered to directly improve people’s lives. That means organizing the federal government—as Lily Geismer and Brent Cebul put it in their recent book Mastery and Drift—around “an abiding moral and social vision for the future.” Such a vision prioritizes universal access to quality housing, healthcare, food, education, and decent transportation, and advances clear plans to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, safeguard civil rights, and address our escalating climate and ecological crises. 

The (Surprisingly) Democratic Roots Of The Administrative State

The radical idea of a federal government organized around a moral and social vision for the future is more American than you might think. Far from the “boot on our necks” that many in right-wing or conservative contexts perpetually bemoan—a framing DOGE reinforces—the U.S. administrative state, historians have shown, has deeply democratic and even populist roots. 

These days, populism is often maligned as a “cancer to democracy,” and to be fair, Donald Trump’s ersatz brand of populism—better labeled authoritarian nationalism—deserves these critiques. But by dismissing “populism” as universally “bad,” today’s liberal anti-populist crusaders obfuscate the reality that it was populist demands and mass movements that prompted the development of the regulatory state that Trumpists seek to dismantle. The critical difference, of course, is that these populist movements were progressive rather than right-wing. As political scientist Elizabeth Sanders writes,

When the American national state began, in the late nineteenth century, to acquire the legal authority and the administrative capability to regulate a mature industrial economy and protect its citizens from the acknowledged pathologies of large-scale capitalism, it did so in response to the demands of politically mobilized farmers.

These farmers, together with labor groups and members of the general public, used mass protest to challenge the power of trusts, monopolies, banks, and Wall Street, and to advance, as Mary Summers writes, a vision of a cooperative commonwealth “rooted in state management, regulation, and ownership of important aspects of the economy.” Federal government regulation of railroads, trusts, and industry was a direct response to these protests. Unfortunately in the postwar period, Summers says, the link between these 19th- and 20th-century organizing efforts and government programs faded from historical accounts.

This understanding of the administrative state as an outgrowth of democracy whose purpose is to deliver collectively determined public goods has all but evaporated today, as fewer Americans see themselves and their needs reflected in what government does. This damages the citizen-expert relationship, and further discourages the very exercise of citizenship upon which that relationship, and a responsive administrative state, depend. This vicious cycle erodes what Ralph Nader calls civic self-respect. Civic self-respect flows from an intrinsic sense of entitlement to participate in public life—a belief that our voices and our actions matter in shaping our collective future. 

To properly exercise citizenship, we must be able to do something of which fewer and fewer Americans appear capable, that is, move beyond our own self-interest and consider how decisions affect the broader community. This requires education, and the kind of critical knowledge generated by the federal government, such as weather reports and food inspection results. Conversely, Trumpism can survive and grow stronger only with mass ignorance. Trumpists know this, and some pundits have argued that the regime is attacking the federal government (and science in particular) in order to annihilate knowledge itself. 

Biden’s Legacy: A Relationship Unfixed

President Biden did some laudable things, but he did not fix the citizen-expert relationship. In fact, in many cases, his administration further undermined it—for example, when, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) cut flight attendants’ quarantine time in half after a request to do so from Delta Airline’s CEO. In other equally important but less overtly dramatic instances, Biden responded to problems by simply upping the dosage of the same tired remedies to the country’s ills. This bought us time, but couldn’t ward off Trump 2.0. In a recent Bluesky post, Connecticut senator and Democrat Chris Murphy wrote about the Inflation Reduction Act, the development and implementation of which deeply involved federal workers: “Biden built an industrial policy. It was working. We were on a comeback.” 

Biden did revive industrial policy, in which government strategically boosts specific types of firms engaged in activities it wants to promote, such as building green energy infrastructure. But as The Center for American Progress’s David Madland explained to me, too many people were either unaware of the IRA’s existence, or misinformed about it. This predicament is a direct consequence of the broken citizen-expert relationship, which was on painful display in a recent story about a rural Georgia community poised to receive significant green investments and new jobs because of the IRA. Asked how they felt about Trump’s move to claw back these investments, residents had either never heard of the IRA, or expressed hostility to renewable energy, declaring that it “didn’t work” and wasn’t worth building. 

