When Susan Rice declares that champagne corks are popping in Beijing and Moscow because the US trimmed 1,300 bureaucrats from the State Department, she does not so much argue as confess. What she reveals, perhaps unintentionally, is the entrenched belief among our ruling class that American power depends not on our economy, our people, or even our military, but on the continued employment of mid-tier bureaucrats with federal pensions. If that is our definition of “superpower,” then we have already surrendered.
Rice’s lamentations, echoed by the usual chorus in the drive-by media, portray the July 2025 layoffs of 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers as a cataclysm, a diplomatic Pearl Harbor. In truth, it is nothing of the kind. The US State Department employs almost 80,000 people. The layoffs represent less than 2% of that total. If the State Department were a company, this would barely qualify as a seasonal adjustment. And yet the reaction has been nothing short of apocalyptic. Why?
The answer, at least in part, lies in a refusal to confront a basic principle of organizational reality: the Pareto Principle. The 80/20 rule, first observed by Vilfredo Pareto and later applied across economics, management, and even software engineering, holds that roughly 80% of effects stem from 20% of causes. In organizations, this often translates into a stark truth, 20% of employees do 80% of the productive work. The rest maintain inboxes.
Applied to the federal workforce, this principle suggests something deeply uncomfortable for those who inhabit the capital and see their value reflected in the size of their departments. Most federal agencies could cut their staff by 80%, and if the cuts were judiciously focused on the least productive workers, the output would not decline. It would improve. The key is not the number of people, but who those people are.
In the private sector, this insight has recently become unavoidable. Elon Musk’s dramatic layoff of nearly 80% of Twitter’s workforce in 2022 was predicted to end in technological catastrophe. It did not. The site remained online, features were added at a record pace, and operational focus improved. Mark Zuckerberg followed suit at Meta, cutting over 21,000 jobs. Microsoft and Amazon did the same. Not only did these companies continue to operate, their efficiency metrics and profit margins improved. Musk bluntly summarized the lesson: most people were not doing much.
These are not anomalies, nor are they exclusive to Silicon Valley. The underlying dynamic is well-understood by any manager who has tracked team productivity. A small percentage of employees create the value. The rest either support them, slow them down, or draw a salary for tasks that could be automated or eliminated entirely.
But while private firms have profit-and-loss statements to discipline them, government agencies do not. They have congressional appropriations and civil service protections. As a result, the federal workforce is not just insulated from market discipline, it is inoculated against accountability altogether. A 2016 GAO report found that 99% of federal workers were rated at or above “fully successful.” Meanwhile, attempts to fire underperformers are stymied by legal hurdles and union protections so dense they resemble medieval forest laws. At the State Department, only six employees were removed for poor performance over a 17-year period.
Such statistics are not signs of excellence. They are signs of sclerosis. When an organization is structurally incapable of distinguishing performance, it rewards mediocrity and punishes merit by dilution. This is why the best employees often leave, and the most inert remain.
Defenders of the status quo insist that these civil servants are “doing critical work.” If so, one wonders why their sudden absence is not accompanied by measurable drops in diplomatic effectiveness. In reality, most of the work performed by these mid-level bureaucrats is duplicative, redundant, or peripheral. The GAO itself has identified over 40 areas of program duplication across the federal government just this year, with hundreds of overlapping missions and billions in waste. For example, both the State Department and USAID previously maintained parallel aid functions until the latter was folded into the former.
Bureaucracies tend toward bloat not because of bad people but because of bad incentives. Each program begets a department, each department acquires staff, and those staff find reasons to expand their scope, not reduce it. Parkinson’s Law is instructive: work expands to fill the time and personnel allotted. In the federal government, where budget increases are seen as a sign of importance, the incentive is always to grow.
When Elon Musk headed the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year, his goal was to introduce a different ethic: lean, accountable, and responsive government. In his words, DOGE should become “a way of life.” The recent State Department layoffs are not superpower suicide. They are an early expression of that way of life. We should encourage more.
Susan Rice’s apoplexy is not grounded in national security analysis. It is grounded in class solidarity. The technocratic elite sees layoffs in Foggy Bottom as an attack on their own status. In truth, it is an overdue recalibration. A nation does not remain powerful by subsidizing administrative drift. It remains powerful by rewarding excellence, demanding efficiency, and adapting to new realities.
Indeed, the very people whose jobs were eliminated were almost certainly drawn from the 80% who do the 20% of output. We have not lost America’s diplomatic edge. We have merely unburdened it. If we took the Pareto Principle seriously across the entire federal workforce, we would not stop at 1,300 layoffs. We would eliminate 80% of non-military, non-law enforcement federal positions. We would then take the savings and use them to double the pay of the top 20%, promote them faster, and give them more responsibility.
Such a shift would do more than save money. It would reorient our government around merit, not tenure. It would allow our best civil servants to lead without dragging dead weight. And it would send a signal that performance matters again. That is not superpower suicide. It is bureaucratic renaissance.
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Unlike private business when a business plan is developed, it’s what is our purpose(to make a profit), provide a product or service that is needed in today’s market, how are we going todo that, procedures, what is required, where are we going to do that, materials are required, how many people with what skill sets are required. W
I get your point, but the Pareto Principle does not translate to government–it’s much worse. In the words of my long-time business partner, who compared the output of government workers to the private sector, he said, “Here it takes SIX people to do the work of one.”