Explain The Deep State To Me Like I’m (Thirty) Five

“But that’s three thousand dollars per terminal per year!”, the exasperated government program manager exclaimed. I had, to his astonishment, just noted that I was gladly paying for an unclassified terminal, in addition to a classified terminal, on each of my twenty engineers’ desks. “How can you expect software engineers to do their jobs without easy access to Google?”, I replied. The woman who had remained mostly silent in the meeting until now, her role being the contract lead for my flabbergasted counterpart, finally chimed in — “can I come work for you?”.

The year was 2008 and I was sitting in a SCIF behind the triple fence remonstrating with someone maybe two or three decades my senior whose introduction to programming, extending the benefit of doubt that such a thing had ever occurred, presumably involved text books and punch cards. I empathized to a degree since my own introduction to programming occurred at a time when “looking up information” meant cracking open a physical book or perhaps even driving to the local Borders to acquire such a book were it not already in the local cache. But I had had a foot in each of two worlds and knew which one was better while he was clearly trapped in amber and forcing his antiquated reality on an army of programmers laboring as if the Internet had not yet been invented (if, ironically, on problems pertaining to the Internet).

It is of course as easy as it is fashionable to bash government employees these days. The world is replete with experts on how to reform government who have never done a day of public service in their lives, imagining that their private sector experiences would translate perfectly to the public sector. How could, for instance, penetrating sophisticated nation state targets for intelligence gathering purposes be any different than, say, running a Silicon Valley startup? What difference is there, really, between fielding a modern SaaS product and shipping a tactical radio system that has to last decades and inter-operate with partner countries?

In fact there is a ton of difference between these realms. And yet it is also the case that, for a variety of reasons, government is struggling mightily to function adequately and has a lot to learn from the private sector. We must find ways to fuse different kinds of wisdom while respecting the uniqueness of various contexts are we to succeed in this rapidly evolving world.

In my eleven years as a Defense Department civilian I bootstrapped and ran two software products, each of which was a large scale workflow automation system of a sort, the second of which was far more successful than the first, and both of which struggled with a common cultural issue.

“How many users do you have?”, I would often be asked, as if that were the thing that most mattered. “What mission outcome would you like?”, my response would follow. It took some time for me to adequately appreciate a certain toxic kind of pragmatism driving many decisions. The government has some of the most noble individuals working for it but also some of the most cynical.

“How am I going to get promoted if I’m managing only a squad of six stealth bombers instead of a fleet of three hundred conventional bombers?”, generals looking for their next star would ask in response to Ben Rich when he would suggest that Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks could upend the game of air superiority with novel technology.

Oh, how I felt that pain as I fielded systems that allowed a tiny number of skilled individuals to do the work of hundreds of conventional SIGINT analysts and operators, chasing metrics that looked more like mission outcomes than butts in seats. “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”, as Charlie Munger would say.

Government owns some of the hardest problems there are to solve in the world. Many of those problems, meanwhile, have extremely high consequences while also exhibiting minimal hedgability. The private startup ecosystem’s success at solving many problems results in aggregate from a hyper-darwinian approach where a large number of uncoordinated actors each attempts a moonshot and to a tiny number of winners go nearly all the spoils. You don’t, however, get to run hundreds of parallel experiments on, say, how best to kill bin Laden tomorrow when a rare and fleeting opportunity to do so presents.

That being said, one of the greatest challenges government faces centers on applying the right risk management model to each of a range of situations, ensuring that it adequately distinguishes between one-way and two-way doors. If you apply the extremely risk averse model that makes sense in one domain to all of the domains in your realm then you inevitably suffer opportunity costs whose harm lies in some inscrutable yet all too real future.

Carelessly expose intelligence gathering sources and methods on a hard target that took decades to develop, perhaps by cavalierly granting security clearances to inadequately vetted individuals, and you might gravely harm your nation’s ability to operate effectively in a planetary scale existential struggle. Cripple your engineers’ ability to develop and field novel technology, however, doing so with inappropriately onerous policies, and you might effect just as much harm. There is no one-size-fits-all risk model, matching the right model to a given situation is incredibly challenging, and the right answer is not static. Getting things right requires a healthy dose of humility that stems from a breadth of experience. And therein lies one of the greatest obstacles to having the kind of government we need owing to a variety of perverse incentives.

I lost count of the number of times that I, on account of holding a high bar on civilian hiring, both internal and external, was told that if we didn’t fill a billet expeditiously then it would be taken away and given to someone else. Oh the race to the bottom that such an incentives structure engendered. There is a reason why, say, Amazon introduced the concept of a “Bar Raiser” interviewer, or Google established a “Hiring Committee”. Without such a third party check on the process, a hiring manager may well prioritize building a local fiefdom over maintaining a global quality standard. Couple that with the “job for life” that many view as the prize for government employment and, well, you get what you might expect.

The success of many government initiatives requires the extended participation of dedicated and skilled practitioners who take the long view and prioritize the mission. I have friends who have been in government for the last twenty years whom I would not want to leave. But the fact that it’s too easy to hire while nearly impossible to fire, coupled with the highly incestuous nature of many sensitive government ecosystems, amplified by a pension system, and complicated by lifers who want to avoid vendettas, creates severe risks around stagnation and bloat.

I credit much of the success I enjoyed during my government years to a continual assumption that I wouldn’t be there for more than a couple more years even though, whoops, I stayed there for over a decade because I was having too much darn fun. I don’t recommend pissing people off for the lulz, but there is a certain value to being just willing enough to ruffle feathers that you can break through the status quo and demonstrate a better way, and for many government employees that willingness, beyond innate personality, is tempered by the concern that the adversary of today may be the boss of tomorrow, a not unreasonable theory if you’re on a thirty year journey to full retirement benefits.

And I credit much of my continued success as a generalist engineer to my nomadic professional lifestyle that has me continually seeking out novelty to expand the mental maps I use to solve problems. A reliable guide to how right a possible next engagement is for your progression is the degree to which you feel discomfort. If you feel entirely comfortable then you are probably on a path to stagnation. If you feel wildly uncomfortable then you are probably setting yourself up for pointlessly spectacular failure. If, however, you feel moderately uncomfortable then you just might have found the “optimal distance” in your new adventure.

My personal experience, plus some modest research, would seem to indicate a barbell shaped attrition pattern for federal employees, namely one wherein most of the shedding concentrates on early-career and end-of-career individuals. This is happening for a variety of fairly obviously reasons while also manifesting an assortment of obviously bad outcomes.

Competition from the private sector has been intense and this has made government employment untenable for even many of the most dedicated folks as the result of massive inflation in the housing sector. The govies who can hang on tend to be the folks who bought their houses before the massive market distortions attendant the outsourcing of huge swaths of work to private firms not subject to the same wage regulations as federal agencies, a problem later exacerbated by Big Tech moving into the neighborhood. Newer folks, alas, tend to churn out as soon as they have bootstrapped a career and found themselves subject to the financial pressures of raising a family.

Risk aversion, meanwhile, especially in the wake of scandals and leaks, yields an ever-growing mountain of policies that stifle innovators internally while also driving consolidation externally in the form of an ever-shrinking number of prime contractors whose major feature is having an in-house army of paperwork wranglers who can navigate the federal bureaucracy in a way that small companies just can’t.

Put those two trends together and you see increasingly powerful foxes invited into a henhouse guarded by a diminishing number of less worldly hounds.

The so-called “revolving door” is a dirty word in government spaces but it’s not an inherently bad thing. Yes, surely having, say, the Army general who in one year is writing the checks to defense contractors in the next year receiving a plum advisory role at such a firm is a toxic way to run a country, but that one anti-pattern isn’t the only possible pattern. While reasonable people would certainly agree that FDA employees leaving federal service for the pharmaceutical companies that they were regulating a hot minute earlier is hella cringe, it seems like it might be pretty great if, say, a techie in the DoD went out to the private sector for a few years in a non-defense space and then ended up back in federal service at a different agency, but we seem to have made that unreasonably unlikely to happen.

And what a shame in an era of violently collapsing trust in government that we should be so bad at ensuring that most of the population has had at least some civil service folded into their career. Not only does this lack of diverse participation in government result in objectively lower quality of said governance but it also creates negative optics owing to the mysteriousness of government agencies.

Anybody who has actually worked in the intel space knows, for instance, that foreign election interference is not merely not a hoax but rather something that is so prevalent as to be, in effect, in the air we breathe and the water we drink. So, too, is domestic election interference, and boy does that come in diverse forms. It’s fun and easy to dream up wild theories about, say, the FBI interfering in today’s domestic politics, in part because there is some historical (and perhaps present day) measure of truth there, but it’s worth remembering that corrupting influences come in many realms and many forms.

How quickly the people retweeting Elon’s posts about free speech and government corruption forget that they are doing so atop a platform controlled by a centibillionaire who just bought an election and stands to benefit enormously from the decisions made by the new administration.

Bashing government is easy, fixing it is hard, and there are always demagogues waiting in the wings to exploit a good crisis.