Charlie Peters, the late, great editor of The Washington Monthly, was a connoisseur of bureaucracy.
After serving as John F. Kennedy’s West Virginia campaign manager, he arrived in Washington to join a brand-new agency, the Peace Corps, where he was handed one of the most unusual positions ever in the federal government. His title was “director of evaluation,” and his job was to travel to Peace Corps locations, spend enough time there to get a read on what was working and what wasn’t, and then report back to the agency’s director, Sargent Shriver. Charlie’s tough-minded reports didn’t exactly endear him to his fellow Peace Corps officials, but it gave Charlie insight into how bureaucracies worked—or more precisely, how they didn’t work.
I often thought of Charlie—my first boss in journalism—and his expertise in government bloat in the months since the inauguration, as I watched Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE minions try—and fail—to get their arms around the federal leviathan. Now Musk has returned to Tesla while complaining that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” undermined DOGE’s work. Like Trump, he’s not one to admit failure, but the rest of us can see that he failed.
