How Washington Really Works

A Belated Book Review

The first time I set foot in our nation’s capital was the day I joined the Foreign Service, on January 2, 1994, and I was 31. As a California native and a west-coaster at heart, I had never felt the need or push to go to Washington DC before. If not exactly irrelevant to my day to day concerns and previous ambitions, DC to me was like any other American place of moderate significance in the hazy distance. Like Miami. Or Houston. Or Chicago. Or anywhere else in our continent country and decentralized federal system where power was scattered and I had never been. It was certainly no more important than Seattle (where I had studied two years at the University of Washington’s Jackson School for a Masters Degree in East Asian Studies) or San Francisco, the city I was born and where I was trying to make my way in the world immediately prior. As for Southern California, where I spent my late childhood and early youth, a local poet had titled a recent collection, “The World is a Suburb of Los Angeles,” which pretty much summed it up.

Unlike in France, where Paris—the city of lights and the center of Western Civilization—reigns supreme; or in Japan, where the Japanese words for “traveling to” and “traveling away from” Tokyo literally mean “to ascend” and “to descend” respectively; or in Argentina, where (as the popular saying goes) “God is present everywhere but only provides services in Buenos Aires”; in the United States, who but those who absolutely needed to, cared about Washington DC?

So by the time I touched down in DC on that icy mid-winter afternoon, I had some catching up to do. Besides getting to know the city itself, which was counterintuitively low-key (where was all the Manhattan hustle and bustle?), and my favorable impression of the lush, unexpectedly verdant surroundings (in marked contrast to bone dry California), I needed a crash course in DC’s political identity. I wanted an inside scoop on the beating heart of national politics, the seat of our sprawling federal government, and the center of our (supposed) global empire. Also, I was curious to know whether the post Watergate rumors were true. Was Washington really a swirling cesspool of corruption, too? Where better to get this scoop than How Washington Really Works¹, the compact one-stop-shop guide for young Mr. Smiths (or government employees and anyone else) by Charles “Charlie” Peters?

The founding editor of the famed Washington Monthly², Peters was a savvy DC insider and a merciless Washington critic, not to mention a jaded idealist and a reluctant, if impassioned cynic. First published in 1980, the book takes the town to task, and might as well have been called (as even Peters admits) Why Washington Doesn’t Work at All. I bought the fourth (and still, I believe, most recent) edition, published in March 1993, which even at the time had a slight whiff of the past. Peters had first arrived in DC in 1961 to work for the Peace Corps under President Kennedy. His references dated back from that period through successive administrations, up to and including the first President Bush. But we were twelve months into the first term of William Jefferson Clinton by then. Peters begins the introduction to that edition (dated January 1, 1993) by expressing concern about the “confidence, bordering on arrogance” of certain members of the newly elected president’s transition team. He had seen the same attitude before, experienced it himself some years back, and felt a sense of foreboding about what it meant for the future success of the then-young president and his starry-eyed team.

*****

Besides the mood of relentless rebuke, I didn’t recall much from my first reading of the book many years ago. Save a few flagrant details. One was the so-called “Firemen First Principle,” whereby government bureaucrats facing budget cuts propose doing away with their organization’s most vital functions first, an often successful tactic to scare would-be budget cutters in Congress and cause them to think again. Another was the obsession of government bureaucrats with office sizes and locations, as markers of their status in the pecking order. This obsession sometimes reached such a point of absurdity that it trumped any concern with the bureaucrat’s actual mission, which was at best an afterthought and often totally forgotten. Peters wasn’t too kind to the profession I was just then entering, either. He described foreign service officers as mere passive witnesses to events, waiting stolidly to advance up the straitjacketed State Department hierarchy while performing the same kinds of irrelevant tasks overseas as their petty bureaucratic counterparts did in DC. Harsh. I sure hoped that wasn’t true, or at least not too true.

Whatever else it was, it was a bracing read. Still, the small white volume with the faded orange image of the Capitol dome on its cover made the cut across 30 years, packed safely into one of the dozens of boxes that would follow me through each of my subsequent nine (in the bureaucratic-military parlance) permanent changes of station. I even picked it up off the shelf and poked through its pages every few years, to test his critique against my actual experience in the foreign service (it struck me as caricatured and unfair in many cases) but also to chuckle with uneasy recognition all too often.