Policy You Can Touch

Understanding what went wrong with the citizen-expert relationship in Georgia requires a closer look at the indirect manner in which Biden tried to provide public goods. As Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan told me, under this “submerged state” approach, the central government spends a lot of money, but through “technocratic, invisible means.” In Biden’s IRA, this meant a system of obscure tax credits that function as carrots for the private sector. If a private developer creates a wind farm, once that farm is up and running, the developer gets a tax credit tied to the amount of electricity it generates.

The problem with this is that unless you are a total wonk who does little else but track policy, you don’t know that the federal government is helping to create that new wind farm (and the jobs that come with it). Moreover, the types of projects (like manufacturing plants) Biden invested in take many years to come to fruition, and so were largely invisible during his presidency. Pairing such long-term projects with those designed to be more rapidly realized and that serve an urgent public need—for jobs or for affordable housing, for instance—might have helped make the benefits of Bidenism more visible. 

As sociologist Daniel Cohen told me, “it’s incumbent on government to combine investments that take a while with short-term investments that people can see.” He calls this “climate policy you can literally touch,” and he says Biden absolutely could have done it. This seems only truer in light of what Trump has accomplished during the first six months of his second term. Of course, in a federalist system like we have in the U.S., state-level bottlenecks can undercut federal planning, as we are now seeing in California, where that state’s Public Utilities Commission has to date distributed, tragically, almost none of the millions in IRA funding it received for a community solar program. And now the Trump Adminstration is terminating it. But even this might have been avoided. As Cohen explained, the Biden Administration was sometimes “too reliant on private companies and local governance systems, missing chances to be more assertive and just get things done.” 

FDR and the New Dealers in the 1930s and ’40s understood the importance of “policy you can touch.” While Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration (PWA) built large, long-term projects like dams, bridges, and airports, many of which we still enjoy today, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civil Works Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps quickly put millions to work, built tangible everyday amenities like parks, libraries, and public pools, and even did small things like distribute, as Michael Hiltzik documents, “Jewish dictionaries” for rabbis who were “broke and on the relief rolls.” Imagine the political mobilization the Biden administration might have catalyzed had it repaired and expanded our system of public pools, making it easier for communities to cool down on increasingly hot summer days. Roosevelt did that, and more.

Policy In My Living Room

As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I directly experienced the power of tangible government infrastructure in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). PBS’s original mission, enabled by President Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s, was to provide universal access to high-quality educational television programming. I loved PBS shows, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as the feeling that this institution was intended for everyone (a legacy that undoubtedly motivated the Trump administration and Republicans to defund it). 1970s-era PBS in particular was unique in its appeal to the intellectual curiosity and capacity of Americans of all backgrounds, and in its embodiment of a kind of pro-intellectual populism that has all but disappeared today. This was a powerful counter to the kind of anti-government rhetoric to which I was routinely exposed as a kid.

I recently met a man around my age sporting a PBS tattoo. Inspired by the idea that “public means people,” that now-universally-familiar logo features a “P” resembling a silhouette of a human face. When I asked about his tattoo, the man, a manual laborer and artist, explained that he hadn’t always had it easy, at times relying on a local food pantry, and that it had meant the world to him that he’d had access to this incredible resource for free. Despite our different backgrounds, we bonded over our love of PBS, which had clearly given us both a sense that broadly shared things of value nurture an important sense of civic connection and belonging.

Communication Failures

I still experience delight in the provision of public goods, albeit less frequently. I was recently overjoyed, for example, to see a gleaming new Amtrak train being tested on a route I regularly take. But I happen to know that Amtrak is public, a fact that is not obvious. Unlike Biden, Trump understands the importance of ensuring that people recognize a public good when they see one. This is why he names everything after himself—the latest is “Trump Accounts” for newborns—and slaps on his big spiky signature. What if Biden had called the IRA “Biden Bridge Bucks,” or something similarly catchy? 

