After 130 days of wielding his chainsaw — hacking off 260,000 United States (US) federal workers who accounted for roughly 6% of the country’s workforce by one estimate and wiping out entire agencies like USAID — Elon Musk has left Washington, DC. From an Indian perspective, I have observed Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s attempt to eviscerate the administrative State with a combination of bewilderment, curiosity, and horror. Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, the DOGE mantra, are adjectives many in India have long reserved for our bureaucracy. But, it turns out that every society is disenchanted with its bureaucracy in its own way (with apologies to Leo Tolstoy).
In America, liberals too are coming to terms with this disenchantment, seeking to replace what they consider an inefficient and unambitious State with one that delivers “abundance”. Viewed from India, the contours of the US debate raise new questions about how State capacity gets built. More importantly, the situation in the US offers a cautionary tale on the paths we must not take. That these debates are taking place against the backdrop of creeping authoritarianism adds to the urgency of engaging with these ideas.
DOGE’s dystopian vision is well known. It seeks a hyper-privatised, techno-State run by algorithms to replace the “fraud, waste, and abuse” of the deep State. Liberal voices are loosely cohering around the vision of an “abundance” State, one that harks back to the New Deal infrastructure moment and builds in abundance for the 21st century — housing, clean energy, and innovation infrastructure, among others. The philosophical roots of the argument lie in the view that Democrats stopped investing in the supply side of the economy, focusing instead on the demand side through cash transfers and affordable care. Consequently, the American State underinvested in infrastructure and public services. The result was low-supply, overpriced essential goods and an economic environment of scarcity. As a political vision, abundance has been critiqued widely for its failure to engaged with societal power structures and furthering the politics of redistribution. But, from a State capacity perspective, abundance brings a new dimension to the debate. Scarcity, and the resulting low trust in government, the argument goes, has been produced by layers of laws, procedures, and what American political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls vetocracy (too many powerful actors blocking the government). Zoning laws and environmental protections are among the chief culprits, this view holds.
Abundance envisages a government that builds by de-regulating bureaucracy. DOGE imagines a State running on the power of algorithms. Both sides of the debate raise critical questions on State capacity — which the Indian debate also should engage with.
{{/usCountry}}Abundance envisages a government that builds by de-regulating bureaucracy. DOGE imagines a State running on the power of algorithms. Both sides of the debate raise critical questions on State capacity — which the Indian debate also should engage with.
{{/usCountry}}The efficiency trap: DOGE, abundance, and the latter’s critics, all seek an efficient State. For DOGE, the algorithm is the Holy Grail. Abundance yearns for what public affairs researcher Marc J Dunkelman, in his book Why Nothing Works, calls the Hamiltonian impulse — a strong centralised government with the capacity to “get things done” in contrast to the “Jeffersonian impulse” that seeks to democratise State power through decentralisation and consensus building.
Missing in this debate is a theory of State power. The State is assumed to be a benevolent actor. Against the looming reality of authoritarianism, this is naïve. DOGE is a cautionary tale on the misuse of efficiency as a value proposition to direct State power towards the pursuit of elite interests. In India too, efficiency concerns have opened the door to a deeply personalised style of strong-man, bulldozer politics. The one lesson from 130 days of DOGE is this: State capacity debates must guard against fetishising efficiency.
The State as a firm: The efficiency trap traces its intellectual roots to New Public Management and its emphasis on private sector management practices for governments. At present, this has been replaced by a Silicon Valley inspired, start-up logic. The State is a logistics delivery firm powered by algorithms and the citizen is a consumer and distant spectator. At the other end of the aisle, abundance expresses a near exhaustion with the citizen. Too much participation and fracturing of power results in absurd realities: 50 town hall meetings for a housing project in San Francisco, for instance. Here, vetocracy impedes consensus building. In both views, the citizen-State relationship is transactional. Accountability and citizen rights are relegated to the margins.
But the State is not a platform fulfilling orders. Effective delivery is about making trade-offs that balance equity, justice, and social stability. Without participatory guardrails, these trade-offs will rarely be made from the vantage of the ordinary citizen. One solution is in Dunkelman’s framing of voice without veto. Eventually, the government has to stop listening and go about implementing, the argument goes. For the State capacity debate, the challenge lies in identifying the institutional mechanisms through which this fine balance between participation and vetocracy can be struck, with the citizen at the centre.
Bureaucratic autonomy: DOGE’s centralising vision seeks to rid itself of rules and procedures to make bureaucracy, as Musk posted in late February, “subject to the will of the President”. Abundance seeks bureaucratic autonomy by de-regulating bureaucracy from procedural red tape, arguably the very tools of bureaucracy that preserve its autonomy, and empowering a Hamiltonian government to get things done. The dilemma at the heart of these differing visions is one that Indian debates are all too familiar with — balancing bureaucratic discretion with accountability through procedures and decentralisation. At its core, the challenge of State capacity in the US and India is one of determining what level of government should perform what level of function and how best to distribute power within the State in ways that make the State responsive and effective.
As this brief overview highlights, the global crisis of the administrative State is an opportunity for radical re-imagination of the State itself. But debates cannot afford to lose sight of normative concerns of democracy and citizenship. The quest for State capacity has to guard against the slippery slope of authoritarianism. Indeed, it should emerge as a bulwark against it. DOGE and Musk are the warning bells.
Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal.