The End Of Bureaucracy As We Know It?
Danny Buerkli, 06 June 2025
AI may be about to do to government what the power loom did to weaving.
For decades, we’ve been digitizing government: moving paper forms online, connecting databases, speeding up communication. But even with digital transformation done right, we have only been rearranging how information moves around. The actual work of manipulation of symbols (reading materials, making decisions, writing responses) still happens exclusively the same way it always did: inside brains.
That’s why, despite all our technology, a government office today would be instantly recognizable to a civil servant from a hundred years ago. If you brought in a capable civil servant from the early nineteen-hundreds they would be up and running before lunch. We have screens and keyboards now, but the logic of the wiring which shuffles information from one cranium to another remains essentially unchanged.
This is not a dig at government bureaucracies. We simply have not had technology which would have changed the fundamental logic of public administration.
It is however not how technology transformed other industries. When mechanical looms arrived in the 1800s, they didn’t just help weavers pass thread faster. They fundamentally changed what it meant to make cloth.
We are arguably at that moment now with most of knowledge work, which includes public administration. And if we are not there yet we will soon be. AI can read, analyze, draft, and reason. In other words: it can think. If this strikes you as a bizarre claim, I strongly encourage you to play around with some of the most recent reasoning models.
Of course AI systems will still need to be supervised in places. But that is no different from how less experienced civil servants have their work checked by more seasoned colleagues.
The question before us is: what happens when every policy analyst has the analytical capacity of an entire department? When every caseworker can process applications with the thoroughness of a team? The binding constraint on public administration has always been the number of people who can read, think, and decide. That constraint is about to disappear.
This shift raises questions we’ve never had to ask before. Here are four implications worth considering:
1) Against State Capacity?
We might not want government to become too effective. Imagine tax authorities that can audit every transaction in real-time, or immigration systems that track every movement instantly. Public administrations aren’t just constrained by laws, but the number of people they have, how capable they are, and how well they work together. We may soon find ourselves in the odd position of defending bureaucratic inability to get things done as a feature, not a bug.
2) But Do You Have A Choice?
Yet we may not have much choice. Consider pharmaceutical regulation: once one country uses AI to review drug applications, others must follow or risk missing critical safety signals buried in complex data. The same logic applies everywhere. As citizens submit AI-generated documents and companies automate their compliance reporting, governments that don’t keep up will simply drown. The pension wave hitting public sectors worldwide only accelerates this: with boomers retiring en masse and fewer workers to replace them, automation becomes necessity, not choice.
3) The Small Government Paradox
This creates an intriguing opportunity for those who’ve long advocated for smaller government. One metric, though not the only one, is headcount. Why replace retiring civil servants when AI can do their work? The political narrative writes itself: no layoffs, just natural attrition plus “automation like we see in the private sector.” But: 100 regulators equipped with AI might wield more power than 10,000 working with paper. Is that really smaller government, or just government with a smaller headcount?
4) The Stabilization Dilemma
The counter-argument runs deeper than efficiency. If AI displaces millions of private sector workers, government employment might become our economic ballast, a form of distributed universal basic income disguised as public service. We might need an “inefficiently” large public workforce precisely because the private sector becomes too efficient.
The same technology that could make government monumentally more capable might also demand we keep it deliberately incapable. The same force that enables a radically smaller state might require us to maintain a bloated one.