Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is good to be back at the microphones. Our housemate Daniel sent us a fascinating prompt this morning that really gets into the gears of how a country actually functions. It is a topic that sits right at the intersection of political science, economics, and honestly, human psychology.
It is one of those topics that usually only gets mentioned when something goes wrong, or when someone is complaining about bureaucracy. But Daniel wanted us to look at the civil service not as a hurdle, but as the institutional memory of the state. He is asking us to look at the people who stay when the posters come down and the victory parties end.
We often talk about the big political shifts, the elections, the new ministers coming in with their grand visions and their sharp suits. But beneath that surface layer of political theater, there is this massive, permanent architecture of people who do not leave when the administration changes. They are the ones who actually know where the keys are kept and, more importantly, why the locks were installed in the first place.
We are calling this the four year itch. It is that phenomenon where every new leader treats the previous administration's policy portfolio like a building they need to demolish and rebuild from scratch. It is the urge to leave a mark, to have a legacy, but as we are going to discuss today, that itch can be incredibly expensive and destructive.
It is a real phenomenon. Every new leader wants to put their stamp on history, which often means reversing everything the last guy did just on principle. If the previous administration liked blue, the new one wants red. If they wanted a bridge, the new guys want a tunnel. But there is a massive hidden cost to that kind of volatility, and that is where the civil service comes in as the stabilizing force.
I think most people have this image of civil servants as just paper pushers, right? People who take three hour lunch breaks and make it impossible to get a permit for a deck. But when you look at the actual mechanics of governance, they are the ones who keep the lights on while the politicians are arguing on television. They are the permanent state, and depending on your perspective, that is either a comforting safety net or a frustrating bottleneck.
They are the ghostwriters of democracy, which is something we touched on way back in episode one thousand one hundred eighty six. If you haven't heard that one, we went deep into how laws are actually drafted. But today we are looking at the continuity aspect. Why do we have these people who stay in power for thirty or forty years while ministers come and go every eighteen months? Are we actually governed by the people we vote for, or by the people who never leave their desks?
That is the big question, Herman. Let's define the terms here. We have the political state, which is the visible part, the elected officials and their appointees. And then we have the permanent state, the civil service. In many ways, the political state provides the steering wheel, but the permanent state is the engine, the transmission, and the entire maintenance manual.
That is a great way to put it. And the tension arises because the steering wheel wants to pull a hard U-turn every four years, but the engine and transmission are designed for a long, steady journey. If you try to flip a massive ship like a national government on a dime, you risk snapping the hull. The civil service is there to say, sir, if you turn that wheel any further, we are going to capsize.
Let's look at the statistics, because they are staggering. If you look at the data from the last few decades in Western democracies, the average tenure for a government minister is somewhere between eighteen and twenty four months. They barely have enough time to find the cafeteria and learn the names of their senior staff before they are reshuffled, or their party loses an election, or there is a scandal.
And meanwhile, the senior civil servants, the people running the actual departments, often have tenures of five to seven years in a specific role and decades in the system. They have seen five different ministers come in with the exact same revolutionary idea, and they are the ones who have to gently explain why that idea failed in nineteen ninety eight, why it failed again in two thousand twelve, and why it will likely fail again today unless we change the underlying implementation.
So is that a good thing? I mean, if I am a voter and I vote for radical change, I want the person I elected to be able to actually change things. If the civil service is there saying, well, we tried this before and it didn't work, aren't they effectively vetoing the will of the people? Aren't they an anti-democratic bottleneck?
That is the fundamental tension, Corn. It is the friction between the democratic mandate and administrative expertise. On one hand, you need the government to be responsive to the voters. If the people want a new direction, the machinery should move in that direction. On the other hand, if you let every new administration completely gut the administrative state and fire everyone who knows how the systems work, you lose all institutional memory. You end up in a cycle of constant policy amnesia where the government is just spinning its wheels and wasting billions of dollars.
Let's dig into that mechanism of institutional memory. How does it actually work on a day to day basis? I know in the Commonwealth model, like in the United Kingdom or Australia, they have this very specific role called the permanent secretary.
Right. The permanent secretary is the highest ranking non-political official in a government department. They are the accounting officer, which means they are personally responsible to parliament for how the money is spent. When a new minister walks in on day one, the permanent secretary is standing there with what they call the briefing book. In the United Kingdom, they often have two versions ready before the election: a red book for the incumbent party and a blue book for the opposition.
That is fascinating. So they have already mapped out the implementation plan for both possible winners before the first vote is even cast?
