My experiences with private-sector package delivery are, to put it mildly, not the best. As I write this, I’m watching and fretting over a package that is supposed to be delivered to my apartment by FedEx, which only occasionally manages to locate me despite the several decades of experience I’m told that they’ve amassed in this industry. The gold standard for delivery has been the U.S. Postal Service, which has never failed me, even as I watch UPS and Amazon stumble around outside, frequently almost making it to my doorstep. But now I’m reading that the incoming Trump administration is mulling privatizing the USPS. Chances are the president-elect’s famous reverse Midas touch will ruin yet another service on which I’ve long relied.
What Trump promises to do to the venerable post office would be the latest example of what has come to be known as “enshittification”—a term coined by Cory Doctorow and recently defined by the Macquarie Dictionary as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” So it’s fitting that Trump is teaming up with techbro goons, in particular Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the next big enshittification project: ruining the federal government.
The federal government typically gets a bad rap from the media, who often depict it as a faceless, bloated, and lethargic bureaucracy. But as Michael Lewis documented in his book The Fifth Risk, as well as a series of stories along similar lines he curated last year at The Washington Post, the civil service is a hive of innovation driven by brilliant, hardworking Americans. Our army of loyal public servants does a lot of important, quiet work—from key medical and scientific research to pollution mitigation to chasing down tax cheats and protecting consumers to keeping our food and medicine safe.
As Trump and his cronies see it, though, these workers are actually left-wing “deep state” soldiers whose sole purpose is to thwart his authoritarian designs. That’s why he waged total war on the administrative state during his first term and plans to pick up where he left off with a shock-and-awe purge of the federal workforce. If he succeeds by even a fraction of his goal, we’re all likely to learn just how important the government is in our lives—by experiencing what happens when it becomes the equivalent of Google’s AI search results or Amazon’s endless stream of junk. All that invisible work done every day on our behalf becomes all too evident when it’s not being done by competent professionals.
You also shouldn’t discount the maladroit impact of Trump’s own army of weirdos. The empowerment of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. creates an environment where crackpots are suddenly allowed to subject the known world to their flawed interrogations. What will it be like to live in a country where things like the polio vaccine are suddenly the subject of a reopened debate? As Dan Drezner recently explained, there is a lot of tail risk that arises when settled matters suddenly become unsettled:
Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support such an outdated worldview, the idea that a debate should be had can be enough to sow doubts about the current consensus. The entire upside to the debate strategy rests with the conspiracy theorists.
The second problem with agreeing to a debate is that it is not cost-free. Energy and time spent on defending concepts like, “vaccines are good” cannot be devoted to other questions of public policy. Instead, advocates pushing crackpot ideas get to extend the Overton Window. Even if, for example, the debate about the polio vaccine goes nowhere, it becomes more politically acceptable to say, “sure, some vaccines are important, but surely reasonable people can agree that we should continue to ask questions about health risks to our children from so many vaccines.”
It’s bad enough that we have to contemplate the whole hard-won world of medicine coming undone, especially at the hands of a president who managed to evade public opprobrium for badly mismanaging a once-in-a-century pandemic. But the federal government’s role in protecting us from financial predators is likely to take a huge hit in the coming administration as well. Beyond the typical Republican obsession for letting plutocratic tax cheats get away with murder, the incoming Trump administration is fairly well bought by the scammy cryptocurrency industry, whose cash investment in our recent election cycle should have earned more concern from the political press.
As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, the crypto oligarchs have some pretty specific demands:
What do they expect to get in return for these campaign donations? A more favorable regulatory and law enforcement environment, for one thing. Leading crypto figures know that all those pesky regulators and investigators in Washington—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and so on—could bring their party to an end. Trump has even pledged to make the U.S. a “Bitcoin superpower,” whatever that means. For now, it means installing pro-crypto figures atop the SEC and other key agencies.
The unholy grail for the crypto industry may be to get their casino more deeply entangled with the real economy and, as Ford writes, “to get the federal government—and, by extension, all Americans—to be the ultimate bag-holder by directly buying cryptocurrencies with taxpayer dollars.” We’re probably now at the threshold of the first big crash of the cryptogrift industry and the first big government bailout of these crooks. If you remember how well the last round of government bailouts helped restore everyone’s faith in the system, well, hold on to your butts.
The sad fact of modern life is that we’ve been trending toward oligarchy for a long while now. Over a decade ago, a study released by Princeton University researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page reached an unsettling conclusion: that “rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will” of the people. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” they wrote, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
Ten years on, this is no longer an esoteric matter or a funny feeling running in the background of American life. The once and future Trump era promises to put the cherry on the oligarchic sundae. Between the anarchy wrought by various Supreme Court rulings (notably Dobbs and the administrative state–decimating Loper Bright decision), the renewed potential for financial ruin in the form of government-endorsed crypto rug-pulls and the widespread rise of addictive sports gambling apps, a defanged federal government allowing financial predators and polluters a freer rein, and the coming loss of health care coverage as the GOP renews its war on the Affordable Care Act, the next few years are going to come with a substantial body count.
They will also come with a collapse in faith in government, just as we have soured on the increasingly shitty tech platforms that dominate our lives. A citizenry that was once fairly well cared for will realize that they’ve been abandoned to the wolves, alone in the world against all manner of natural disasters, high-tech criminals, and a consumer world no longer protected by any kind of watchdog. It’s hard to know what the United States will become once everyone is more like a cornered animal than an actual citizen. As the former CEO of United Healthcare might attest, it’s probably not the best idea to leave such a heavily armed populace so discontented and disconnected. In that way, we might come to learn the most important role that the administrative state plays in our daily lives: It helps keep the peace.
