Why you hate the Government...
And why that is by design.
The Frustration of Government Institutions
Anyone who has dealt with a government institution (which is most of us) knows how frustrating the experience can be. Need to update your driver’s license? Prepare to take time off work because the wait at the DMV will likely take hours. Does your workplace rely on government funding? Expect months-long delays in contract payments. Lucky enough to live in a state with a public insurance option? Brace yourself for an avalanche of confusing paperwork before being given access to clinics with months-long wait times.
Like many of you, I used to look at these antiquated, sluggish government systems and immediately blame the people working within them. I assumed they simply didn’t care about the people they were meant to serve. How else could you explain the rigid red tape, the endless bureaucracy, and the maddening inefficiency? To me, these institutions, and the people who worked in them, were the embodiment of everything wrong with the system: lazy, indifferent, and part of the problem. Libertarian ideals resonated with me because, clearly, anything the government touched was a waste of taxpayer money.
When I developed this disdain for government, I was an outsider looking in. My experience was rooted in academia, where the longest delays were IRB approvals and peer-review processes. Ideas flowed relatively freely, and progress felt tangible through consistent grant awards and publications. But I also realized that most of the work we published were just theories about what people and institutions should be doing. Rarely were these ideas actually implemented—and if they were, they often didn’t stick. I had no firsthand understanding of the day-to-day realities of the people behind the scenes in these institutions, nor did I grasp how this knowledge would fundamentally shift my perspective on why government institutions were so slow and outdated. My views were shaped by assumptions, not reality.
A Shift in Perspective
Then, something changed. I began working with one of these institutions instead of just critiquing it from the outside. I collaborated on an implementation science research project with the New York City Department of Health, designed to improve testing and treatment outcomes for people recently exposed to HIV. What I discovered didn’t just challenge my assumptions—it fundamentally shifted my understanding of how government works.
When I started collaborating with the NYC Department of Health, I thought implementing an intervention would be straightforward. I quickly learned how wrong I was. It took over six months just to get different units to communicate and agree on how to implement the hypothetical intervention. Once it was up and running, I conducted qualitative interviews with recipients. Across the board, clients reported how much they loved the intervention and how fortunate they felt to receive such thorough care from public health advisors and nurse practitioners who clearly cared about their health. The intervention was making a real difference: people were getting tested earlier and becoming more engaged with their healthcare overall. And it was all publicly funded.
But while patients benefited from the new service, the intervention demanded significantly more time and effort from the public health advisors carrying it out. While the NIH grant funding the intervention provided funds for the salary of a nurse practitioner and intervention materials, the public health advisors were offered no additional compensation for the extra labor. There wasn’t money in the budget for that. Despite seeing the benefits of the intervention, the lack of sustainable compensation made it impossible to maintain. When COVID hit New York City in 2020, the program became completely untenable and was discontinued.
This experience opened my eyes to the inner workings of government systems and the people who keep them running. Working with public health advisors showed me how deeply these civil servants cared about the people they served. It also revealed how entrenched silos within the institution prevented effective communication and collaboration. I learned why it was so difficult to implement anything new and innovative: you had to navigate red tape processed by understaffed departments and convince jaded, burnt-out leaders that the innovation was worth the bureaucratic headache.
The Cycle of Defunding
As the years went on, I watched these workers being asked to do more and more with less and less funding. It became clear that publicly funded services were inefficient and antiquated not because people didn’t care, but because workers were being stretched thin with inadequate resources. This defunding also eroded the community relationships the Department of Health had painstakingly built. Community partners felt abandoned and taken advantage of as their contracts were delayed or canceled entirely. To the public, the Department of Health became the enemy.
The defunding of well-liked public programs is a calculated strategy by elites who have infiltrated our government system. In theory, government is supposed to serve the people who fund it with their hard-earned tax dollars. In practice, politicians—often backed by corporate dollars—vote to defund public services under the guise of “saving taxpayers money.” These efforts, initially praised by the public, result in less efficient services.
The Privatization Trap
This is when the corporate agenda behind defunding becomes painfully clear. As public services deteriorate, politicians present a new solution: the private sector. They sell us the idea that our tax dollars will be better spent on “innovative, efficient” for-profit companies. But what happens, time and time again, is that taxpayer money is diverted from public institutions meant to serve us and handed to for-profit companies that prioritize their own interests. The result? Less accessible, lower-quality public goods.
Take Citi Bike in New York City, for example. Taxpayers subsidized Citi Bike’s implementation across the city, sold as an innovative public good for on-the-go New Yorkers. Something the public sector couldn’t possibly achieve. But once taxpayer money built out the infrastructure, the company swiftly jacked up prices. What was supposed to be an affordable public transportation option became a corporate handout. Now, renting a Citi e-bike for a single mile costs at least $10. All of this was done with the blessing of a Democratic mayor.
Defunding public services creates the narrative that services and projects provided by government entities will always be slow, costly, and antiquated. This narrative pays the way for public support of privatization of public goods. But the privatizing of public goods will always lead to a corporate hand out that results in nothing but inaccessible services and shareholder profits on the tax-payer dime.
What’s crucial to understand here is the distinction between civil servants—federal, state, and city workers—and elected politicians. While politicians are technically civil servants, their exposure to corporate corruption is different than the average civil servants working for a government institution. The people who work for these institutions are often not the ones corrupted by corporate money. In fact, Fed, State, and City workers often act as a defense for the average American, protecting them from corporate greed. Politicians, on the other hand, are often bought out by corporate interests, particularly when they are no longer in hyper-local positions. Corporations know that politicians control the purse strings, so they target them for elite capture.
So when you see politicians—or, in Elon Musk’s case, unelected government contractors—laying off the federal workforce en masse, understand that this move exclusively serves corporate interests. It removes the government workers who actually serve your interests, not those of corporations.