The civil service spends months analyzing the manifestos of all major parties. They look at the promises and they figure out the legal, financial, and logistical hurdles. So when the new minister sits down, the permanent secretary hands them a document that basically says, we know you promised X, here is the fastest way to achieve it, but here are the three laws you will have to change first, and here is the five billion dollar hole it will leave in your budget. It is a reality check delivered with extreme politeness.
It sounds a bit like the show Yes Minister. The bureaucrat isn't saying no, he is just saying it will be very challenging and will take ten years.
It is exactly like that, but with higher stakes. This continuity protects against what we call the volatility trap. Think about a major infrastructure project. Let's take high speed rail or a national digital identity system. These are not four year projects. They are fifteen or twenty year projects. They require specialized engineering, complex land acquisitions, and massive international contracts.
And if a new government comes in at year four and decides they don't like the look of the trains, or they want a different encryption standard for the digital I D?
Then you are in deep trouble. If you cancel those contracts, you don't just stop spending money. You pay massive exit fees. You lose the engineers who have spent four years learning the specific geology of the route. You lose the data. This is where the civil service acts as a bulwark. They are the ones who can say to the new minister, look, you can change the branding, you can change the ticket prices, but if you change the gauge of the track now, you are throwing away three billion dollars of completed work. Their job is to provide the technical continuity that allows the state to function across decades, not just election cycles.
I want to talk about the cost of that volatility, because Daniel's prompt specifically mentioned the waste of taxpayer money. Do we have actual numbers on this?
We do, and they are eye watering. There are several studies, including some from the Institute for Government and various academic groups, suggesting that radical policy reversals between administrations can increase project costs by twenty to forty percent. In some cases, it is even higher. When a project is cancelled and then restarted four years later under a different name, you aren't just starting from zero; you are starting from negative because you have to undo the previous work and re-hire a whole new team.
Twenty to forty percent. On a fifty billion dollar infrastructure project, that is ten to twenty billion dollars just... gone. Because of a change in political fashion.
It is like trying to build a house where every few months a new architect comes in and decides the kitchen should be where the garage is. Eventually, you just have a pile of expensive rubble and no house. The civil service is the foundation that stays put while the architects change. They provide the technical continuity. They are the ones who remember that we tried that specific type of concrete in nineteen eighty five and it cracked, so we shouldn't use it again, even if the new minister's brother-in-law sells it.
That brings us to the different models of how this is handled. We have been talking about the neutral, permanent model, but the American model is quite different, isn't it?
It is a very different beast. In the United States, you have a much higher number of political appointees. We are talking about thousands of people at the top levels of government who are replaced every time a new president comes in. This is designed to make the government more responsive to the president's agenda. It is rooted in the old spoils system, the idea that to the victor belong the spoils.
But that seems like it would maximize the volatility trap. If you replace the top three layers of every department with people whose primary qualification is loyalty to the new president, don't you lose all that institutional memory we were just talking about?
You do. And that is the big debate happening right now, especially as we look at things like the Schedule F proposals that have been circulating in Washington. For those who don't know, Schedule F was an executive order toward the end of the Trump administration that sought to reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as political appointees. The goal was to make them easier to fire.
And the argument for that is accountability, right? If the people are voting for a radical change, but the bureaucrats are blocking it because they've been there for thirty years and like the old way, then the president isn't really in charge.
That is the argument. It is about breaking the power of the so-called deep state. But the counterargument, which is what we are exploring today, is that if you make the entire civil service political, you turn the government into a giant patronage machine. You lose the neutral experts who are willing to tell the president, sir, this is illegal, or this will bankrupt the treasury, or this violates a treaty we signed in nineteen seventy two. If everyone is a political appointee, they are incentivized to say yes to the boss, even when the boss is wrong.
It is the difference between a professional doctor and a personal trainer. The trainer might tell you what you want to hear to keep you motivated, but the doctor is supposed to tell you that your cholesterol is too high even if it ruins your mood.
That is a perfect analogy. And the efficiency argument is actually quite strong on the side of the permanent civil service. When you have a professional, non-partisan bureaucracy, you have a baseline of competence that survives political turmoil. Look at countries that have high levels of political instability but strong civil services. Belgium went for over five hundred days without a functioning government a few years ago. Italy has a new government almost every year. But the schools stay open, the trash gets picked up, the social security checks are mailed, and the borders are managed. That is the civil service doing the heavy lifting while the politicians are in a deadlock.
It is the unglamorous work of making sure the gears of society don't seize up. I think about the implementation of complex laws. A politician passes a bill that says we are going to revolutionize healthcare. That is the easy part. It is a speech and a signing ceremony. The hard part is the next five years of writing the regulations, building the databases, training the thousands of people who actually have to run the system, and ensuring it complies with privacy laws. That is all civil service work.
