Four days into the second Trump presidency, a comment piece appeared in the Daily Telegraph entitled “If Trump succeeds in reinventing government, expect his plans to be the global blueprint”. Respect for nationalists, even authoritarian ones such as Trump, is not unusual in the pages of right-wing newspapers these days. It was the column’s author that was surprising: Simon Case, who had only stepped down as head of the civil service a month earlier, having served under Keir Starmer and Britain’s previous three prime ministers.
Case could not have known how rapidly, brutally and unaccountably Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) would behave over the following weeks. Doge’s putsch targeting the instruments of government – seizing control of Treasury payment systems, sacking civil servants en masse without warning, breaking in to the offices of non-profits – has been shocking to behold.
Musk’s declared aim was to cut an eye-watering $2tn from the federal budget, which would effectively dismantle the post-Rooseveltian social state. Attacks on the US government’s tax office, the IRS, will significantly shrink the tax base, making it far easier for taxes to be avoided – a clear win for libertarians and the ultra-wealthy. The fact that this is being carried out by the world’s richest man and a band of assorted gamers and former Palantir staffers, whose primary credential is fidelity to a Trumpian world-view, lends it a dystopian and fascistic quality. And Musk’s declaration that he will “significantly” reduce the time he spends at Doge from the start of this month is unlikely to mean a reversal of its “accomplishments” so far, or a withdrawal of his philosophy from Trump’s administration. Indeed, while announcing his partial withdrawal, Musk simultaneously renewed his commitment to making “sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back”.
Whatever the fate of Musk’s experiment, Case’s kneejerk enthusiasm for it is, in our own context, perhaps the more interesting development, signalling a shift in the legitimacy of Britain’s civil service in 2025, and perhaps of liberal government in general. Nor is Case the first senior public servant to depart their office in a state of frustration, tipping into admiration for strongmen. David Frost, for example, who now writes outlandish Telegraph columns praising Trump and attacking “indoctrination” of children by teachers, was not only the chief Brexit negotiator under Boris Johnson, but a career civil servant in the Foreign Office since the 1980s. Mervyn King, who spent over 20 years at the Bank of England (and as governor for ten of those) was, by 2019, demanding a “no deal” Brexit, viewed by civil servants and businesses as national economic suicide.
Years spent inside Britain’s governmental machine at a senior level appears to have a radicalising effect on many individuals, nurturing their sympathy for libertarian and small-state regimes. In less polarised political times, Gus O’Donnell, one of Case’s predecessors as cabinet secretary, suggested Britain learn from Singapore by opening up the civil service to top private sector talent, through matching their pay and allowing senior staff to move back and forth between government and business.
Then, of course, there is Dominic Cummings, whose opinions about the civil service went before him. His notorious blog-cum-job advert from 2020, seeking to attract people to Whitehall “who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels”, as opposed to “Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news”, dripped with pent-up resentment towards the civil service.
It may be tempting for social democrats and progressives to write this all off as the latest wave of neoliberal attacks on the public sector, escalating in some cases to the misanthropic rage of egotistical men in the latter stages of midlife crises. And those suspicions are not wholly unfounded. But it is also worth recognising the full extent of the current consensus that government bureaucracy is bloated and failing, which now includes both populists and moderates, left and right, Westminster insiders and outsiders.
In a context of economic stagnation, a fiscal squeeze, and the shadow of Nigel Farage falling over everything, Tory and Labour leaderships have competed to own the critique of the civil service. In the autumn, Kemi Badenoch provoked raised eyebrows when she declared 5 to 10 per cent of civil servants to be so bad, they should “be in prison”. This followed a frankly weird pamphlet, “Conservatism in Crisis”, to which she wrote a foreword blaming Britain’s ills on the closed minds of a “new bureaucratic class”. This “class” was an eclectic mix of public sector employees and other professionals, such as those in HR or compliance roles, whose shared interests lay in interfering in personal and market freedoms, whether via government regulation or some insidious woke ideology that (the pamphlet argued) is the mark of higher education these days. No real policy proposals emanated from this bleak vision, other than the demand that conservatives strengthen their resolve for more culture war.
In December, Starmer got in on the act, with a speech claiming that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. In practical terms, 2025 has seen a series of announcements from the Cabinet Office Minister, Pat McFadden, and Starmer laying out ambitions to reduce the civil service headcount, make better use of technology and cut “red tape”. The recently announced closure of NHS England was made with the kind of media fanfare that indicated political points being sought, and not merely technocratic ones. It has since been reported that McFadden is drawing up plans to abolish hundreds of quangos, and has written to each government department, demanding that they justify the existence of every quango under their remit, or risk its dissolution.
With the exception of trade unions defending their members, it is hard to find a positive word said about the civil service in Britain right now. In some respects, this is a very familiar story dating back decades, intensifying since the 1980s. But in others, it feels more like a distinct conjuncture, that reflects on a wide range of political, economic, technological and cultural crises that many nations – not only Britain – face right now. The question is how to disentangle the old from the new.
