Why the Federal Bureaucracy Keeps Multiplying
Managing the Managers, Coordinating the Coordinators
The prior essay documented the steady growth of managers and administrators in the federal government with a series of charts. The most telling is probably this:
Management and staff functions — HR, Finance, Legal, and Program Management — have accounted for all employment gains in the U.S. federal workforce over the last quarter century.
Let's consider five explanations for this bureaucratic expansion.
1. Rising complexity of work
Does a knowledge economy require more managers and administrators? As routine clerical and technical tasks are automated, a larger share of the remaining workforce is engaged in specialized, judgment-based work that demands greater coordination and "coaching" from supervisors, program managers, and so on. Or so the argument goes.
Some economists have made this claim, but I’m skeptical for a couple of reasons. First, it doesn't explain why administrative jobs have grown far more than other “cognitive” occupations like engineering and science. Even if you accept that managers and administrators can play a useful coordination function, the growth gap is too large: there simply aren’t that many non-administrative knowledge workers to coordinate (on the other hand, there are lots of coordinators to coordinate—we’ll get to that later).
Second, and more importantly, it's questionable that an information-age economy requires more support staff, managers, and layers. Gurus like Peter Drucker have made the opposite case: knowledge workers can direct and discipline their own performance through feedback from colleagues or customers and use IT to directly access information, eliminating the need for managers to act as “information relays.” My research with Gary Hamel has documented how organizations like Haier (appliances), Nucor (steel making), Vinci (infrastructure), WL Gore (materials), and Buurtzorg (health care) thrive at large scale with minimal managerial and administrative overhead.
Fact is, there’s little evidence that more administrators and managers translate into improved organizational effectiveness—and the opposite is often true. I’ll have much more to say about this in future posts, but consider a 2015 paper by researchers at Duke, Princeton, and Vanderbilt. It found that increased numbers of administrators were actually associated with lower performance, measured by agency scores on the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) introduced during the George W. Bush administration.1
2. Title and grade inflation
Some bureaucratic growth comes from reclassifying existing roles. For instance, workers in white collar support roles like “accounting technician” are occasionally reclassified into administrative ones like “financial administration and program.” But the effect is modest.2 The Pentagon’s conversion of military into civilian jobs between 2004 and 2010 is another factor—this influx explains some, but certainly not the majority, of the dynamic at the Department of Defense.3
There’s little doubt that the federal government's method for promoting employees has led to more supervisory positions. In the General Schedule—a system of 15 grades that determines pay and advancement for civil servants—a supervisor’s grade is determined by the grades of their subordinates (i.e., those supervising Grade 11s need to be Grade 12 and above). In contrast, non-supervisory employees' grades depend strictly on their technical expertise. The system therefore creates a strong incentive to promote individual contributors into supervisory roles as a way to increase pay and influence (it’s no accident that managers are typically one grade higher than those they supervise). These promotions aren’t perfunctory title changes—supervisors must spend at least a quarter of their time managing others.
While some of the grade creep stems from well-intentioned efforts to reward and retain capable employees when other options are limited, it diverts talent from practical work and expands management overhead.
3. More contract work
New York University’s Paul Light and others have documented the federal government's greater reliance on private sector contractors, state and local governments, and other third parties to carry out its functions. This trend, which accelerated after the end of the Cold War, can create additional administrative work for the permanent workforce—setting requirements, drafting contracts, ensuring compliance, and reviewing performance.
The federal government has embraced contracting and local government grant-making for several reasons: a sluggish hiring process, skills gaps in critical occupations, political pressure to limit the size of the federal workforce, and a belief that offloading work to third parties improves efficiency and flexibility. Unfortunately, this "asset light" strategy can backfire by eroding the base of technical and practical expertise.
(founder of Code for America and U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer during the Obama Administration) documents numerous public sector examples in her excellent book, Recoding America. This pervasive trend also affects the corporate sector (just look at Boeing).The contracting explanation has some merit, but it doesn't account for the growth in administration and management over the last 10-15 years relative to contract spending. The number of legal and contracting personnel is up by a third since 2008, yet contract dollars are lower in real terms (2020 was an outlier, in part because of Covid-related spending).
Paul Light’s latest estimates of the contracted and grant workforce tell a similar story. His ratio of contractor and grantee headcount to federal employees in 2017 was comparable to 1999, yet the number of managers and administrators increased by 50% over the same period.
4. Increased legalism and regulation
There's widespread concern that America's legal framework for government action relies excessively on prescriptive rulebooks and formal procedures, subjecting agencies to layers of challenges and review. It's no wonder we often get inflexible policy making and slow and kludgy implementation (the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is a good example).
has long made this argument (for instance, here and here), along with other voices across the political spectrum like University of Michigan's Nicholas Bagley and Niskanen's .A legalistic approach to policymaking and execution can lead to expanding administrative staff. Agencies need more lawyers not only to ensure compliance but to defend against an expanding range of procedural challenges. They might also need more contracts officers to ensure ever more complex agreements are properly formulated (there are over 2,000 pages in the Federal Acquisitions Regulations manual).