And that is where the waste happens if you don't have continuity. If you spend three years building a healthcare exchange database and then a new administration comes in and says, actually, we are going to do it this other way, you have just lit billions of dollars on fire. The civil service is the bulwark against that kind of waste because they are the ones who can say to the new minister, look, we can change the branding, we can change some of the rules, but let's keep the underlying infrastructure because it works and it is already paid for.
We talked recently about impact bonds, and Daniel's prompt mentioned them too. How do they fit into this idea of continuity?
Impact bonds are a fascinating tool for baking continuity into the system. For those who missed that episode, an impact bond is a contract where the government agrees to pay for a specific social outcome, like reducing recidivism or improving literacy rates, but only if the outcome is actually achieved. Private investors provide the upfront capital, and a service provider does the work.
And because it is a legal contract that spans five or ten years, it is much harder for a new minister to just cancel it on a whim?
It uses the legal system to protect the policy from the volatility of the political system. It creates a multi-year commitment that is tied to data, not to political cycles. It is a way of using the permanent state's legal architecture to ensure that long term social goals aren't abandoned at the next election. It is basically a way of saying, we have agreed that this problem takes ten years to fix, so we are going to sign a contract that makes it very expensive for the next guy to stop fixing it.
That seems like a very clever way to bridge the gap. But let's talk about the downside of all this stability. You called it the continuity paradox.
Right. The continuity paradox is the idea that the very thing that makes the system stable also makes it stagnant. If a system is too resistant to change, it becomes an anchor. You get the classic stereotype of the bureaucrat who says we do it this way because we have always done it this way, even when the world has changed and the old way is now obsolete or even harmful.
It is the difference between institutional memory and institutional inertia. Memory is knowing why we did it; inertia is doing it just because we did it yesterday.
Precisely. And that is the danger of a civil service that is too insulated. They can become a law unto themselves. They can develop their own internal culture that is out of step with the public they serve. This is why you need the political layer. You need the fire of the politician to melt the ice of the bureaucrat occasionally. If you have all fire, you burn the house down. If you have all ice, nothing ever moves. The goal is a controlled burn that allows for progress without destruction.
So how do we find that middle ground? How do you keep the memory without the anchor?
One way is through better transparency and something called the formal ministerial directive. In many systems, if a minister wants to do something that the senior civil servant thinks is a bad idea, or a waste of money, or legally shaky, the civil servant can ask for a written direction. This basically says, I hear your concerns, I acknowledge the risks you have pointed out, but as the elected official, I am ordering you to proceed.
That creates a paper trail.
It does. It protects the civil servant from being the scapegoat when things go wrong, and it puts the responsibility squarely on the elected official. It allows for change while ensuring that the experts have at least been heard and their warnings have been recorded. It creates a healthy friction. The expert provides the warning, the politician makes the choice, and the public can see who decided what. But it requires a level of maturity in our political discourse that feels a bit rare these days.
It really does. It requires us to value boring government. We are living in an era of charisma and big, disruptive ideas. But maybe we should be looking for leaders who are good at managing the existing machinery rather than just promising to blow it up.
Well, that is the case for the technocratic minister, which we discussed in episode five hundred ninety two. But even the best minister needs a stable team. I think about the implementation of something like climate change policy. This is a thirty or fifty year problem. You cannot solve it in a four year term. If the civil service isn't there to provide that multi-decade perspective, we are just going to keep lurching from one short term fix to another, never actually moving the needle.
It strikes me that the health of a democracy can actually be measured by the stability and quality of its civil service. If you see a massive brain drain from the departments, or if you see every position being filled by political hacks, that is a leading indicator that the state is becoming more fragile.
When the experts leave, they take the memory with them. And when that memory is gone, the government starts making the same mistakes over and over. They forget why the regulation was written. They forget why the contract was structured that way. And then they are surprised when the system fails. We should want civil servants who are highly trained, well paid, and insulated from political pressure. That is a form of government accountability that is often overlooked.
It is a branding problem, isn't it? Nobody goes to a rally to cheer for a well-managed pension fund database or a robust food safety inspection regime. But those are the things that actually determine your quality of life.
They are. And we should also consider the role of technology in this. Daniel's prompt got me thinking about the future. We are entering the era of artificial intelligence in governance. I wonder if A I will eventually take over some of this institutional memory role.
That is a fascinating angle. Imagine a government department where the institutional memory isn't just in the heads of a few senior lifers who are about to retire, but is encoded in a massive language model that has digested every memo, every policy failure, every legal brief, and every budget debate from the last fifty years.
You could ask the system, what happened the last time we tried to reform the land tax in this specific region, and it could give you a detailed breakdown of the unintended consequences, the groups that protested, and the legal challenges that were filed. It would make the institutional memory much more accessible to the politicians.
