Why Cutting Bureaucrats Won’t Fix Bureaucracy, And What Will

As the latest generation of politicians vow to cut bureaucracy to make the state more efficient, one thing remains clear: cutting bureaucrats is the wrong way to do it.

Cutting Bureaucrats is Always Popular

It’s always a popular decision and an easy political win, cutting bureaucrats makes headlines, stirs public support, and sounds like a bold move. But the reality? Cutting people without fixing the system only ensures that bureaucracy grows back, often in even more dysfunctional and hidden ways.

Recent NHS Bureaucratic Cuts

Just this week in the NHS the government announced dramatic plans to cut the number of bureaucrats. NHS England (The World’s Biggest Quango’) was labelled an ‘inefficient bureaucracy’ by the health secretary and abolished. Whilst ICBs the local health commissioners were told to make 50% cuts. All with the Prime Minister’s goal of “cutting the number of bureaucrats.” (How and why did NHS England turn into an unloved bureaucracy? Read about it here.)

Bureaucracy: A Misunderstood Beast

Bureaucracy is everywhere, yet it is badly misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, bureaucrats aren’t just pen-pushers sitting around doing nothing all day pretending to work. In reality a large number of bureaucrats are subject matter experts, deeply knowledgeable in their fields, passionate about their area of work. So very often when bureaucrats are cut these are passionate experts in their subject.

The real issue isn’t bureaucracy itself but the dysfunctional decision-making processes that underpin it. It keeps people locked into endless technical arguments, which simultaneously builds people’s expertise, but at the same time disempowers them from using that knowledge.

What is Bureaucracy Really?

Bureaucracy at its’ heart is a DECISION MAKING process. We often mix up the people with the process. Bureaucracy is a structured form of decision making that enforces power order and control through several defining characteristics:

1. Formal Power Hierarchy
A bureaucracy operates through a clear chain of command, where each level is accountable to the one above it..

2. Conformity and Control
The system is designed to ensure that all members adhere strictly to the established rules and procedures, promoting uniform behavior across the organisation. Control mechanisms are implemented to monitor compliance 

3. Standardisation
Decisions and actions within a bureaucracy are governed by established rules, policies, and procedures. 

4. Specialisation
Employees in a bureaucracy are often given strictly defined roles and areas of expertise. 

5. Impersonality
Bureaucratic decision-making emphasises the application of rules and processes over people.

Why Bureaucracy is a Problem

Bureaucracy slows things down. It centralises decisions, making systems rigid and unresponsive to real human needs. It prioritises self-preservation, creating layers of process, reporting and documentation (‘red tape’) to enforce it’s power and control.

Here’s what happens when decision-making becomes too bureaucratic:

• 🐌 Decisions take too long, delaying action.
• 🎯 Power is centralised, & is unresponsive to the needs of people.
• 😶‍🌫️ Bureaucracy breeds more bureaucracy, Makes decisions that increase and spread bureaucracy (e.g requiring others to 
• 🙃 Decisions are made for the wrong reasons, often to satisfy internal processes rather than real-world needs.
• 📉 Resources are wasted, as inefficiency is built into the system.
• ⛔ Innovation is stifled, as risk-taking is discouraged.
• ☣️ Conformity is rewarded, rather than creative problem-solving.

In short, bureaucracy prioritises stability at the cost of adaptability. It creates an environment where change is difficult, and long drawn out processes end up with an inadequate minimum acceptable solution with little innovation.

The Bureaucracy Stress Cycle of Never Ending Failure

Bureaucracy’s cope with their ineffectiveness and inefficiency by creating a never ending loop of organisational change. Constantly coming up with new plans, to ‘fix things’. These plans are often top down noisy changes, that require ever more targets controls and performance management as their ineffectiveness becomes increasingly clear. This is necessary as Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety means that bureaucracies move too slowly to keep up with an ever changing world and therefore are in a constant cycle of failure. Which explains a common feature of bureaucracy failures are always covered and denied. 

Why Cutting Bureaucrats Won’t Work

When bureaucratic cuts happen, the wrong people lose their jobs. Those who survive tend to be the ones most skilled at playing the system, while the ones who challenge inefficiencies, the real experts, the ones asking difficult questions,are often the first to go.

If you want to know who the real bureaucrats are in the system, they’ll be the people taking charge of the redundancy process, deciding who goes and who stays. If they had a real value adding job to do they would be focus on that. Instead, the most powerful will simply manoeuvrer their way to the positions to decide the fate of others. Then it is simply cutting people who are not in their power base.

Very often the people being cut are the experts who are not interested in playing political games, the people who ask awkard questions, those that are trying to change the status quo and people simply disliked by the leader. What we end up with are powerful leaders with their core powerbase of ‘yes men and women’ controlling the remainder of the system.

Therefore the core of the bureucratic system remains largely intact, just with fewer knowledgeable people in it. The fact that the dissolution of NHS England is taking a jaw dropping TWO YEARS. Tells you what kind of decision makers are operating the process.

What Could AI Mean For Bureaucracy?

There is a risk that AI is weaponised by bureucracies simply to extend their power. AI could increasingly being introduced not to streamline decision-making, but to extend bureaucratic oversight. Instead of making work more efficient, AI is often used to demand more ever more reporting, more approvals, and more justification for simple decisions.Creating ever more rules processes and data requirements. It is the decision making equivalent of the out of control AI turning everything into paper clips.

What Needs to Change: Fixing the Decision-Making Process

The real solution isn’t cutting people, it’s redesigning how decisions are made.

To genuinely reduce bureaucracy, we need to replace its outdated decision making structures with more adaptive, decentralised, and network and community driven approaches.

Here’s how we can do that:

✅ Adopt Networked Decision Making – Multidisciplinary teams, peer reviews, and distributed models allow for faster, more informed decisions.

✅ Retain Experts as Internal Consultants – Instead of cutting knowledge, reposition experts in advisory roles where they can inform better decision-making.

✅ Use AI to Enhance, Not Control – AI should be used to support human decision-making, reducing administrative burdens rather than increasing surveillance.

✅ Empower Localised Community Decision-Making – Give teams and communities the autonomy to respond to challenges without layers of approval.

✅ Measure Impact, Not Just Compliance – Focus on real-world outcomes, not just ticking boxes or meeting arbitrary targets. You can’t accurately capture people’s needs using a tick box.

✅ Reform Budgeting Process, So it doesn’t just reinforce the status quo and strengthen management silos. 

Bureaucracy itself isn’t inherently bad; it becomes problematic when it stifles the very progress it’s meant to support. By shifting from rigid, hierarchical models to adaptive, human focused systems, we can reclaim efficiency without sacrificing expertise.

Conclusion

Cutting bureaucrats doesn’t cut bureaucracy, it just makes it more fragile, more dysfunctional, and less capable of serving people’s real needs. Cutting it simply allows it to grow back, often in ways and places hidden from view. 

If we’re serious about making the state more efficient, we need to stop thinking about trimming bureaucracy and start thinking about transforming it.

What are your thoughts? Have you experienced bureaucracy helping or hindering decision-making in your field? Let’s discuss. 👇

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