In at least one case, a trump sign has appeared on a bridge built with Biden-era money — The INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT & JOBS ACT was passed in 2021. (Image: THE TRAVEL)

But even if Americans grasp that the public sector is behind a project, there is no guarantee they will support it. Leaders also must convey to ordinary people why their investments are both necessary and beneficial, something Biden frequently failed to do. Take his strategy of prioritizing federal investments in Republican-run states. As Cohen explained, Biden believed that if he poured money into such places, the story of his policies’ benefits would simply tell itself. It was a terrible assumption, because unlike places like California and the Rust Belt, “red states” and rural areas often lack the kinds of institutions, like robust unions and quality local journalism, capable of the kinds of mass popular education necessary to build public support. If all you’ve got is Fox News telling people the IRA is just another federal boondoggle, you’re in trouble!

From Fireside Chats To “Schools of Philosophy”

We can learn a lot from the New Dealers of the 1930s and ’40s, who understood the importance of mass popular education to achieving their vision. Popular education extends the search for truth, knowledge, and understanding to a broad range of citizens, and treats learning, as Adam Waters and E.J. Dionne Jr. write, as a “broad democratic enterprise involving citizens of every background.” Close to their audiences by definition, institutions of popular education directly inform, but can also support open-ended, reciprocal learning between citizens and experts. A good example of the former is FDR’s famous fireside chats, in which the president spoke regularly via radio to millions about how his administration was helping Americans. But it was the latter—the reciprocal variety of popular education—that was especially important to a group of New Deal bureaucrats that rural sociologist Jess Gilbert calls the “agrarian intellectuals.” 

In Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal, Gilbert shows how the agrarian intellectuals—figures like USDA undersecretary M. L. Wilson and USDA secretary Henry A. Wallace, who also served as vice president under FDR—were deeply shaped both by their “midwestern farm boy” roots and the innovative ideas they encountered during their university educations. (At the time, farming was a much bigger percentage of the American economy by employment than it is today). By forging, as Gilbert writes, a “new relationship between expert and citizen,” the agrarian intellectuals believed that government could not only help solve farmers’ problems, but could also help preserve and strengthen democracy, which to them was not an abstraction, but rather an everyday social practice in which anyone could participate. 

Gilbert shows how the agrarian New Dealers brought these beliefs and sensibilities to their roles as federal bureaucrats, and how they launched, through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the most successful, if short-lived, democratic planning effort in U.S. history. These agrarian New Dealers understood “planning” as the continual, ongoing process of securing the future for all Americans, not just the wealthiest. Combining populist sympathies with a firm belief in the large-scale building of public institutions, these bureaucrats strove for a “balance between expertise and popular control,” and worked to forge “a new relationship between expert and citizen based on dialogue, cooperation, and mutual education.” This required creating new structures through which struggling farmers and government experts could work together, and which united “rationalization with participation, federal with local, science with citizenry, and bureaucracy with democracy.” Indeed, the agrarian intellectuals saw no contradiction between these things. 

As Henry Wallace said, “There can be no worthwhile result unless there is just as great a volume of thought flowing into Washington as there is flowing out of Washington.” Wallace’s logic, as Gilbert explains, was straightforward: “farmers knew their own locality best, but they did not know the ‘outside forces’ also affecting them as well. The opposite was true of the state and federal experts.” Hence the need for citizens and specialists to “unite to improve agricultural policy.”

The New Deal USDA spoke directly to farming households about its programs through a variety of methods, including radio broadcasts. This photo shows Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, (right) and USDA broadcaster Morse Salisbury doing a program for the National Farm and Home Hour, circa 1939.

