Democracy Needs A Good Bureaucracy

President-elect Biden must repair the harm done to the U.S. government under Trump and begin to build a modern, expert-led civil service

- Romesh Ratnesar

Typically, the start of a presidential administration is filled with expectation. Victorious campaign staffers arrive in Washington to claim jobs at federal agencies. Lobbyists commandeer hotel ballrooms for breakfast buffets with incoming power brokers. Magazines assign fashion photographers to do shoots of the West Wing’s newest inhabitants.

The mood won’t be quite so heady this time. When Joseph R. Biden takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2021, he will inherit the gravest national crisis faced by any new president in the past 75 years. Although a vaccine for the coronavirus may be ready for initial use, infections are likely to remain rampant as Americans endure a winter crowded indoors. Tens of millions will still be out of work, and many children may not have returned to the classroom. Members of the president’s own staff may be forced to work remotely for months, even as they begin taking action on policy priorities ranging from health care and climate change to trade and nuclear arms control.

Then there’s a less obvious but perhaps even more daunting challenge: rebuilding the government after four years of Donald Trump, whose assault on the “administrative state” has demoralized federal workers and chased away thousands of career civil servants—the very specialists best suited to help the country find a way out of its current morass. America’s calamitous pandemic response has exposed the costs of Trump’s war on expertise. “We’ve got a number of broken agencies that desperately need repair,” says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.