On the other hand, the relationship between procedural requirements and administrative growth over the last few decades isn't straightforward. Many of the foundational legal changes happened in the 1960s and 1970s (another bastion of legal proceduralism, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs or OIRA, was established in 1980). The raft of regulations has also slowed down in recent years. For instance, the number of final rules published in the Federal Register (the government's official publication for rules, executive orders, and notices) in 2023 was 40% lower than in 1998. Some of this is probably due to the issuing of longer rules less frequently, but the total page count in the federal register hasn’t meaningfully changed since the late 1990s (the Biden administration issued a lot more new rules in 2024, but that’s beyond the timeline of my workforce data).
Another counterpoint: the military’s largely exempt from administrative law requirements, but that hasn’t prevented it from becoming “overly centralized, overly bureaucratic, and overly risk-averse,” as Gen. Mark Milley, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs, put it.
This isn't to say that overbearing legalism isn't a problem, or to discount the pernicious effect of a steady stream of rules sedimenting over time and interacting with each other to create ever more complex compliance requirements. But the problem might be more organizational than legal.4 And this brings us to the fifth and final explanation.
5. Deeply-rooted bureaucratic practices and mindsets
Bureaucracy multiplies across government agencies because it's encoded in the management DNA of these institutions. Let’s unpack the drivers and dynamics, and show how they connect to earlier explanations.
The underlying drivers: architecture and ideology
When people think about bureaucracy, they focus on visible symptoms like the paperwork, the approvals, the rules. But bureaucracy is much more than that — it’s a comprehensive model for organizing and managing human effort, with specific features:
There is a multi-layer hierarchy
Power is vested in positions and trickles down
Big leaders appoint little leaders
Strategies and budgets are set at the top
Central staff groups make policy and ensure compliance
Job roles are tightly defined
Control is achieved through oversight, rules, and sanctions
Managers assign tasks and assess performance
Everyone competes for promotion
Compensation correlates with rank
Unless organizations are re-wired to operate with a different architecture, whatever reforms are introduced are likely to be marginal or temporary. Delayering is a good example: companies periodically flatten their hierarchies and shrink their staff groups in times of crisis, suddenly realizing that 20-30% of bureaucrats were surplus to requirements. But when economic conditions improve, the layers inevitably return, along with a proliferation of new titles and positions.
The challenge runs even deeper than architecture—it’s rooted in ideology. Managers pride themselves on pragmatism, yet their worldview shapes every decision they make. And the ideology of bureaucrats is controlism. Look up "manage" in any thesaurus - the first synonym is "control." Managers and their allies in staff functions manufacture control—that's their #1 job. Control matters, of course. But when managers elevate control above all else, it becomes an end in itself. It also leads to other limiting beliefs about people and work:
This ideology is deeply embedded. For instance, consider this leadership competency framework from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The specific competencies—strategic thinking, creativity, team building, accountability—make sense… until you overlay the hierarchy:
Apparently, being externally aware—or “the ability to identify and integrate key external factors into daily work activities” is something that is required from just the 500 people at the top of the agency. Nearly 90% aren’t really expected to demonstrate accountability, which means “setting challenging goals, tracking progress towards them, solving performance problems, and demonstrating urgency and drive towards achieving them.” Good news for the 78,000 non-managerial employees at HHS: you can officially stop setting challenging goals or showing any drive. It's in the framework!
This mindset infects every aspect of organizational life. Here’s another for you to consider: when your colleagues mention the “leadership team," do they mean (A) everyone who can mobilize others to achieve shared goals, or (B) just the dozen executives atop the pyramid? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess “B.”
Dynamics of bureaucratic growth
Mix rigid hierarchies and standardized practices with a control-obsessed mindset, and bureaucratic growth becomes inevitable. Here's the typical pattern:
When the organization expands, layers get added and the ratio of managers to front-line staff goes up. Over time, the proportion of employees who have a direct customer-facing role goes down. As Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, you end up with “a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
In most organizations, your power and compensation are the product of headcount and budget. The tendency is therefore to find all sorts of reasons to expand both. No one ever downsizes their empire voluntarily, either.
Internal boundaries multiply and harden over time, spawning new approval processes and coordination roles. The Defense Business Board captured this perfectly in their report on program managers:
Many DoD program managers, senior officials, and others who were interviewed believe that PMs spend the majority of their time going from meeting to meeting and answering the same questions amongst the various offices. PMs spend too much time managing the politics and the “process” within DoD rather than managing their specific program.
