## Notes from 05 March 2026 [[2026-03-04|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-03-06|Next note →]] ## Eilbert on the intellectual history behind DOGE and Abundance Read [[Casey Eilbert]]'s **"[Recombining government: These are the questions bureaucratic reformers can't avoid](https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/recombining-government-these-are?r=10o1))"** (Nov 2025, [[Niskanen Center]]'s _Hypertext_). This is one of the best pieces I've read on the current American debates about administrative reform, specifically because it _historicizes_ them with unusual care. Eilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins writing an intellectual history of bureaucracy in the modern United States, delivers a piece that reads like a compressed book chapter rather than a "hot take." ### Why this piece is so good What makes it stand out is the refusal to treat the current moment as unprecedented. Both [[Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)|DOGE]]'s assault on bureaucracy and the [[Abundance Agenda - Progress Studies|Abundance agenda]]'s push for empowered administrators are presented as _recombinations_ of tensions that have structured American administrative thought since Woodrow Wilson's 1887 essay, "The Study of Administration." Eilbert identifies three persistent tensions that every generation of reformers must navigate: |**Tension**|**One Pole**|**The Other**| |---|---|---| |**Control vs. Flexibility**|Centralized hierarchy, presidential direction|Decentralized discretion, frontline autonomy| |**Political Responsiveness vs. Neutrality**|Administration as a partisan instrument|Administration as impartial, expert-led execution| |**Efficiency vs. Democratic Input**|Managerial performance, results orientation|Proceduralism, citizen voice, participatory accountability| The insight is that these tensions are never fully resolved—they are merely _reconfigured_. Each era selects a different combination, and that combination defines its administrative paradigm. ### The three eras Eilbert organizes American administrative history into three broad phases. I appreciate that she avoids a normative tone; each phase is treated as a rational response to a real problem created by its predecessor. **1. The Progressive/Prewar Paradigm (1880s–1940s)** Wilson and his followers established the politics-administration dichotomy: administration is a neutral, technical function executed by trained experts under presidential direction. The civil service is merit-based, centralized, and hierarchical. The president channels the public will; the bureaucracy implements it without interference from interest groups. This paradigm produced the Pendleton Act (1883), the merit system, and the Brownlow Commission (1937), which sought to make the president the "center of energy, direction, and administrative management." - **The formula:** Centralized control + political neutrality + expert efficiency. **2. The Postwar Revolt (1940s–1970s)** World War II shattered faith in the "neutral executor" model. Under the shadow of totalitarian regimes, scholars argued that treating administration as "merely executing orders" was a "dangerous fallacy." Critics rejected the politics-administration dichotomy as inadequate, arguing that administration is "at its heart normative." What followed was a full-circle reversal. "New Public Administration" scholars rejected top-down control in favor of administrator discretion. The New Left demanded participatory democracy and bottom-up accountability. Public choice theorists argued that competition and market logics—not hierarchy—would ensure responsiveness. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 1966), the public interest movement, and outsourcing all grew from this soil. - **The formula:** Decentralization + political responsiveness + democratic input (at the expense of unified purpose). **3. The Market-Oriented Paradigm (1970s–2000s)** Carter's 1978 reform abolished the Civil Service Commission, establishing the [[US Office of Personnel Management (OPM)|OPM]], and introduced pay-for-performance. Reagan’s [[Donald Devine]] attacked the Wilsonian vision directly: "There is no value-free public administration." Clinton and Gore's "Reinventing Government" completed the shift: agencies were told to treat citizens as "customers," decentralize authority, and use competition to reduce regulation. The career civil service shrank by 400,000. - **The formula:** Market mechanisms + consumer choice + managerial flexibility (at the expense of a collective sense of "the public"). ### Where DOGE and Abundance land (and what they leave open) Eilbert's framework shows that both contemporary movements pick selectively from this history, and both contain a significant "accountability gap." ||**DOGE / Trump**|**Abundance**| |---|---|---| |**What they revive**|Progressive-era "unitary executive" theory—all actors report to the president.|Progressive-era faith in the "public interest" as a guiding concept for administrators.| |**What they reject**|A merit-based civil service insulated from partisan influence (the Wilsonian bargain).|Both top-down presidential control _and_ bottom-up proceduralism.| |**Their prescription**|Shrink career bureaucracy, expand political appointments, make the state a partisan instrument.|Empower administrators with autonomy, remove procedural constraints, trust experts to make tradeoffs.| |**The accountability gap**|If the bureaucracy is a partisan instrument, what constrains the president? This risks a return to patronage politics.|If bureaucrats are autonomous and freed from hierarchy and procedure, who determines outcomes? To whom are they answerable?| This is Eilbert’s key diagnostic: both sides have "scrambled the matrix of 20th-century administrative theory." DOGE revives the Progressive emphasis on [[Executive Decisiveness|presidential control]] but ditches the neutrality that made it legitimate. Abundance revives the faith in the public interest but ditches the institutional framework (merit hierarchy) that was supposed to operationalize it. Both reject the postwar consensus on bottom-up accountability: DOGE because it constrains the executive; Abundance because it produces procedural paralysis. ### What I take from this 1. **The maturity of the framing:** Unlike most writing in the Abundance space, Eilbert doesn't treat the [[New Public Management (NPM)]] era as a villain. She presents it as a coherent response to the failures of the Progressive model. The market turn wasn't an error in judgment; it was an attempt to solve bureaucratic unresponsiveness. This is a fresh take, as many proponents of state capacity today (like [[Rainer Kattel]] in his Substack series) treat NPM as a pathology to be escaped rather than a logical response to earlier issues. . 2. **Accountability is the right question:** This is the "hard problem" in all the comparative cases I track. [[Executive Decisiveness]] sounds great until you ask: who picks the leader, who constrains them, and what happens when they are wrong? Eilbert names this clearly for Abundance: they don't specify who determines outcomes. This same gap appears in the Kattel/Quattrucci program-manager model and the [[DARPA-style setups|DARPA-ARIA playbook]]. . 3. **The historical pattern is clarifying:** Seeing DOGE and Abundance as recombinations makes them less mysterious. DOGE is essentially Reaganism with teeth—and powered by the [[Nationalist-Conservative Right|New Right]] Silicon Valley technologists rather than orthodox economists. Abundance is New Public Administration with a supply-side twist: the same faith in empowered administrators, but oriented toward building things rather than ensuring participation. Both are moves within a century-old game.