But would that make the system even more resistant to change? If an A I tells a minister that their plan has a ninety five percent chance of failure based on historical data, does that give the minister more confidence to adjust, or does it just become a new, even more powerful kind of bottleneck?
It could go either way. It could be the ultimate Yes Minister machine. But regardless of the technology, the core need remains the same. You need a way to bridge the gap between the short term incentives of an election and the long term needs of a nation. Whether that is a human permanent secretary or an A I advisor, the function is the same: to prevent the state from being a ship without a keel that flips over every time the wind changes direction.
I think about large scale social challenges like aging populations. That is a thirty year demographic shift. You can't manage that with a series of four year plans that all contradict each other. You need a civil service that is empowered to look at the data and say, this is where we need to be in twenty fifty, and here is the path to get there, regardless of who wins the next three elections.
And that is why we see some of the most successful policies being the ones that achieve a cross party consensus. When the major parties agree on a long term goal, the civil service can put its full weight behind it without worrying that the whole thing will be dismantled in three years. Think about something like the nuclear deterrent in the United Kingdom or the social security system in the United States. These things have survived for decades because there is a fundamental agreement that they are necessary, and the civil service has built incredible institutional depth around them.
But when that consensus breaks down, the civil service is caught in the crossfire. They are forced to implement policies they know might be reversed, which must be incredibly demoralizing for the people doing the work.
It is. Imagine being a high level expert in environmental law and spending two years drafting a complex regulation, only to have a new administration come in and delete it on their first day in office. You aren't just losing your work; you are watching the state lose its capacity to function. That kind of volatility drives the best people out of government and into the private sector, which then creates a vacuum that is filled by less competent or more ideological people. And then the cycle gets worse. The government becomes less effective, which makes people more angry, which leads to more radical demands for change, which leads to more volatility.
It is a downward spiral. So the takeaway for our listeners is that when you are looking at a new policy or a new government, don't just look at the headlines. Look at whether the administrative machinery is actually capable of delivering what is being promised. If a politician says they are going to fix a massive problem but they are also promising to fire half the civil service, you should be very skeptical. You can't fix the car by firing the mechanics and throwing away the manual.
That is a great analogy. The civil service is the manual and the mechanics. You might want a faster car or a different color, but you still need someone who knows how the engine works. And we should be asking for better, more professional bureaucracy, not just less of it. We should want a system that values expertise and continuity.
It reminds me of the infrastructure under the street. You don't think about the sewers until they back up into your house. The civil service is the plumbing of democracy. It is not pretty, it is not exciting, and nobody wants to spend their weekend thinking about it, but you really don't want to live in a house without it.
Precisely. And I hope this gives people a different perspective the next time they hear someone complaining about the permanent state or the bureaucracy. It is not just red tape. It is the collective memory of the government. It is the reason we don't have to reinvent the wheel every four years. It is the reason the lights stay on and the water stays clean even when the people at the top are losing their minds.
Well said, Herman. I think we have covered a lot of ground here. We have looked at the fiscal costs of policy churn, the different models of civil service around the world, and that fundamental tension between democracy and expertise. It is a complex issue, but it really comes down to whether we value stability and competence as much as we value political change.
It really does. And I want to leave the audience with one provocative question: If we could replace the entire civil service with an A I that had perfect institutional memory but no political agenda, would that be a victory for democracy or the end of it?
That is a heavy one to end on. I think we will let the listeners chew on that for a while. This has been a really enlightening discussion. I always learn something when we dive into these structural issues.
Same here, Corn. It is easy to get caught up in the daily news cycle, but it is important to step back and look at the actual foundations of the system.
Before we go, I want to thank Daniel for sending in this prompt. It was a great follow up to our recent episodes on policy and continuity.
Definitely. And for those of you listening, if you are enjoying these deep dives, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show and helps us keep this collaboration going.
Yeah, it makes a big difference. And if you want to keep up with all our new episodes, you can find us at myweirdprompts dot com. We have all the links there to subscribe via R S S, or you can find us on Spotify.
We also have a Telegram channel if you want to get notified the second a new episode drops. Just search for My Weird Prompts on Telegram. We love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out through the contact form on the website if you have your own weird prompts you want us to explore.
We have a huge archive of over thirteen hundred episodes now, so if you liked this one, there is plenty more to explore on the website. Check out episode one thousand one hundred eighty six or episode five hundred ninety two if you want more on this specific theme.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks for joining us, and we will be back soon with another deep dive into whatever is on Daniel's mind.
Take care, everyone. See you next time.
Goodbye.