Powerful staff groups blanket the organization with policies and rules, which typically don’t have a sunset clause. As a result, the clog of red tape grows ever bigger. Since internal service providers face no threat of dismissal from their "customers," they have little incentive to improve. (Yes, Congress and the White House mandate new positions and oversight. But in my experience, the majority of process and rules are generated internally out of desire to control, risk aversion, and general lack of imagination of how to generate discipline is better ways, such as clear accountability for results and transparency).
Every new challenge begets a new CxO or head office unit — witness the twenty-three Assistant Secretaries and Deputy Undersecretaries the DoD added in recent decades. These soon become permanent fixtures. Similarly, authority moves to the center during a crisis—and stays there.
An administrative aristocracy eventually emerges. Power almost invariably shifts to the “suits.” What often distinguishes this group senior managers isn’t creativity, foresight or technical expertise, but mastery of administrative arcana—how to develop a plan, set performance goals, build a budget, interpret financial results, coordinate a project, conduct a performance review.
As managers crowd out the makers, the end result isn’t just bloated overhead. These dynamics drain organizational vitality — daring, resilience, creativity, and engagement. As Mike Mazarr notes, bureaucratic institutions ossify.
How these explanations intersect
Deeply entrenched bureaucratic practices and mindsets shape and amplify all the other explanations for managerial and administrative growth we touched on previously:
Complexity: bureaucracy is often the conditioned reflex for handling new challenges and mandates. It's what most other large institutions do, so it's viewed as inevitable. These responses also conform with expectations of Congress, government executives, and other stakeholders, who mistake the trappings of bureaucracy – a chief compliance officer, compulsory training, comprehensive reporting – for true accountability and control. Consulting firms and professional schools of business and public administration typically promote similar "best practice" prescriptions.
Grade inflation: when you create a system where the only way to advance is through a managerial hierarchy, you're going to get an oversupply of managers.
Contracting: the hollowing out of expertise in government is another product of administrative thinking. For instance, when faced with a challenge that requires deep engineering or software development capabilities, decision-makers who lack technical expertise might well prefer outsourcing the work to outside of contractors. It's just easier to model the project in a spreadsheet and send it out for bids than to wrangle a team of practically-minded and technically proficient people — the kind
affectionately calls ‘geeks’.Legalism: I made the general point earlier about bureaucracy's deep ties to legal proceduralism. Here's how it plays out in practice. An increasingly influential managerial and administrative class, likely composed of people who got ahead by ensuring compliance and being compliant, will tend to favor narrow interpretations of existing rules and regulations, thereby creating more inflexibility and conservatism. Most agencies will end up over-interpreting statutes, creating procedural rules not mandated by law, and ignoring flexible procurement arrangements like Other Transaction Authority. As Pahlka illustrates in Recoding America, existing pathways to expedite procurement decisions are rarely used because of "a culture in which if even one person prefers safe over sorry, we're back to the way it's always been done." The problem in the cascade of rigidity is, well, the cascade.
Bureaucracy is a formidable foe. Like Agent Smith in Matrix Reloaded, bureaucracy is self-replicating, and like the creature in Alien, it's relentless. Its rules and routines become load-bearing walls in organizational life. It's so embedded that it shapes our thinking and blinds us from considering alternatives.
Yet bureaucracy isn't a cosmological constant—as we’ll see, it's a policy choice.
PART was developed by the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush administration, aimed at evaluating programs in a systematic, consistent, and transparent manner. It has sadly been discontinued. Alexander Bolton, John M. de Figueiredo, Charles M. Cameron, and David E. Lewis, “Grade Inflation in the U.S. Government,” unpublished working paper, January 13, 2015.
For instance, the biggest increase in reclassified administrators was 17,000 employees making the move from the technical "General Clerk and Assistant" role to the administrative"General Administration and Program" (which I count in my analysis) over the 1988-2011 period. To put that in perspective, the number of employees in General Administration and Program in 2011 was 106,000. The contribution of reclassified positions to new administrative jobs also declined in the early 2000s, so most of the additions likely precede my time series. This data is from Bolton, de Figueiredo, Cameron, and Lewis, “Grade Inflation in the U.S. Government.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) notes that this added 32,000 civilian roles (the General Accounting Office reports that in this period some contractors also became permanent staff, though it's not clear whether these are in addition to the 32,000 new roles mentioned by the CBO). We don't have a clear breakdown of what jobs former military or civilian contractors moved into, but even with the generous assumption that two-thirds of the "civilianized" positions were administrative, that accounts for only 21,000 jobs. That's about a third of the admin growth that time period, and less than a fifth of the total expansion of the administrative ranks between 2004 and 2023.
As Philip Howard observed, the legal framework itself emerged from deeper bureaucratic management principles Max Weber outlined over a century ago: stratification through unitary command, standardization via precise rules, and formalization of fixed roles.