Cut the bureaucracy — and the chainsaw

I retain a requisite amount of contempt for government-run institutions and the bureaucrats with whom I have to deal on occasion. Every interaction with them makes me want to pull my hair out. Government websites function as if they haven’t been updated since dial-up. I would rather go to the dentist than the DMV. It’s as if each employee has been specially hand-picked to make you hate the government more. These are features of the system, not bugs.

Take the TSA, the organization which seems to derive the most joy out of making things difficult for parents flying with toddlers. In an effort to thwart these desperate adults chaperoning tiny terrorists, the agency will inexplicably change up the protocol for strollers every single time. In order to justify the hassle, they hold you up while they wipe the stroller down for evidence of a bomb — then throw away the diaper rash cream for being an ounce too big.

In June 2022, a photo posted by a TSA public affairs spokesperson went viral. It showed a picture of all the confiscated, oversized liquids from a three-day span. The image was roundly mocked as it showed water bottles, children’s juice packets, toiletries, peanut butter, snow globes and an uncomfortable amount of Vaseline.

It’s not surprising that late February polls showed a majority of Americans support Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) in its efforts to reduce waste, root out fraud and curb abuse. Musk also has the stomach to do that which needs to be done (thanks, autism) and lay off thousands of government workers.

Americans have been dealing with all kinds of upheavals and corrections in the private sector for decades: globalization, downsizing, technology, layoffs. Federal (and state and local) bureaucrats not only seem to think they’re immune from this, but that they’re entitled to a job forever. It does not matter how government programs are actually performing: the state keeps growing, and demanding more of your money, while all around you crumbles and gets worse. Everything in nature corrects itself — except for the government.

Some years ago, I was shipping a box across the country through USPS. It was filled with memorabilia, photos and yearbooks from grade school through high school. Irreplaceable stuff. At some point in transit, it busted open. When I received my package, it weighed significantly less than when I had packed it and contained someone else’s stuff. My neighbor was walking down the street in our suburb recently and saw a piece of mail floating in a puddle. He picked it up and it happened to be a tax document with his name on it. His wife asked, “What else has never arrived?”

The lack of empathy for “devoted public servants” is explained by one’s own experiences. The average encounter with a bureaucrat involves petty tyranny. At an unhinged, entertaining appearance at this year’s CPAC, Musk held up a chainsaw given to him by Argentine president Javier Milei as a symbolic gesture for cutting red tape. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” he yelled, followed by only “Chainsaw!”

And nothing, nothing, makes me want to take a chainsaw to bureaucracy quite like tax season. It’s maddening trying to navigate the ever-changing tax codes. Filers are left feeling powerless and drained. And forget trying to follow the money — what I’d give for an itemized receipt.

My friend Mary Katharine Ham told me a story on my podcast that exhibits the low bar most Americans have set for their government-run agencies. She called the IRS for help with a very specific question. She wanted to go in and talk to someone. They said, “We don’t really do that.” She pushed them for a meeting and they said it would be three months. Three months later, Mary Katharine’s orders came: drive thirty minutes, go to a satellite office in a dreary government building, sit outside with a number and wait until an agent was ready. “I sit there for like an hour or two more,” she tells me. “I get called into the little stall. A person walks into the stall, picks up the receiver of the phone on the desk and dials the tax assistance helpline for me and hands me the receiver. And I was like, ‘No, no, that is insane.’”

These anecdotes must be countless across America. I know I’m repressing several for the sake of my fragile psyche. The government is a giant machine, comprised of seemingly incompetent bureaucrats, whose only job is to take money from me — every nickel and dime. It’s a forced transaction. California, where I lived for years, remains the worst. The state operates like the mafia.

This is why so many Americans are on board with Musk’s DoGE. After all, how much worse could it get? What remains to be seen, however, is whether Musk is leading or trolling as he tackles the state. The government is so bloated, I’m OK with a mandatory cleanse. And a mercurial billionaire with at least five baby mamas wielding a chainsaw is fine by me — at least compared to the faceless, nameless “government” that intervenes in my life daily.

But when slashing the government means firing a disaster coordinator in Alaska, or VA nurses, or the one locksmith with the bathroom key in Yosemite, you start to wonder if MAGA has its priorities in order. It’s dumb for the right to act like spending cuts won’t be devastating for lots of people. They’re necessary, but should the richest man on Earth be gleefully pulling chainsaws out and celebrating what’s going to be painful for a lot of hardish-working Americans? I’m not MAGA enough to be OK with that kind of rage-infused gloating in the face of suffering. I don’t think most Americans are.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.