In December, the Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, released a report tauntingly titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst, the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, had recently announced her intention to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “cut Washington’s pork and make ’em squeal.” The report, with the alliterative plosives of its title raining down like flecks of spit, was an opening volley in the fight to rouse sleepy bureaucrats and put them on notice.
Ernst charged public employees with widespread absenteeism and dereliction of duty. The report’s headline finding—claiming that just six per cent of federal employees work full time in their offices—was quickly debunked. But the narrative of a lethargic civil service in bad need of work discipline was set in motion. “The parasites are thrashing hard,” Musk posted on X. Instead of government employees “pretending to work” and “being paid a lot for nothing,” Musk wrote, they would have to “get a real job.” The Fox News personality Jesse Watters summed up the story line by pronouncing, in December, that “bureaucrats have never been lazier.” According to Watters, “Biden spent forty per cent of his Presidency on vacation. But compared to the rest of the government he’s a workaholic.”
America’s federal government employs a dizzying range of workers: mail carriers and mapmakers, firefighters and fish biologists, volcanologists positioned on tectonic-plate boundaries, cooks on Navy submarines. Recent antagonism toward the government workforce, however, has targeted a particular type: the office-dweller, the laptop-user, the knowledge worker who is possibly remote, possibly dead, whose products are indeterminate and, therefore, of dubious value. DOGE’s waves of firings has been indiscriminate, more machine-gun spray than surgical excision. Yet throughout, the image of the pampered paper pusher has stood in for a larger hazy vision of taxpayer-sponsored waste.
Bureaucrats are easy to loathe. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—a leading thinker beloved by enemies of big government and friends of the free market—wrote in 1944, “Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat.” The very term implies an insult. The rule of bureaucracy, von Mises argued, favors the “inefficient expert” who “cannot succeed within a competitive system.” For von Mises, as a bureaucracy swells, it risks blossoming into state tyranny. Other critics of bureaucracy point to a different danger: the corrupting effects of the system on the bureaucrats themselves.
Gray walls, harsh lighting, stiff hierarchies, mystifying rules, endless reams of paper: the tedium and repressiveness of bureaucratic work is proverbial. Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber saw bureaucracy as dehumanizing, a coldly rational deprivation of human freedom. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed,” Weber wrote. “He is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.” The government worker may “enjoy security,” von Mises added. “But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls.” The political scientist Ralph Hummel went so far as to argue, in the nineteen-seventies, that bureaucrats are bad in bed: warped by their work, bureaucrats focus not on love but on “technical performance in sexual intercourse.” Recent claims, in the conservative press, of a twelve-person orgy among officials at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, offer salacious elaboration on this theme of erotic pathology, casting the bureaucrat in the bedroom as at once perverse and virtuosic.
Although the question of whether bureaucrats make good lovers is relatively modern, the trope of the bureaucrat as avoiding hard work has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself. The scribes of ancient Egypt were among the world’s first bureaucrats, and while scribal work was considered prestigious and honorable, a career as a scribe was also a way of evading the hardships of other forms of labor. “The Satire of the Trades,” a frequently copied text composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, presents itself as advice composed by a father for a son on his way to scribal school. Becoming a scribe, the father says, “saves one from work.” That is, it saves one from the miseries, indignities, and bodily damage incurred in nearly all nonscribal occupations.
The bulk of the “Satire” is devoted to recounting the physical arduousness of jobs outside the courtly bureaucracy. The barber “wears out his arms to fill his belly,” walking the streets “crying out, his bowl upon his arm,” looking for customers to shave. The potter’s clothes are “stiff with mud,” the furnace tender’s eyes are red from smoke, the weaver gets whipped, and the fisherman must contend with crocodiles. Only the scribe is spared these horrors. And so the father exhorts, “I shall make you love books more than your mother.” Then again, the division between manual and cognitive labor is, as ever, deceptive. The Egyptian scribes may have avoided the crocodiles, but skeletal remains indicate that plenty of them developed arthritis.
The idea that bureaucrats are slow-moving and unproductive, as well as insufficiently motivated, is drawn out in Victorian literature, too. In Charles Dickens’s novel “Little Dorrit,” published between 1855 and 1857, the most powerful government department is the Circumlocution Office, through which all official business gets routed—and blocked: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.” A full-blown moral panic about the laziness of government workers, such as we are now experiencing, is more rare. Nonetheless, Musk’s filleting of the federal government is not the first time that so-called lazy bureaucrats have been thrown under the wheels of historical change. Campaigns to purge the “parasites” tend to emerge—or to be fanned into flame—at moments of political rupture. When an insecure yet ambitious regime attempts to carry out large-scale social transformation, the indolent bureaucrat makes for an ideal scapegoat.
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, fearing decline, pursued modernizing reforms. The reformers worried that change was too halting, and that the Ottomans were falling behind the industrializing European nations. In 1906, Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting “The Tortoise Trainer,” one of the period’s most celebrated art works, memorably depicted such anxieties. It shows an elderly man in religious Ottoman garb attempting to train the sluggish tortoises crawling at his feet, their domed shells evoking mosques.
In this context, widespread alarm arose in Istanbul about whether civil servants were working hard enough, as the historian Melis Hafez recounts in her 2021 book, “Inventing Laziness.” Bureaucrats who didn’t measure up were purged. Clerks who fell asleep in the office were charged with crimes. In 1911, as the empire verged on collapse, the Grand Vizier—the head of state second only to the Sultan—demanded that “every lazy, incompetent, and inefficient civil official be weeded out.” An empire in decline turns on itself and attacks its own organism, while fastening onto the belief that if people worked harder, the country would be saved.