*****

Here we are now 31 years later, and here I am one year and counting after leaving government service. (Time flies, only memories remain.) More to the point, here in the United States we are weeks away from a political transition that promises, more than any in recent memory, to wreak radical change (if not actual havoc) on Washington DC and beyond. It was thus that I found myself quietly wondering: Would Peters’ little volume contain insights and lessons that remained relevant and useful today? I decided to find out. With those and related questions in mind, I reread How Washington Really Works cover to cover, taking notes this time. What follows are a few tentative conclusions.

But first a note of caution. I approached the text a bit like the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might read the US Constitution—for the meaning contained in the words on the page, not as a reflection of what I knew about Peters’ evolving views and actual intentions gleaned from related, contextual reading. For example, I knew Peters was no fan of the first Trump administration, and that’s putting it mildly. His long running “Tilting at Windmills” column in the Washington Monthly and his subsequent books, including the last one he wrote We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America (published in 2017), make clear where he’s coming from. Until his death in November 2023, Peters believed deeply in the cause and calling of public service and in the potential of government to advance the common good. In that sense, he would doubtless be feeling a dread similar to that of many other long-time observers of the US political scene in the face of what may be coming.

*****

Even so, I was struck off the bat by one counterintuitive impression: The curdling of idealism about the positive potential of government can look a whole lot like root and branch skepticism of the same, and even downright cynicism (if you didn’t know any better). I hadn’t quite realized before that Peters’ withering criticism reflected the experience of a true believer betrayed, if not exactly mugged, by reality. His was the deep disappointment of a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal Democrat from West Virginia (when that state practically belonged to the party). His was the despair of a person who sees a friend fail for avoidable, visible, sometimes sadly ethical reasons. The federal government had fallen far short of expectations, turned down the wrong path (near the end of the Roosevelt administration), and almost entirely lost its way since. Those who knew him personally or professionally will surely protest (and with good reason), but I thought much of what I read in the pages of Peters’ little white book might have found a comfortable home in Project 2025³. (But more on this deceiving surface unity of opposing views—the snake cruelly biting its own tail—at the conclusion.)

How Washington Really Works takes aim at eight different facets of Washington power, by turns, in short punchy chapters: The Press, Lobbies, The Bureaucracy, The Foreign Services, The Military, Courts and Regulators, Congress, and The White House. Much of the analysis withstands the test of time, with many of the problems he identified 45 years ago, mere seedlings then, now in full, overwhelming flower.

But his opening chapter on The Press plainly does not. Few could have foreseen the dramatic, even revolutionary evolution of what is now (probably inaccurately) called our “information ecosystem.” The problem now vastly transcends the overly cozy relationships between political reporters and their government sources, which Peters singled out for special criticism. Instead, we now have a near complete reversal of the quip (often attributed to H. L. Mencken) about the role of the press being to “afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted.” Now we have Joe Rogan bantering amiably during a three hour-long podcast with our once and future president (widely known for his dodgy relationship to truth and his demonstrated interest in deploying public power for personal gain, among other colorful things), never once interrupting the simpatico flow of the convo to ask a pesky or probing question. Today, most barriers between journalism and entertainment have been definitively dissolved. Meanwhile, information itself is the object of intensive philosophical debate and political disagreement. Is there any difference between sheer invention and scientifically verifiable (or at least falsifiable) reality? You tell me. The late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan may have believed that people were not entitled to their own facts, but that opinion appears to have been overtaken by events some time ago. If we had a few problems with the so-called Press back then, as Peters faithfully points out we did, those problems pale in comparison with the infinitesimally atomized, colliding, irreconcilable versions of reality we face today.

In the interests of brevity and relevance, I will touch mainly on the chapters on Lobbies, The Bureaucracy, and Courts and Regulators, and close with a comment on his proposed “A Way Out,” which seems both timely and anachronistic in retrospect.

Lobbies

During my two years as a civilian faculty member at the National War College, I remember our foreign students expressing particular surprise about the presence and role of lobbies in the US government system. Wasn’t this an example of structural corruption? Didn’t this reflect the intrusion of private interests into the public sphere? Didn’t this skew public action in a “particular” direction? Well, good questions. In general terms, Peters shares their skepticism. The blurring of private and public interest lies at the heart of Washington corruption, and Peters’ criticism of this dynamic permeates the pages of the entire book. For their part, congressional representatives are consumed with raising funds for constant re-election campaigns, which turns them into mere tools of lobby groups. “This is the basic reason why lobbies run the American government today.” That’s all I’ll say about what Peters says about Congress.

