Why ‘less bureaucracy’ is a load of DOGEshit 

by Associate Profesor Dmitrijs Kravcenko


Despite forming the backbone of our society, economy, education, defence and literally everything else, bureaucracy is something that everyone loves to hate. Despite this, and much like with Churchill with his reluctant appreciation of democracy, it is the single best way of running things that we’ve come up with over the past two centuries; and it’s now coming under attack in a way that should be deeply concerning to all of us.

In certain parts of the world, Latvia included, the mere mention of ‘bureaucracy’ automatically invokes a knee-jerk reaction of rejection and dismissal. Elsewhere, associations such as “Kafka-esque” or “Byzantian” are no less common. Indeed, who would not like fewer forms to fill, decisions being made quicker and easier, and the necessity of going through step-by-step processes vanquished from business and public sphere alike? This, after all, is the basic premise of Elon Musk’s and Donal Trump’s DOGE initiative – the Department of Government Efficiency – to identify administrative bloat and mercilessly cut it out of every system of administration, thus saving time and money. Well, the devil is in the details, or, in this case, in the delta between what is done, what is implied, and what is (mis)understood.

What is bureaucracy, anyway, and what are its crimes and shortcomings that cause us to dislike it so uniformly? In simple terms, bureaucracy is a type of social technology that focuses authority on rules and procedures. Comprehensively articulated by Max Weber, but in known use at least two centuries prior, bureaucracy was pitched as the most modern system of administration – where decisions were made because of agreed-upon rules and not because some one person wanted (or did not want) something done and had enough dedicated followers to force the matter, or because of some decision-making power inherited through perennial tapestry of nepotism. Essentially, bureaucracy is the rule of law and bureaucrats are not individual persons but agents of the system.
 

The problems with bureaucracy are not due to some original sin of the fundamental principle, but because universally applicable rules are not that simple to formulate or apply.


It is also challenging for people to de-identify and act as pure bureaucrats as required by the concept. Indeed, the mechanistic reputation of bureaucratic systems described by the likes of Robert Merton in the 1950s, where people are little more than “cogs in the machine” and “bricks in a wall”, was not a bug but a feature of a system where fetish with perfecting rules and standards prevailed over reality. What reality? The reality that systems, especially social systems, consist of people and, for better or worse, also include their brains, personalities, relationships, likes and dislikes. Advent of the “Human Resource Management” movement, and the subsequent evolution of the “Knowledge worker” that supercharged the service and, later, the digital economy which we are on the precipice today, was possible only because this fact finally gained recognition. But neither of those were at all considered anti-bureaucracy – simply better bureaucracy. Where bureaucracy of the early 20th century was meant to reduce uncertainty and supercharge efficiency, we learned to balance novelty with accountability to supercharge innovation. Not by having fewer rules, but by having better rules.

“Oh, well, that’s what ‘less bureaucracy’ ultimately means – better, not literally less” someone might counter-argue, accusing me of splitting semantic hairs. Conceivably, this is probably true on the level of common sense. Successive governments in Latvia and elsewhere would routinely pitch for ‘less bureaucracy’ when, really, meaning to say ‘better bureaucracy’ – a sentiment that is both fine and worthwhile. However, even a cursory look at the world that we live in in 2025 should make it painfully obvious that common sense is all but common. The advent of post-truth era on the back of Brexit referendum, the first Trump presidency and the large-scale efforts to quantitatively profile informational habits of masses of individuals via social media made actionable by Cambridge Analytica caught the vast majority of traditional truth-brokering institutions with their trousers down. As the dominos began to fall under pressure from social-media fuelled “do-your-own researchers”, half-truthers and an epidemic of short-form, rage-bait engagement farming, the bonfire of 2016 grew into an all-encompassing inferno the likes of which would cause even George Orwell or Aldous Huxley to burst into hysterical laughter from sheer disbelief. 

As a result, nothing can be taken for granted any more. The developing case of DOGE now, and the lesser known but no less impactful experiments with algorithmic management around 2018, do suggest that the order of the day is, in fact, less bureaucracy, not better bureaucracy. Captains of industry revel in calling for less regulation where examples of long and difficult process of abolishing the latest near-modern slavery phenomenon that was the gig economy is not seen as an achievement.
 

America innovates while Europe regulates’ is a sneer at the robust bureaucracies of Europe which keep us from following our American friends down the rabbit hole of the Wild West version of capitalism.

So, it’s not just less bureaucracy but substantively less bureaucracy. Despite a large body of academic research and supporting evidence repetitively pointing to just how dysfunctional hierarchy-less and rule-less workplaces are for both the employees and the employers, we have individuals in positions of political power calling for organizing public administration more along the lines of startups now. But even startup don’t want to be organized like startups, which is why they bureaucratise the first chance they get! This is not even a matter of choice, it is a kind of social physics – every organization exists on a continuum between being either very small and simple and highly integrated or being very large and complex and highly differentiated. The more complex you are – the less integrated you are. The more integrated you are, the less complex you can be.

Startups seem flexible and agile because they start up small and integrated and can pivot rapidly. Note that complex startups in more complex industries cannot do this even from the very beginning. So, how does the circle of challenges of integration gets squared with increases in complexity? As startups need to hire more people with diverse skillsets to cater to their clients needs and, suddenly, different parts of the organization (eg. marketing, R&D, finance, legal etc.) begin pulling in different directions? That’s right – by means of rules and standards. Governments are, of course, endlessly complex, which is why they require extensive bureaucratisation. Improving said bureaucratisation is a Sisyphean task of professional public administrators. Just chopping things off is a great way to trigger dis-integration, ultimately leading to more of everything these ‘less bureaucracy’ initiatives claim to combat – inefficiency, bloat, indecision, waste, etc.

But what if this is not a misunderstanding and the end goal is, in fact, less bureaucracy? Fewer bureaucrats, fewer rules, less cost but more… more of what, exactly? This is never explained but we don’t need to look far into the past to see just how systems of governance with either ineffective bureaucracies or no actual bureaucracies at all operate; we don’t even need to look into the past, for even today, more people than not live with and under precisely such conditions. Where these is less functional bureaucracy, there is invariably more corruption, discrimination, favouritism, arbitrary decision making, and uncertainty overall. While some individuals stand to benefit from such an environment, the vast majority of the rest of us certainly do not. This is both unsurprising and unavoidable, as this is exactly what bureaucracy was developed to protect against. The rich and the powerful naturally dislike bureaucracy for many of the same reasons that King John disliked the Magna Carta back in the 13th century – it levels the playing field (as much as it can, anyway) and introduces accountability.

So, while making sure the rule of law in public and private administration works as intended and is fit for purpose at any given point in time is a never-ending effort, and we should all strive for better bureaucracy, nobody who genuinely calls for ‘less bureaucracy’ is your friend because ‘less bureaucracy’ will always result in less accountability, fewer rights, fewer opportunities, and a complete DOGEshit of decision-making at every level.