Deep State Insider Confessions

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Deep State Insider Confessions

Ken Moskowitz, writing for Persuasion on Substack, pulls back the curtains on what goes on in the administrative state, foreign affairs division. It is a sobering review, in the most literal sense. Read it, breathe it, let it sink in: It will sober you up from the tipsiness of rage stoked by…well…lots of people trying to become and/or remain viral.

The fact of the matter is that the way our government functions is mainly excruciatingly boring from the perspective of your average citizen and humble taxpayer. The suspicion is that public sector workers are often either lazy or malign in carrying out their jobs. But their jobs are often completely rule-bound, with so many procedural rules and restrictions put in place with the specific objective of trying to be fair to everyone, to protect complex processes from capture by powerful interests, and to make the whole complicated apparatus transparent in a way that permits review after the fact to determine if things went wrong as well as where, when, how, and why.

As it happens, I’m one of those weirdos who is moved by the classical liberal spirit to believe smaller government is preferable at every turn. In fact, none of what Moskowitz describes makes me a fan of the administrative state. But when it comes to foreign policy, I also believe our government could be doing more for public diplomacy, more to promote a positive American reputation abroad. A dollar spent on public diplomacy, which in the private sector would just be called “marketing”, is worth countless dollars more in fancy war-fighting machinery. This public diplomacy was part of what Moskowitz’s jobs entailed—that and making sure American government grants didn’t get wrapped up in other countries’ internal corruption.

A lot of the bureaucratic work of the U.S. federal government domestically looks like this. It’s a lot of time- and personnel-intensive procedural work with the intentional aim of making sure—double- and triple-checking—that the system doesn’t rob citizens of their rights, including rights to protest, object, and request appeal. The stuff that has made the news in the past has had to do with failures of such safeguards. The fix to these failings often enough entails putting more procedural steps in place and adding more layers of administrators to perform oversight and review.

It’s not all as exciting as the spicier branches of the internet, social and sensational media make things sound: the reports that drive you to drink. But drunken rages, satisfying as they may seem at times, don’t do much in terms of streamlining processes and making them less costly in terms of time and money.