"Nominally, there is one executive for every eight federal employees, a ratio that would bankrupt many private industries"
About this Quote
“Nominally” does a lot of work here: Gross isn’t just quoting a staffing ratio, he’s planting doubt about the official story before the reader can get comfortable. The line is engineered to make bureaucracy feel both bloated and evasive. One executive for every eight employees is framed as a structural absurdity, and the word choice implies the number might even be worse once you account for hidden titles, duplicative roles, or managerial layering that doesn’t show up cleanly on an org chart.
The private-sector comparison is the rhetorical trigger. “Would bankrupt many private industries” smuggles in a moral standard: the market as truth serum. It invites the reader to treat government as a firm that should be judged by profit logic, then leverages the fear of insolvency as shorthand for incompetence. That’s effective because it converts a dry headcount ratio into a visceral picture of waste: too many bosses, not enough doers, everyone passing memos uphill.
The subtext is less about accounting than about legitimacy. If government is managerial overhead piled onto managerial overhead, then policy failures become predictable, not accidental. Gross is also leaning on a popular cultural suspicion: that the administrative state reproduces itself, rewarding supervision over service.
Contextually, this kind of claim thrives in eras of anti-government sentiment and budget fights, when “efficiency” becomes a proxy for ideology. The quote doesn’t argue details; it fires a framing device. Once you accept the metaphor, every program starts to look like overhead.
The private-sector comparison is the rhetorical trigger. “Would bankrupt many private industries” smuggles in a moral standard: the market as truth serum. It invites the reader to treat government as a firm that should be judged by profit logic, then leverages the fear of insolvency as shorthand for incompetence. That’s effective because it converts a dry headcount ratio into a visceral picture of waste: too many bosses, not enough doers, everyone passing memos uphill.
The subtext is less about accounting than about legitimacy. If government is managerial overhead piled onto managerial overhead, then policy failures become predictable, not accidental. Gross is also leaning on a popular cultural suspicion: that the administrative state reproduces itself, rewarding supervision over service.
Contextually, this kind of claim thrives in eras of anti-government sentiment and budget fights, when “efficiency” becomes a proxy for ideology. The quote doesn’t argue details; it fires a framing device. Once you accept the metaphor, every program starts to look like overhead.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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