Rachel Augustine Potter is the first to admit that her academic specialty—the ins and outs of the American bureaucracy—”is generally not a cocktail party crowd pleaser.”

But this Miller Center faculty senior fellow is in good company. She’s part of a group of scholars and government practitioners leading the Center’s latest nonpartisan work on executive branch reform as part of a “Democracy and Bureaucracy” practice area. Her scholarship, grounded in prior experiences working as a bureaucrat, shines light on the hidden politics of government procedure and process. She recently discussed this work.

Last fall you teamed up with Sidney Milkis, the Miller Center’s White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs, to write about the presidency as an increasingly polarized and polarizing institution. Could you say more?

For decades political scientists have been tracking the steady decline of Americans’ trust in government. Right now that trust is at an absolute low. The government does many things well behind the scenes but can’t always take credit in ways that allow people to see the successes. As a result, the “administrative state”—what many people call the executive branch administrative agencies—is experiencing a reputation crisis.

At the same time, we see extreme polarization among political elites. For instance, during the Trump years, polarization gave rise to a deep skepticism of the administrative state, encapsulated in the expression the “deep state.” The term itself is highly polarizing. While I do not endorse it, I understand that its use reflects real problems in and frustrations with the bureaucracy. I’m a bureaucracy fan, but I’m also a realist. There are issues in the federal bureaucracy and room for improvement.

The Miller Center’s new Democracy and Bureaucracy [working] group is working on ways to address some of the problems. For example, it’s difficult in the federal bureaucracy to fire poor performers. Are there ways that the federal government could redress this? What do other countries do? And what are some public policy approaches to tackle the administrative state’s reputation crisis?

It’s difficult to have these kinds of conversations in the heat of the moment in Washington. A place like the Miller Center offers a way for knowledgeable people to take a step back from politics and participate in conversations across the aisle—”OK, how do we do this better?”

Can you tell us more about your latest research?

Twenty years ago, I worked on a Government Accountability Office report on federal procurement. I’m now writing an academic book on procurement focused on the role of contractors in the government. These are private-sector workers hired under procurement contracts for federal agencies.

We don’t really count how many contractors we have at the federal level. But research suggests that for every career civil servant, there are two to three contractors working full time—an enormous multiplication of the federal workforce. The usual conversation about contractors is that outsourcing serves goals of efficiency and effectiveness—important public policy principles. But there are a lot of politics involved as well because money is involved. And labor is involved—labor that, given the structure of the federal budget, is much less visible than the hiring of career bureaucrats.

Does the presence of all these contractors contribute to the aggrandizement of presidential power? How much do contractors contribute to government policymaking? How does the outsourcing of highly skilled work to contractors affect agency performance? In short, the workforce under the president’s control is much larger than we tend to think it is. In the long run, is that a good thing or a bad thing for the presidency?

READ THE MILKIS-POTTER ESSAY