Transitioning the Federal Workforce into Farmhands

January 31, 2025 by J.B. Shurk

I was reading one of James Howard Kunstler’s exquisite essays when I stumbled upon a hilarious conversation in his comment section. Discussing President Trump’s turbocharged criminal alien relocation efforts, a reader named Mitch observed, “People keep asking who’s going to man the grills, pick the crops, clean the houses when all the illegals get deported. We have lots of useless government-paid parasites that could fill those jobs nicely. They’re educated, speak English, and currently produce nothing but obstacles.”

Bandit replied, “But bureaucrats don’t do work. They wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything useful, and I’m sure they don’t have the mental capacity to learn.”

Il faut savoir noted, “Working on farms is hard and demanding. We have produced SOFT generations, heads down on their cell and social media, and have hyped their worthless degrees as big deals. Getting some time on the farms and doing hard hand labor would not only get them in shape, but show them what the true value of work means.”

Finally, Beth Nicolaides dreamed, “I’d like to see a new IRS hire picking lettuce.” (Me, too, Beth!)

I think this online conversation gets to the nub of the most pressing crisis in America: there has been a decades-long disconnect between the vast government bureaucracy and the American people whom that bureaucracy purportedly “serves.” When President Wilson first empowered a permanent administrative state to handle the “business of governing,” he envisioned an educated workforce immune from the day-to-day passions of politics but uniquely qualified to direct the operations of the American state. That was at best a naïve dream and at worst a calculated strategy to deprive the American people of their democratic powers and elevate a faculty lounge of Wilson clones as a new noble class. (When it comes to academics, it’s difficult to know whether their love for impractical theorizing or narcissistic god complex is the root cause of their real-world failures.)

Without any doubt, the steady expansion of the federal government over the last hundred years has been an unmitigated disaster. From its inception, Wilson’s “modern” bureaucracy became a home for scarcely camouflaged Marxist-socialists who wished to burrow inside the federal government and “transform” America’s Constitution from within. They sabotaged Americans’ interests and undermined Americans’ individual liberties. By hook or by crook, they constructed a hiring system that prevents their subsequent removal. No matter how poorly they perform or how malicious their intent to damage the United States, bad government workers remain employed.

“Rule by mediocrity” has created a widening gulf between the American people and their government. It has enabled a few million bureaucrats to work around the will of voters. It has effectively transitioned America from a representative republic to a “blob”-ocracy that listens to and represents only the blob. Consequently, Americans see their government as something separate from themselves — an exotic beast that has grown in spite of the Constitution’s explicit limitations.

Adding insult to injury, none of Wilson’s dreamy benefits materialized from the construction of a “professional” government. Elevating “experts,” he insisted over a century ago, would allow the federal government to react quickly to domestic problems and foreign challenges. “Smart” people who were well trained for the tasks at hand would be equipped to overcome any difficulty at a moment’s notice. Do those descriptions remind anyone of the federal government?

It’s been four months since Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians, and FEMA still can’t find western North Carolina on a map. The Pentagon wasted billions of dollars over the last four years fighting “climate change” and “white supremacy” while fast-tracking delusional men with fake breasts into positions of command. California — which prides itself as a kind of premier “laboratory” for the federal government — cut its firefighting budget, stopped executing controlled burns of dangerously combustible brush, and diverted record rainfalls into the Pacific in order to save a “sacred” fish. When wildfires predictably destroyed parts of L.A., California’s inept “laboratory” of “professional bureaucrats” were not smart enough to understand that empty fire hydrants had been the city’s undoing. Instead, the “experts” blamed their own incompetence on “global warming.”

Those are just three well known examples of lethal bureaucratic failures. An honest auditor could start making a list of government-created crises, and the list would never end. Because most of the government’s auditors are equally incompetent (or corrupt), the “professionals” who monitor all the other “professionals” rarely see anything wrong. Negligent supervisors breed government malfeasance exponentially. Like a hydra-headed monster, as soon as one bureaucratically engineered problem is fixed, ten new problems take its place! (For those keeping score at home, this is why President Trump recently fired a score of inspectors general whose investigatory faculties appeared crippled by willful blindness.) Rather than proving themselves skilled managers capable of deftly executing solutions, as Wilson promised, the permanent bureaucracy operates the “business of government” at a glacial pace. During the “reign of experts,” Uncle Sam has demonstrated remarkable flexibility only in his uncanny ability to stick his head up his own derrière.

The online commenters whom I quoted at the beginning of this essay articulate our predicament adroitly. After a century of bureaucratic expansion, we have millions of unnecessary employees who greatly overvalue their own contributions to American society and remain oblivious to the reality that non-government workers are the country’s only essential workers. People who grow, build, move, and fix things are the lifeblood of our nation. Government bureaucrats are leeches who drain that blood in the form of taxes and senseless rule-making so that hacks with few skills can pretend to be “professionals.” Professionals in what? Who knows? Even most of the “experts” realize that they are expert only at doing little and getting paid.

After President Trump’s executive order forcing federal workers back into the office, Wilson’s “professional government” ran to social media to shriek about the horrors of having to put on pants and function as adults. Who would watch their children? How would they ever be able to work that second job that they do when they’re pretending to work their federal jobs? How can they be expected to rejoin their coworkers when it’s been only five years since the beginning of COVID? If you watch enough of these videos online, it is impossible not to conclude that a substantial percentage of the federal workforce do absolutely nothing to justify their burden to American taxpayers. They are the definition of dead weight.

Unsurprisingly, many of these federal parasites are advocating for sabotage of the Trump administration. The clever writers over at Twitchy have highlighted a lengthy post from an intelligence officer who describes in detail how federal workers can undermine the president while hiding behind a pretense that they are doing their jobs “by the book.” The fact that unelected bureaucrats feel so untouchable that they publicly incite subversion is sufficient evidence that the administrative state should be dismantled and disbanded. As one commenter properly concludes, “if they are not going to do their jobs in an apolitical manner ... they should be treated like political appointees and forfeit the protections of the civil service.”

The administrative state is a giant python that chokes the Constitution and swallows the American people whole. It should be destroyed. If it cannot be destroyed, it should be chopped into little pieces and dispersed across the frontier wilderness of Alaska. If Congress and the courts prevent federal workers from being terminated, then President Trump should set them to better tasks. He’s already “immediately halted” the hiring of IRS agents. Now it’s time to do as Beth Nicolaides suggests above and send remaining IRS agents into the fields to pick lettuce. Transitioning the federal workforce into farmhands would give bureaucrats a chance to earn an honest living.