But not everyone is happy with the bureaucratic revolution in government. The populist-nationalist insurgency of the past decade has been motivated in part by the conviction that certain members of the body politic lose out when bureaucratic norms and expectations take hold. Angry on behalf of these voters (or perhaps just irritated at their own inability to game the system for their personal advantage), populist politicians have acted to sabotage (or just work around) bureaucratic norms and institutions in favor of reviving something much closer to clientelism.
This is what Donald Trump was doing when he and senior members of his administration attacked career civil servants in the State Department, Justice Department, and other arms of the federal bureaucracy and sought to replace them with political appointees. Trump was doing the same thing when during and following natural disasters he would refuse to help, or drag his feet in providing aid to, states that didn’t vote for him in 2016. Or when he reportedly rerouted a Navy hospital ship in the early days of the pandemic because one governor complimented him publicly and another governor did not. In all these cases Trump was acting like a patron handing out or withholding favors instead of like the head of a bureaucratic branch of government intended to serve all Americans equally, regardless of their partisan commitments.
This is bad — a deliberate attempt to make government more corrupt, less even-handed, more subject to the whims and petty grievances of elected officials, and more inclined to favor the party, faction, or class of the people in power over the citizenry at large.
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