Washington, D.C. Is Not A Swamp
The good guys (and girls) of the Deep State keep their heads down and under Trump they pretty much saved your ass. They deserve better than your condescension or scorn.
The latest issue of the New Republic has what is, if memory serves, my first TNR cover story since the 1980s. It’s a celebration of the people who came to Washington to do good—civil servants, military, DC government workers, public interest lawyers and lobbyists, NGO workers. I profile several of them in the piece.
Most of these folks could make more money doing something else, a circumstance that caused Irving Kristol and other neoconservatives to denounce them in the 1970s and 1980s as a power-mad New Class comparable to the Soviet nomenklatura. The “Deep State” critique that surfaced in the Trump years derives from that view.
In truth, there is nothing wrong with trying to make the world a better place. That’s what the New Dealers who flocked to Washington wanted in the 1930s, and what the Peace Corps volunteers invited in by President John Kennedy wanted in the 1960s and after. The nihilist MAGA right judges them a conspiracy against it’s-hard-to-say-what. The press, which mostly lacks access to them, ignores or condescends to them. Are some of them incompetent or misguided? Of course. They’re human beings. But most of the ones I know are dedicated and smart. These are the people who kept the lights on during the Trump administration, and a handful of them, led by Barney Graham of the NIH, created the blueprint for life-saving Covid vaccines.
“When people make these comments about ‘Oh government workers, nine to five by the clock’— most people I knew in government, virtually all the people I knew in government … felt a sense of purpose,” Graham told me. (For the record, the actual standard day for a federal employee is 8:30 to 5.)
This is the Washington I’ve known as neighbors and friends during my four decades living here. The other, This Town Washington of hustlers and camera-chasers, so deftly lampooned in Mark Leibovich’s book of that title, certainly exists, but that’s only about three thousand people. The people my piece is about number about one million.
These are the Washingtonians who’ve been my neighbors for four decades. I’ve dined in their homes. I’ve dated some of them. My children have slept in their homes. One of them is one of my oldest and dearest friends. In any other city these people would be judged extraordinary in their ingenuity and their commitment to the public good. Here in Washington, they’re the norm. You should thank them every goddamned day of your life.
This is one of the better pieces I’ve ever written. Please read it here.
Having grown up in the DC area, can confirm. The vast majority of mid-tier federal employees are high-minded people who take pride in serving the public, and the grunts pushing paper at Social Security or wherever are no different than service employees anywhere else. We can probably make life better for both those employees and the customers they serve, by investing more in efficient IT and thoughtful process streamlining (like Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program, which people often unjustly mocked at the time -- it produced real savings in time and money, for both the government and people who need service from the government). To a large extent, negative experiences of government bureaucracy have to do with Republicans willfully raising the administrative burden on users. The GOP position is that it is better to waste $10 per person to screen people, even if that means that you spend $1000 screening a hundred people, you screen out one person who was going to get $1 in "undeserved" benefits, and you _also_ block another ten people from getting benefits they deserved (and desperately needed).