Anti-bureaucratic sentiments are as old as bureaucracy. The rise of modern government bureaucracies in the late-19th century, characterised by permanent, salaried officials, whose loyalty was to their office and not to any political leader or party, has always been viewed as a mixed blessing at best. This ambivalence is captured in the words of the great theorist of bureaucracy Max Weber, who noted how it operates “without regard for persons”. By focusing on documentation, numbers and due process, bureaucracy can be both efficient and fair – but also dehumanising. If not held in check, bureaucracy turns procedure and record-keeping into a kind of fetish, that eventually blocks innovation and imagination.
Numerous 20th century critics and satirists highlighted the absurdity and threat of systems that seem oblivious to the political or ethical goals they serve. The horrifying efficiency of Nazi administration served as proof of the malleability of bureaucracy, and the excuses it provides to individuals hiding behind paperwork and rules. Bureaucracy was symptomatic of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer termed the Dialectic of Enlightenment, whereby the dogmatic pursuit of rationality leads eventually to wholly irrational outcomes.
By the late 1960s, despite the evident benefits that welfare states had delivered to postwar societies, critics were questioning the dull homogeneity cultivated by state bureaucracy, while highlighting how centralised planning frequently foundered on contact with social reality. The intellectuals of the New Right (who provided the ideological kindling for the twin transformations led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) channelled the ideas of the “Virginia School” of neoliberalism, which, by applying neo-classical economics to the behaviour of bureaucrats, argued that public servants have an innate tendency to increase public spending and public sector jobs.
The term which came to describe this neoliberal assault on bureaucracy was “New Public Management” (NPM). From the mid-1980s onwards, the Thatcher government deployed targets, audit, league tables, performance reviews and other private sector techniques to try to drive efficiencies into the public sector, including Whitehall. In terms of sheer headcount, this had some remarkable effects: the size of the civil service fell from 735,000 to 430,000 under Thatcher. But without commensurate increases in productivity, this was more a reflection of a shrinking state than of managerial ingenuity.
The NPM suspicion of “back-office bureaucracy”, a declared focus on “implementation” and “delivery”, and constant (always negative) comparison with the private sector have remained a political orthodoxy ever since. The Blair government introduced a “Delivery Unit” to try to find ways of overcoming bureaucratic inertia, and commissioned the 2003 Gershon Review of civil service efficiency. The Cameron government arrived promising a “bonfire of the quangos” and created its own “Implementation Unit”. For a brief period, Cameron attempted to position himself as a leader for a “post-bureaucratic” age, in which open data replaced the need for officials and documents.
Cameron and Osborne made no secret of their desire to shrink the size of the state, and in terms of civil service headcount they succeeded, with the number falling from 490,000 when they entered office to 380,000 when they departed. But that achievement was more than reversed by their central political legacy: Brexit. Since 2016, faced with sudden and unanticipated increases in administrative and policy complexity (touching on virtually every arm of government), the number of civil servants shot right back up to over half a million, where it remains today.
Yet the Cameron era wasn’t only a reheating of NPM. It also witnessed a new style of cultural resentment emerge towards the civil service, which became typecast as over-privileged and abnormally liberal on social issues. Michael Gove popularised the term “the blob” to refer to an amorphous cultural mass of public sector employees who blocked change and looked after themselves. Working as Gove’s special adviser, Cummings developed a notorious hostility to Whitehall traditions, including the post of permanent secretaries and the idea that civil servants be “permanent”, for which he read “unsackable” and therefore lazy. Idolising the model of successful tech start-ups and the mindset of physicists, Cummings demanded a wholesale reorientation away from the culture of a mandarin class, towards small teams of problem-solvers, in which there were much clearer incentives to deliver, and penalties for failure. On this score, he had (and retains) many sympathisers, but the intellectual inspiration he drew from the Silicon Valley “rationalist community” pointed to shadier, more radical political objectives that took aim at the very core of liberal government.
Gove’s populist insinuations exploded into the mainstream following the 2016 referendum, as Whitehall became routinely blamed in the press for thwarting Brexit, possibly because it was staffed by Remainers. Max Weber saw the distinction between private individual (the person holding a job) and public office (the function they were performing) as essential to the functioning of bureaucracy, but Brexit and its aftermath started to test this, as paranoia regarding the “liberal elite” came to dominate the imagination of the Brexiteers.
The arrival of the least bureaucratic politician imaginable, Boris Johnson, into Downing Street, signalled a new kind of breakdown in relationship of politicians with Whitehall. As ministers, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab were both embroiled in scandals concerning the bullying of civil servants. The post-bureaucratic fantasies of Cummings (allied to the pre-bureaucratic ones of Johnson’s minister for the Cabinet Office, Jacob Rees-Mogg) failed to produce any meaningful reform. A plan to reduce the civil service headcount by 20 per cent announced in May 2022 was overwhelmed by the scandals and chaos that forced Johnson’s resignation a few months later.
There are well-known systemic problems that have always dogged the British machinery of government, caused by the split between permanent officials and elected politicians. One reason Whitehall compares unfavourably with private sector bodies is that the latter are usually clear about what they are trying to achieve. But the goals of government departments shift, not only when there is a change of government, but whenever there is a ministerial reshuffle.