But what most caught my eye this time around was the following passage: “For more than a hundred years the federal government was the biggest employer in the District of Columbia. But in 1979, it was surpassed by the ‘service’ sector, which includes the law and public relations firms and the trade associations where paid lobbyists work. The rise of these organizations reflects the trend toward special interests politics…” Wow, I thought to myself, if that was the case already back then, what must the statistics show now? I know that that trend has accelerated, probably geometrically, in the ensuing half century. These “service” organizations and their near infinite progeny (including a briar patch of government contractors) have taken over the entire DC, Maryland and Virginia (DMV) metropolitan area.

One tangible consequence of this fact is that federal government employees now find the DMV area increasingly unaffordable. Even the salaries of senior government officials can’t compete with those in the proliferating government “service” sector. If you want to “make it big” in Washington now, or make ends meet at all, I almost want to say, don’t choose to work for the government. Work for an entity or organization or company that sells stuff or provides services to the government. For this reason, when I first heard the terms “swamp” and “deep state” on my return to DC in 2016 after a decade and a half overseas, I was not sure I knew what they referred to. Had hapless government bureaucrats been unfairly targeted? If you wanted to drain the swamp, who would stay and who would go away? What does this mean for the future of our government?

The Bureaucracy

Suffice it to say, Peters is no fan. Embodied in the Firemen First Principle, bureaucracy exists primarily to perpetuate itself and only secondarily to perform any outside function. Over time, bureaucrats come to serve mostly the interests of their own survival. This explains the obsession with process unconnected to results, a “make-believe” reality marked by an endless series of pointless meetings. In this “make believe = survival” context, Peters argues that more does not mean more, it often means less. Small streamlined teams often outperform their larger, cumbersome counterparts in performing the same function. (Here he offers an overseas embassy example that caused a shudder of recognition). For this reason, Peters says, cutting the number of federal employees in absolute terms would improve government performance. (Peters notes that permanent federal government employees numbered 3 million at the time of his writing; according to most estimates I’ve read, the number now hovers around 2.3 million, even as the population of the country has increased by almost 50%. Of course, during the same period the number and percentage of government contractors have exploded.)

To my surprise, Peters also makes a strong pitch for replacing permanent career officials with short-term political appointees who can be fired at will—until such a time as the two groups reach a rough parity of numbers. In this way (he says), at least half of all federal employees will feel a personal stake in the success of any given administration, while the other half will continue to provide the ballast of professional expertise and institutional memory. (Even Project 2025 doesn’t go that far. But we’ll see.) Complicating the equation, Peters points out that the problematic decline in the quality of civil service professionals in the late 1980s reflected the “hostility to government of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations and the neglect of recruiting for the Civil Service that was the natural result of their attitude.” Analysts called it a “death spiral” then. What’s the right term for it today? Suicide watch? One of the single greatest challenges facing the future of good government is the public sector’s ability to attract and retain talent, particularly young talent. This problem is on the verge of becoming a full on emergency requiring all hands on deck, and yet we may well be speeding in the very opposite direction.

To attract and retain the right profile of talented and ambitious professional, many veteran public officials agree that the structure of incentives for career federal employees should be reformed to enhance and sharpen long-term performance. (The foreign service “up or out” system of advancement is one possible model). At the same time, based on my own 30 years of federal government service, I am unconvinced that hundreds of thousands of new political appointees (beyond the 2-3 thousand we have in senior slots now) would be any more willing or able to pursue the public interest more effectively or efficiently. (For the record, that’s a euphemism.)

Courts and Regulators

In light of current events, Peters’ chapter on Courts and Regulators was of particular interest. But he defines the problem somewhat differently than it is being defined today, and that has a big impact on the proposed solution. The problem is not excessive regulation, but rather deregulation. Not too many rules per se, but too few, or at least too few of the right kind. When the government fails to regulate, or fails to enforce existing regulations, or regulates on behalf of private interests instead of the public good, the consequences can literally explode or spill out into the open. For example, you get the massive 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska or the Savings and Loans crisis of the late 1980s, which threatened the banking system. (Little did we know what was coming in 2008, or did we?)

The main culprit of regulatory corruption, Peters notes, is the familiar revolving door. That is, government regulators become corporate lobbyists charged with lobbying the very agencies and entities where they previously worked. “One consequence of the revolving door is that the large private law firm develops an expertise in manipulating the regulatory agencies, with the result that it usually succeeds in either defeating regulatory action against its clients or at least mitigating any unhappy consequences of those actions.” The revolving door, a kind of permanent corrupt bargain at the heart of the political system, ensures that public entities do mostly private bidding, and the public good gets the shaft.

