The Long Nap Of The Lazy Bureaucrat

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.

Classical attacks on bureaucracy center on the paralyzing effects of rigid institutional structures. The concern with bureaucrats sleeping in the office shifts the emphasis from structural issues to individual weakness of will. In Trump’s America, as in late-imperial Istanbul, the napping bureaucrat has been summoned for abuse. One self-proclaimed former federal worker reported via TikTok that “our government is filled with the most incompetent and most lazy people.” Every morning, she said, she would walk past one colleague “snoring at his desk.” Another employee, she alleged, would regularly slip out of the office to “take a nap in his favorite park, under a shady tree.”

Trump’s consolidation of power in his second term has been driven by a perceptible change of pace. The Administration has ginned up a sense of urgency, doing away with brakes and guardrails by insisting that the fate of the nation depends on rapid executive action. “All federal workers should be working at the same pace that President Trump is working and moving,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last month. Why? Because “we have a country to save.” As Watters said on his show, “Work-from-home Fridays isn’t going to fly in the Golden Age.” He credited Trump with a revival of the American work ethic. “This country was forged by pioneers. This isn’t a lazy nation like some of you nations out there. You know who I’m talking about, Canada.”

The purging of bureaucrats has often coincided with zealous announcements of a new golden age. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong came to believe that the revolution was losing momentum because of the country’s lumbering bureaucracy. Mao rejected the idea that communism encouraged laziness. On the contrary, he saw laziness as counter-revolutionary. “The Chairman could not abide ‘lazy’ bureaucrats,” the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in “Mao’s Last Revolution.” In 1964, Mao declared, “Laziness is one of the sources of revisionism”—a deviation from revolutionary ideals. Purges of supposed revisionists were routine in Mao’s China; linking laziness to counter-revolution, he put idlers on the chopping block. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, the Chairman hacked away at the bureaucracy, focussing especially on ministries dealing with culture, education, and public health.

Soviet Russia, too, experienced periodic panics about slothful bureaucrats impeding the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, films such as “Don Diego and Pelagia” presented indifferent and self-indulgent office workers reading romance novels and eating huge meals at their desks. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes, in her book “Everyday Stalinism,” a political cartoon titled “Bureaucrat on the trapeze.” It depicts a pair of circus artists, one representing the Soviet citizen, the other representing the bureaucrat; the citizen has just launched himself into the air, but the bureaucrat, instead of rising to catch him, holds up a sign reading “Come back tomorrow.”

The morality of work was crucial to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary effort. The 1936 Soviet constitution quoted St. Paul’s dictum, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Later in the century, idleness was criminalized. The Soviet Union’s 1961 law outlawing “social parasitism” mostly targeted tramps, beggars, and prostitutes (as well as poets like Joseph Brodsky)—not bureaucrats. But the message was clear: if you’re lazy, you’re not with the program. The glorious future of the nation depends on everyone laboring at a fast pace, with no time to slow down and question what’s happening. Trump’s agenda, reactionary though it may be, exhibits a certain revolutionary fervor.

In the United States, the apparent incontestability of the work ethic makes it awkward to fight back against attacks on “lazy” bureaucrats. Musk’s recruiting call for DOGE asked for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week.” (The conspicuous youth of the DOGE team may reflect the greater willingness of young people without family responsibilities to submit to such a punishing regimen; according to Politico, some DOGE staff members are sleeping on IKEA beds in a federal office building.) Musk has repeatedly contrasted the fecklessness of federal employees with the industriousness of his élite cadre of libertarian workaholics. DOGE employees, he boasted on X, are working a hundred and twenty hours a week. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

Attempts to defend federal employees by showing that they actually do work long hours, while helpful, miss the point. Totting up working hours places us on Musk’s argumentative terrain. Over the years, Musk has made himself into a contemporary saint of overwork, laboring with a ferocity at once stunning and pathological. A Business Insider headline, from 2023, announced that “Elon Musk’s productivity hack is taking 2 or 3 days off a year, working 7 days a week, and getting 6 hours of sleep a night.” Musk confided to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the strain of work “would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit”; in 2018, he wept on the phone with a Times reporter while describing the agony of his hundred-and-twenty-hour workweeks. Few of us are going to match Musk on hours worked. Nor should we.

DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce is, in part, a classic Silicon Valley story of condemning the public sector as unproductive while lauding the private sector as dynamic, innovative, and entrepreneurial. (This picture of the public sector’s inertia is, at the very least, highly disputable: Musk himself has received thirty-eight billion dollars in federal funds for his businesses in the past decades, and a low-interest Department of Energy loan helped get Tesla off the ground.) But it’s also a story about how work ethic gets twisted to serve the ends of people in power. For Musk and Trump, the “lazy bureaucrat” is anyone who stands in their way. ♦