Seasoned civil servants know that if they don’t deliver on one set of goals, a new one will be along before too long – the classic “Sir Humphrey” problem, in which the permanent official ultimately holds more power than the temporary executive. The frustrations surrounding Brexit led to escalating paranoia on this front, to the point of imagining some “deep state” of Remainers that was conspiring to obstruct democracy. Badenoch, who appears to take her lines directly from some of the more paranoid reaches of YouTube, continues to speak to this mindset.
There is a more reasonable version of this view, that has now become adopted as a cause célèbre by many progressives. This holds that a combination of Whitehall and regulators have become over-powerful and bloated, due to a culture of risk aversion, lack of experimentation and zero tolerance for error. The example of the Covid vaccine development, regulation and roll-out demonstrates what can be done at speed where there is sufficient political will, but which is frequently thwarted by mountains of paperwork. The newly approved Lower Thames Crossing tunnel had been subject to 16 years of planning approval, at a cost of £450m (the total cost to date is £1.2bn, but the cost of planning is around a third of that) and 360,000 pages of planning documents.
This critique is associated with the “modern supply side” ideas developed by the Biden administration, and has been amplified by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, which lays out a path for American liberalism focused on building the material and infrastructural conditions of a better society. The enemy here is Nimbyism in all its forms, which would include naysayers inside government, which – it is claimed – have multiplied as the complexity and risk assessment of decision-making has escalated.
More pessimistically, rising social demands on the state (due to an ageing, less physically capable population) combined with prolonged economic stagnation, produces an urgent fiscal case for trimming the size and cost of the civil service. Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement included a plan to reduce headcount by 10,000 and costs by 15 per cent.
The fiscal logic (to reduce cost) and the implementation logic (to reduce delays and obstructions) may appear to pull in the same direction, at least in the sense that they potentially both point to a smaller civil service. But is that necessarily the case? Over-inflated and unspecified hopes are being placed in AI to generate government efficiency, with Starmer claiming that digital technology could save the public sector £45bn.
But any such savings will mostly be at the back office, non-Whitehall end of the civil service (where most civil servants work, many outside London), and useless as a way of speeding up decision-making. What if senior civil servants, with considerable experience and cultural capital, and whose numbers have also been multiplying, are part of the problem? Speaking entirely in terms of net headcount and cost provides ministers with simple pledges, but fails to capture deeper-seated problems of inertia that so many insiders and outsiders have become convinced of. Improving the “agility” and speed of government often requires deliberate efforts to do new things, outside of ossified lines of accountability, not just shrinking old ones.
The question remains how to achieve any of the above. A lot of responsibility ends up being dumped on HR: performance management and redundancy schemes are highlighted repeatedly as some kind of golden bullet, as if government’s main problem is (as per the reactionary prejudices stoked by Cummings) an excess of lazy and incompetent staff. McFadden has, unsurprisingly, spoken a lot about getting rid of poor performers.
The flipside involves seeking to lure whichever brand of digital nerds, “weirdos” or private sector “talent” one believes is the required tonic. The No 10 Innovation Fellowship programme, launched in 2021, has provided one route for techy outsiders to spend time in Whitehall. McFadden wants one in ten civil servants to be working in “digital” or “data” roles within five years, however that is meant to be defined.
Conscious of the epochal challenge that liberalism is currently facing, Downing Street would like such measures to be viewed as disruptive and radical. Talk in Labour circles of “Operation Chainsaw” (a reference to the tool wielded by Argentina’s President Javier Millei and later Musk, as a symbol of anti-government zeal) is a somewhat unconvincing attempt to peg their reform agenda to the libertarian zeitgeist. If that agenda turns out to be just another round of NPM, a slightly fiercer HR policy, handing carriage clocks to a few mandarins, and hiring some physics grads in hoodies, then it is unlikely to be all that noticeable, and won’t stem the frustration and disillusionment that is felt by many. The worry right now is that there is an alternative waiting in the wings, which is less about a new type of management or process, and more about unbridled political aggression.
The Doge and Trump model dispenses with the logic of bureaucracy altogether. As the sociologist Dylan Riley noted in 2018, Trump is a manifestation of what Weber characterised as “patrimonial” rule, which suspends the separation of “private” life from “office”, using office for private enrichment, and deploying power via a logic of personal loyalty and revenge. Among the questions Doge employees were asked before being appointed was how they had voted in 2024. Some have speculated that Doge’s real function is to create as much unregulated space as possible for AI to exploit in the coming years, not simply to make existing systems more efficient, but to start afresh.
When we think of anti-government rage, we often turn to some fantasy of the “left behind” populist voter, who feels abandoned by the elites. We less often reflect on the rage that elites themselves experience towards their own colleagues and institutions, both justified and unjustified. In 2025, few seem to disagree that the machinery of government has grown dysfunctional. The question is what to do with all the pent-up frustration: try to learn from it in the service of something better, or simply unleash it in a frenzy of destruction?
[See also: What is school for?]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall