Trump and Mamdani Are Running Polar Opposite Bureaucracies
As the Trump administration saddles Americans with new administrative burdens to cut taxes for the rich, the Mamdani administration has made cutting red tape to free up benefits part of its governing agenda for New York.
For all the talk of government efficiency, the Trump administration is busy tying up working-class people’s benefits in miles of red tape in order to offset tax cuts for the rich. Zohran Mamdani is pursuing actual efficiency — without privatization. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds and Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)
In the year since Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, millions of Americans have already lost their health insurance as a result of that bill and other Republican policies. According to a recent report from health care advocacy group Protect Our Care, the number of enrollees in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has fallen by nearly four million since last July. Last month, data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed an even steeper drop for Obamacare: five million fewer people are now enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace plans compared to last year.
Part of this slide has a straightforward cause: in January, Republicans blocked the extension of enhanced tax credits for Obamacare, leading to a steep jump in premiums and a predictable drop in ACA enrollment. But the broader decline stems not from a single decision but from a constellation of new policies that have been rolled out over the past year. Some of these measures come directly from the Big Beautiful Bill, but most are simply new rules drafted by Trump officials with the aim of reducing enrollment in programs like Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Obamacare. In short, the numbers reflect the administration’s wider strategy of weaponizing red tape against low- and middle-income Americans.
This approach has intensified in recent months as administration officials have introduced a wave of new rules that raise barriers to enrolling in or maintaining access to various programs. The finalized rule for the ACA marketplace, published by HHS in May, illustrates this trend. Weighing in at 1,121 pages, the rule introduces a dense array of new regulations and reporting requirements while narrowing the enrollment periods. For enrollees, this means a lot more paperwork and time spent navigating a complex web of “sludge” just to keep coverage they already qualify for. Marketed as fraud‑fighting measures, these new rules are almost certain to drive down enrollment among eligible individuals.
Lest there be any doubt that Trump officials are actively working to throw people off their insurance, the HHS cleared it up in its press release on declining ACA enrollment last month. Far from downplaying the drop, the agency pointed to it as proof of the administration’s successful crackdown on fraud, repeating assertions from a dubious right-wing report that half the number of new enrollees in ACA plans since 2021 have been fraudulent or otherwise illegitimate. The administration has happily forecasted that its new ACA rules will further reduce marketplace enrollment by two million people in 2027 and one million each year for the remainder of the decade.
Republicans have used this same playbook across various government agencies and federal programs. Last year’s Big Beautiful Bill, for example, added a slew of additional rules that pile on fresh red tape for Medicaid and SNAP recipients. The most notable of these new provisions are work requirements, which are expected to reduce enrollment in the safety net programs by millions over the next few years.
While sold by Republicans as an effort to crack down on lazy idlers living off of taxpayer dollars, the evidence shows that work requirements have minimal impact on employment — mostly because the vast majority of enrollees already work and those who don’t often face legitimate barriers such as disability, caregiving responsibilities, or simply a lousy job market. Research also indicates that work requirements harm vulnerable populations and lead many eligible people to lose coverage due to procedural errors like missed paperwork. In states like Arkansas and Georgia, where Republicans have previously imposed Medicaid work requirements, the rule had virtually no effect on labor force participation but left many working enrollees uninsured because they struggled to meet the onerous new reporting rules.
National work requirements are expected to reduce enrollment in Medicaid and SNAP by millions in just the first year of implementation. A significant chunk of these reductions — almost half, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute — will likely be due to procedural disenrollment rather than actual ineligibility rulings. This is not a flaw in the policy but a feature, with bureaucratic hurdles used as a core mechanism to reduce the rolls.
Weaponization by Design
The GOP’s ongoing weaponization of bureaucracy follows a historical pattern that was documented back in 2019 by professors of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School, Donald Moynihan and Pamela Herd. In their book, Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, the authors detail how political actors often deliberately impose administrative burdens as a “policy tool to achieve an ideological goal,” whether to reduce enrollment in safety net programs, restrict voting rights, or curtail immigration (to name just a few examples).
The Trump administration, Moynihan told Jacobin by email, “very much fits the pattern of using administrative burdens as policymaking by other means,” pointing specifically to the “huge changes to our safety net that are occurring in hidden ways.” This use of administrative burdens is not an accident, he said, but a “means of reducing take-up of core programs like SNAP or Medicaid to the point that they enable enough in federal savings to offset the cost of Trump’s tax cut.”
Imposing new rules and paperwork is the most straightforward way to increase administrative burdens on the public. But they can also grow by simply undermining government performance. “Burdens are the experience of government as onerous, so any state action that makes it harder for people to interact with government adds to burdens,” Moynihan said. This includes “cutting administrative capacity to the point that agencies like SSA [Social Security Administration] or IRS [Internal Revenue Service] are no longer able to respond to the public.”
Not coincidentally, this is exactly what last year’s widely publicized crusade against the federal bureaucracy accomplished. Under the command of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted the very agencies and departments that the public interacts with the most, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the IRS. The DOGE initiative ultimately shrank the federal workforce by nearly 300,000, bringing with it office closures, longer wait times, increased backlogs, and, in the case of the IRS, a massive decrease in government revenue. The subsequent decline in services has been most pronounced at the SSA, where elderly and disabled beneficiaries have had to deal with longer wait times and additional obstacles since DOGE slashed the already understaffed agency’s workforce by almost eight thousand (roughly 15 percent).
From the day that DOGE launched early last year, it was clear that the initiative was less about improving government for ordinary people and more about cutting regulatory burdens for corporations like SpaceX and Tesla. This reflected the right-wing critique of government and bureaucracy that has long guided Republican and neoliberal reforms. DOGE pursued its deregulatory goals by targeting the regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing things like consumer welfare, workplace safety, securities regulation, and environmental protection. Though DOGE has since dissolved, the Trump administration has faithfully carried on this project. While adding a wide range of new rules on working people, the administration has taken the opposite approach with corporate America, which has benefited from most of its deregulatory actions. From energy and artificial intelligence to finance, Trump officials have eased oversight and compliance standards while relaxing rules that safeguard consumers, workers, and investors.
The purpose of this deregulatory agenda, the White House has stated, is to reduce the burden and costs of compliance for corporations and thus encourage “more profitable activities” that will bring “innovation, investment, and economic growth.”
New York’s Rebuttal
In his 2015 book, The Utopia of Rules, the late anthropologist David Graeber observed that the term “bureaucracy” had become nearly synonymous with “government” in US political discourse, with an efficient private sector routinely contrasted against an inefficient public one. According to this neoliberal framing, the only path to greater efficiency is for the government to embrace privatization and other market solutions. As Graeber noted a decade ago, the “mainstream left” largely conceded this right-wing critique of bureaucracy in the late twentieth century, even spearheading efforts to make government “more efficient” through outsourcing, privatization, and the adoption of “market principles.”
But today, some on the Left are attempting to chart a different course in response to the Right’s latest broadside against the federal government. Instead of retreating into a defensive crouch and acquiescing to the Right’s framing on bureaucracy, progressives and democratic socialists have advanced their own critiques while attempting to reclaim efficiency as a value of progressive governance.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been explicit about this strategy. In late May, he announced the formation of the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE), which has been tasked with proposing charter‑revision ballot measures to help streamline the city bureaucracy and reduce administrative burdens on residents and small businesses. In the preliminary report issued by the commission earlier this month, executive director Ann Cheng took direct aim at right-wing framing and argued that an “efficient government is not one that cuts services or workers, but one that listens to its workforce and empowers them to deliver.”
Rejecting efficiency as a code word for austerity or privatization, Cheng offered a progressive vision of efficient government as one where “city residents are able to seamlessly access government services, small businesses can obtain approvals without having to hire expediters and consultants, and City workers can build life-saving street infrastructure without delay.”
The new mayor’s immediate efforts have focused on making government more accessible to the public while cutting back on the city’s habit of outsourcing key functions to private contractors (one of the biggest sources of waste and fraud over the years). In a sharp break from the prevailing trend of outsourcing public sector expertise, the administration unveiled a new initiative earlier this month that aims to rebuild in‑house technical capacity and modernize the city’s digital infrastructure. The initiative will establish cross-agency teams of technologists called Public Interest Technology (PIT) crews, who will be charged with developing digital tools and fixes for public sector challenges.
Mamdani framed this program as part of the bigger push for more efficient government, noting that residents “should not be forced to navigate systems that are confusing, outdated and burdened by bureaucracy.” In his telling, these new teams will “work closely with city agencies to launch digital solutions to government processes that have long been defined by piles of paperwork.” Fittingly, the first task for the newly formed PIT crew will be to build an online portal to help enforce the administration’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which bans companies from using deceptive tactics like subscription traps and junk fees. The portal will give city residents a direct channel for submitting complaints about companies to the city.
The Mamdani administration’s crackdown on corporate tactics that mirror the same duplicitous methods used by Republican officials inside the federal government offers a vivid case study in how bureaucracy can be built to serve people or trip them up. As the Trump administration continues to saddle much of the public with new administrative burdens, the Mamdani administration has made cutting red tape and easing bureaucratic gridlock a central part of its governing agenda for New York. Meanwhile, as the Trump administration loosens oversight on corporations, the Mamdani administration has gone in the opposite direction, aggressively targeting bad actors in the private sector.
The battle over bureaucracy is part of a broader class conflict, with one side offering a vision of government that works for ordinary people and the other a government whose primary function is to serve the wealthy. In the end, the strongest rebuttal to the Right’s vision of government may be to simply demonstrate what an efficient and well-run government can actually achieve for working people. “The objective is to give the best government possible,” former Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan — America’s most successful “sewer socialist” — once said. A century later, the Left is once again making the case that government can work when it’s built to serve people rather than frustrate and hinder them.