The federal bureaucracy is under a microscope as Elon Musk and his DOGE gang run roughshod over key government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Aviation Administration, among several others. Federal government workers have been fired apparently indiscriminately, with many rehired shortly thereafter, sparking protests and widespread disapproval of Musk’s chaotic chainsaw approach. Musk and Trump are rapidly losing trust and goodwill, even among their allies.

The DOGE onslaught comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision last summer in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which also spotlighted the federal administrative state, overturning 40 years of the Chevron doctrine, a legal test calibrating judicial review of federal agency actions. Whatever one thinks of Musk or the decision to scrap Chevron, there seems to be something in the air. The moment calls for a more careful and fact-based assessment of the administrative state and its place in American political economy.

The political left—defined broadly as defending labor, transparency and democratic control of government, environmental and ecological protection, and social equality—has tended to see the administrative state as at least necessary to its goals, and in any case as indispensable to effective government in an age when specialists and experts are thought to be needed to administer public policy in complex domains. Thus has a folk history built up around the administrative state, obscuring its record of abuses and collusions with corporate power.

Over the past 100 years in the U.S., there is a startlingly clear correlation between the size of the administrative state and the size and power of multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S. Trust in and deference toward the administrative state on the political left is disturbingly underdetermined by the available data. That is, it is far from clear that the net effect of an extremely powerful and centralized army of apparatchiks has been to regulate corporate power and protect Americans. The creation of these massive islands of concentrated power in the federal government has not curbed the exploitative, socially destructive excesses of capitalism. Notably and counter-intuitively (at least under the naive theory of centralized government power), some of the most independent federal agencies regulate some of the most powerful and unaccountable industries: for example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Reserve System rank as among the most insulated from democracy.

Reuters recently reported that as of this writing in March 2025, there are 438 federal agencies, directly employing more than 3 million people. But this is hardly the full picture: according to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. gave about $760 billion to its manifold contractors in fiscal year 2023, up over $30 billion from the previous year. We have privatized many of the government’s most important functions through this state-corporate nexus, yet we have no information from the federal government on the number of contractors and subcontractors it employs at any given time.

From the founding period and before, the American ruling class has understood that a strong, centralized, active U.S. government is the key to creating modern commercial power. If this seems counterintuitive, it is only because our political discourse has lately become invested in the deeply naive and ahistorical idea that the state is there to limit the power of private capital. No idea in our politics is more misguided and unmoored from the historical and empirical record.

The folk belief that the American state serves as a real counterbalance to corporate interests is a shallow misconception contradicted by centuries of historical evidence. Among the core debates of the Framers was the role of the central government in the broader political and economic system. The Federalists argued in favor of a powerful and centralized national government capable of laying a deep institutional foundation of special prerogatives for commercial interests, in particular banking and financial institutions. Alexander Hamilton championed a robust central government intertwined with burgeoning corporate entities, not as a check on them, but as a way to empower them with special favors. His advocacy for the establishment of the First Bank of the United States exemplifies this merger of state power and corporate interests. Hamilton’s vision laid the foundation for a financial system where government authority and corporate power are not adversaries but partners.

Today’s federal government, true to its roots and its primary role in the system of production, furnishes its favorite corporate giants with an extraordinarily deep menu of advantages and privileges, designed to prop up and subsidize otherwise impossible size, and to make it far more difficult and expensive to operate at smaller scales. Because complying with their dictates is so absurdly expensive and labor intensive, executive branch agencies have become one of the most powerful tools corporations have for maintaining their size and power, curating the marketplace for those with the means and infrastructure to enter the game. State support of large-scale businesses is much more intensive than most Americans understand—and much more critical to corporate domination. The state and capital are mutually reinforcing and codependent, with overlapping leadership and shared priorities.

Today, although it was originally contemplated as the most powerful branch of the three, Congress is largely for show, having abandoned the legislative function to an outgrowth of the executive branch that now operates without meaningful democratic oversight. The executive branch has been operating outside of the prescribed constitutional structure for decades, performing the functions of all three branches, overseeing its own courts and judges, propounding administrative rules that are tantamount to law, and enforcing both the law and its own rulemaking.

There are several reasons that the American left should counsel extreme caution in embracing this kind of consolidated and unbound state power, not the least of which is that it exists to partner with today’s lordship: multinational corporations. Because this vast system is nowhere contemplated in the U.S. Constitution, there are no ready and available means to challenge its actions or hold it to account. Its fundamentally authoritarian and insulated character notwithstanding, the federal administrative state has somehow become progressive-coded within American political discourse.

The aggrandizement of boundless executive power has been a thoroughly bipartisan project for decades, arguably for the country’s entire history. For all of........

© CounterPunch