This quote embodies an important truth we’ve apparently forgotten today: that neither communities nor experts can go it alone, but rather must communicate and cooperate with each other in order to solve problems. We saw this dynamic at work in the recent devastating Texas floods, a catastrophe whose death toll can be attributed at least in part to a failure in the chain of communication between experts and citizens: the National Weather Service knew the disaster was coming, but officials in Kerr County didn’t send the right emergency alerts to enough people. Healing the citizen-expert divide is literally a matter of life and death. 

Of course, as has been well-documented, New Deal programs broadly speaking worked closely with and empowered corporations, the era’s unions (which sometimes excluded non-white workers), and large farmers. Powerful Southern Congressmen also succeeded in excluding agricultural and domestic workers from labor protections and social security programs. It was also the case, however, that New Deal rhetorical commitments to economic democracy inspired many of those who did not share in its benefits to organize to improve their living and working conditions, like striking cotton pickers and the Southern Tenant Farmers’Union. The era also empowered bureaucrats who were serious about creating meaningful outlets for the expression of active citizenship, and giving ordinary people a role in shaping federal policy. This is evident, as Gilbert writes, in the “extremely high levels of citizen participation” the New Deal USDA achieved in the discussion groups and “schools of philosophy” it organized all over the country, which drew millions of participants. In these forums, “thousands of farmers increased their knowledge about land use and related agricultural problems and policies,” and as citizen-planners, developed tools and ideas that became the basis for public action. The result, as Gilbert writes, was that “farmers adopted broader points of view, becoming less local and individualist and more national and scientific, while [government] economists realized that people’s preferences had roots deeper than theory.”

Unfortunately, the agrarian New Dealers’ efforts and experiments were short-lived and ultimately dismantled by more conservative forces. But that just makes it all the more remarkable that we can still see their imprint today, despite the impoverishment of our politics, in things like participatory citizen science initiatives. 

Sparks In The Dark

Zohran Mamdani’s recent upset victory in New York City’s mayoral primary exposed the public hunger for leaders whose ambition matches the New Dealers’ in terms of the problems they wanted to solve, the vast numbers of people they wanted to serve, and the scope of the economy they took on. (Indeed, Mamdani has praised Fiorello La Guardia, New York City’s New Deal-era mayor.) Mamdani is proposing a modest set of social democratic policies, from five municipal-owned grocery stores to baby baskets for new parents. His ideas seem radical only because it’s so unusual for apolitician to suggest that government can tangibly improve people’s lives, in this case by easing New York City’s affordability crisis. 

Like the New Dealers, Mamdani grasps the importance of communication and popular education. He is fond of saying “New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, and that they can even yell at,” a phrase that echoes the agrarian New Dealers’ emphasis on two-way communication between citizen and professional. (Notably, this is exact opposite of the liberal technocrat mentality—so entrenched in the Democratic Party—that says that you don't have to show people what you're doing for them so that they understand it, you can just manipulate things behind the scenes.) During the primary, Mamdani’s campaign organized over 50,000 volunteers, who knocked on 1.6 million doors to engage voters in the campaign’s message. He also adeptly uses social media to interact with people about the problems they face, just as Roosevelt embraced the then-nascent medium of radio. Mamdani stands his ground, staying focused on affordability despite relentless attempts to derail him. New Dealers often similarly defended their principles and programs: When accused of “wasteful spending,” public administrator and Roosevelt advisor Harry Hopkins responded: “They are damn good projects[…] I have no apologies to make. As a matter of fact, we have not done enough.” 

Of course, Mamdani is not yet in office, so we don’t know how or whether his campaign style might translate into governance. He would also govern on a municipal, not federal scale, and he is not technically a bureaucrat. But Mamdani’s clear belief in using government to improve people’s lives suggests that he would likely empower municipal bureaucrats committed to staying in close touch with the city’s residents and their needs. For all these reasons, a potential Mamdani administration holds promise for healing the citizen-expert relationship. 

