It’s long past time to rein in the field of public administration, which supplies the bureaucrats who populate the administrative state. About 12,000 U.S. students a year graduate in the field, mainly at the master’s level through the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree. About half of all MPA graduates end up in government, mostly at the state (25%) and local (15%) levels, but some (about 10%) at the federal level. This means that about 1,200 public administration graduates enter the federal bureaucracy every year, presumably in leadership and management-track roles.
Christi Grimm, a former inspector general in the Department of Health and Human Services, is one such MPA holder who did damage from the federal bureaucracy. Grimm issued a panicked report on COVID in its early days that President Trump viewed as an attempt to undermine his handling of the crisis (she has since sued for reinstatement after being fired shortly after Trump’s second inauguration). Another is Karen Chen, a senior analyst on environmental issues in the Government Accountability Office, who previously worked for Michael Bloomberg’s net-zero initiative for local governments that sought to counter policies of the first Trump Administration.