It is interesting to contemplate the potential impact of the incoming administration’s planned Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) in the context of Peters’ assessment. Whatever its eventual official status and binding (or not) authorities, and even assuming the best of intentions and the absence of any conscious ulterior motives (a colossal assumption), the prospective effort gives real pause. If the core challenge of good government has always been to disentangle the pursuit of the diffuse public interest from that of narrower, particular, private pursuits, then what would this mean? Will it be a sincere fight to clean up an acknowledged tangled mess (as wishful thinking would suggest)? Or the definitive capitulation of faltering public power to the overwhelming force of purely private interests? I know where I stand on that question.

The Way Out

Peters’ proposed “Way Out” feels almost quaint, if not misguided, today. In part this is due to a deeply flawed assumption. He writes: “(T)rue democracy depends on fair elections, which means we must eliminate the power of money over politics.” Here! Here! But his subsequent recommendations are premised on the idea that this lofty goal will have been achieved. Because here again he doubles down on replacing “unaccountable permanent bureaucrats” with a plethora of short-term political appointees at every level. Many benefits (he says) would accrue from bringing “grassroots involvement in the federal bureaucracy,” not the least of which is cross-fertilization. Ordinary Americans would bring their intimate knowledge of the needs of their communities to their work inside government, ensuring that government responds to these needs, and then bring the knowledge they gained about how government works (and doesn’t) back to their lives in the outside world. This would turn the vicious cycle of the status quo into a virtuous one. It struck me that, the flame of his former idealism reignited and suddenly resurgent, Peters hoped to democratize the federal government wholesale, seize Washington from the hands of moneyed interests, take power away from all-powerful lobbies, and return it to the people.

It is important to remember that Peters wrote these words decades before the landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling on “Citizens United”, which unleashed a veritable biblical flood of private money—dark, light, and in-between—into US politics, not to mention US presidential campaigns. I still remember thinking that the title of the 2002 book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” by investigative journalist Greg Palast was at least partly metaphorical. But if it was not quite true then, is it true today? Some political analysts believe that the world’s richest man, with his $110 million plus donation to the once and future president’s re-election campaign, his marshalling of the (still) massively influential X platform to similar ends, and his other visible public antics and unknown private schemes, essentially sealed the deal. In no mere metaphorical sense, it was a purchased election. Now that same man, and several of his (whether consciously or not) deeply self-interested billionaire sidekicks, plan to climb down into the gears of a government—itself presided over by a lesser and not quite bona fide billionaire, but still—for a thorough review and “cleansing”. Once there, they will decide with grim dispatch which rules to keep and which rules to throw away. The stated purpose of this project is to fix our failing system. My simple questions are these: What do they mean by “fix?” What do they mean by “failing”?

I know that Peters himself was outraged by the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, alarmed by growing social and economic inequalities in America, and deeply disappointed by the migration of the Democratic Party away from its working class roots. Who would now represent the public interest in US politics? Who would represent the actual people? Who was now “willing to put the welfare of the national community above (their) own”? This widening chasm at the heart of our system explains the seeming coincidence between cynical motives and dashed idealism, between the naked embodiment of a colossal conflict of interest raised to an almost unimaginably high power and Peters’ quixotic tilting at windmills. The inversion of private and public is now all but complete. The state is approaching absolute capture.

One question I used to ask myself while serving as a diplomat focused on political matters overseas was: “does the political system in country X work?” That turned out to be the wrong question. For one, it didn’t explain the stubborn persistence of government dysfunction, of systems that appeared not to work so well (if at all) for the vast majority of people. Why? (For the record, government dysfunction struck me as a much deeper and broader problem in most of the places I served than it is in the United States, notwithstanding our real problems.) In terms of explanatory power, the better question was: does this system work for those for whom it was designed to work?

I think that question is a good starting point for further political inquiry in the United States today and, more importantly, from January 20 of next year.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Really-Works-Charles-Peters/dp/0201624702

2. Writers who got their start at the Washington Monthly form a who’s who of American political journalists of several generations, including my own.

3. Project 2025 is the blueprint for radical reform of the federal government that former and future Trump administration officials compiled, and from which Trump distanced himself during the campaign but appears to have re-embraced after his re-election. We’ll have another opportunity to ascertain just who the real Mr. Trump is come January 20, presumably.