On another front, the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) is organizing to strengthen the civil service itself. Founded in 2022, FUN is the largest worker-led federal organizing effort in decades, rallying unionists to defend democracy, public services, and federal workers’ rights. As founding member Chris Dols explained to me, FUN is fighting to preserve civil service protections “so that federal workers can continue to be true stewards of the public sphere.” Dols says that federal workers often opt to make less than they could in the private sector because they have a “common commitment to the public good” and “want to be a part of making the maintenance of our infrastructure something that is done more responsibly.” Forget DOGE—federal workers themselves, Dols argues, “are some of the best critics of government, because they know how the sausage is made.” He argues for a politics that “reasserts the public sphere as a brandable, defensible alternative” to privatization and corruption. 

Bring Back The Heroic Bureaucrats

Addressing the concerns of America’s farmers at a 1986 press conference, President Ronald Reagan infamously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’” 

But Reagan’s pro-corporate, anti-labor administration made his own quip a self-fulfilling prophecy: the 1985 farm bill was extremely harmful to American family farmers, who organized fiercely against it. It’s no accident that these farmers’ resistance to Reaganism, as Summers documents, occurred in a context in which Midwestern farm families still held a strong collective memory of the agricultural New Deal. In other words, they could still recall that, in fact, the government had come knocking at their doors in the 1930s and had helped them out of catastrophe, significantly improving their quality of life. For example, in the 1930s and ’40s in rural Georgia, as a result of programs designed by agrarian New Dealers, both Black and white citizens saw major infrastructure and other improvements, including, as Gilbert writes, new school buildings, better-qualified teachers, a county library system, bookmobile, motion picture projector, hot lunch program, and improvements to housing, recreation, forest fire control, and soil quality. As Bureau of Agricultural Economics sociologist Arthur Raper wrote in his book Tenants of the Almighty,² on rural Georgians’ response to these New Deal efforts: 

The phrase “before the government came” is as definite a way of speaking about time as “back in slavery times” or “before the boll weevil”[…] People feel they are in a new era. 

What would “a new era” for 21st-century America look like? For starters, a modern-day Civil Works Administration or Civilian Conservation Corps could put people to work retrofitting public spaces and playgrounds for more prolonged hot weather, building public pools, and upgrading and expanding public libraries. A Public Works Administration could build out renewable energy, eliminate lead in our schools, repair bridges, build social housing, and expand transit, bicycling and walking infrastructure.

Such massive infrastructure investments would need to be paired, however, with an administrative state committed to setting up spaces in which experts and regular people can learn from each other over time. In such spaces, the public sector would provide education and training, but would also trust, as Cohen says, “that ordinary people can be creative and innovative.” For example, contractors and trades workers could learn how to deploy the latest technologies, like heat pumps and rooftop solar, but could also offer their own ideas about how to do things better. The same goes for teachers, care workers, and more, all of whom see problems firsthand, and who are in a strong position to offer solutions that can inform good policymaking. It’s sad to think of all of the people whose creativity and innovation we’re currently wasting. 

There are so many things our federal bureaucracy could do, and creative ways it could publicize these efforts. As Cohen says, “In a functioning version of the IRA”—what he calls green economic populism—“you could have members of government or Congress, along with people from social movements, unions, and community groups going around and having big splashy events all the time, traveling in giant vans with AC units and heat pumps. There should be a constant drumbeat of ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help—and it’s great!’” 

It’s a fitting slogan for a new era, one in which heroic bureaucrats and ordinary citizens build on this country’s best traditions, and decide together what might truly make this country great. The need for a healthy citizen-expert relationship has arguably never been more urgent. Let’s look to a time when we can recall this dark age as a thing of the past, and tell our stories about what it was all like “before the government came.”

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1: See BLS data codes CES0000000001 (total employment) and CES9091000001 (federal employment).

2: Mary Summers’ mother, U.T. Miller Summers, assisted Raper in his research for this book.