An Argument for Bureaucrats

I have advocated for children and youth in the schools for decades both as a mom and a professional and I have met some truly remarkable people working hard to make sure that children with disabilities like mine have access to what they need to succeed in school. I feel sad when I hear these government service workers being maligned. I have known some really outstanding people who worked in public service for their whole careers. They were bureaucrats and I want to share a few of their stories.

One is a fellow who worked within the federal government most of his career, nurturing and advocating for early childhood programing, across many administrations. His focus was ensuring that young children had what they needed to overcome adversity and be as prepared for school as possible. I met him serving on a national advisory committee for school health and safety. He had been transferred to that part of the government and took on the task of pulling together stakeholders in our little subcommittee on family partnerships. He was a consummate public servant who gave his entire working career to making life better for children and families. He was a thinker, a convener, and ultimately a doer. He was also a kind and compassionate elder who decided to retire in 2017-8, discouraged by working under an administration that seemed hell bent on unravelling his life’s work. I miss working with him.

Next person who comes to mind worked in disaster response. She would leave her family and go wherever there was risk. She worked on management of hazardous materials and public safety. She was there at 9/11, plane crashes, Katrina, and so many other disasters. She was the one Mr. Rogers’ mom spoke of when she told him to look for the helpers. She wasn’t flashy or loud, just quiet and very competent. Others answered the phones and worked individual disaster cases to try to compensate people who had been impacted, while still being mindful that these were public dollars. They worked hard.

There are so many program developers and managers who do exhaustive research and pull together the critical stakeholders around any given issue to ground practice in what works. They write proposals and create programs that try to figure out how to get best practices out to kids like mine. They have the capacity to gather the best minds to enable development that is prepared and paid for at the federal level, so that systems across the country can access it. They administer grants to try to encourage best practices. They work hard to prevent and stop the bad actors who prey on vulnerable people.

Ignorance is not benign. It comes with heavy costs. My oldest son was abused in a shady residential “treatment” center at 12 years old because we did not know any better and none of the local providers we had access to knew what to do either. His life would have been very different had we had known smarter options. Helping families be better informed and advocating for effective practices is the purpose of No Saints Here (2025; should be out in May).

My dad was a bureaucrat. He served a whole career in the army. He was a soldier, but also an administrator managing fellow pilots, a battalion, troubleshooting whatever trouble GIs would get themselves into overseas, inspecting bases - keeping things running. Then when he retired and went to work for A&M he ran the physical plant, which was also about managing people. He had been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and when he retired, he was in turn served by bureaucrats who developed programs to support people like him who were injured by chemicals while serving their country.

IRS bureaucrats translate tax law into rules so that we know how to pay our taxes and what to pay. Workers process the returns we send in and issue refund checks. They also investigate to assure, at least to the extent that is required by law, that we all pay our fair share. 

Bureaucrats serve a number of critical functions. They serve as institutional memory to prevent making the same mistakes over and over. At the federal and state levels, they translate the laws passed by congress and state legislatures into actual programs. In the case of the Department of Education, they write rules that advocates like me use to help families make sure their kids have what they need. Health and Human Services and Center for Disease Control try to facilitate systems that benefit us through drug safety, managing immunizations, and so much more. Bureaucrats by in large go into public service because they give a damn. They are mission driven rather than profit driven.

I am all for making our government institutions more efficient. But you need people who know the demands they need to meet. You would not give the task of running a hospital over to a car salesman - they are just two different sets of demands. Restructuring requires a thoughtful bunch of bureaucrats who know systems intimately. Set goals about outcomes that matter and ask these people who know their systems intimately to come together, invite stakeholders, and review best practices, to identify changes to increase efficacy. Bureaucrats are keepers of knowledge that we don’t have to relearn if we are smart.