In an analysis more than a century old yet just as insightful as any contemporary reflection on the subject, Max Weber described bureaucracy as one of the unavoidable aspects of rationalized modernity. As societies grew to unprecedented size, he explained, they required a level of technical expertise that demanded the expansion in the number and purview of bureaucracies. These organizations exist, at least in theory, to manage the day-to-day operations of increasingly complex social institutions according to an ethos of rational objectivity.  

Weber accepted this as an inevitability. At the same time, he fully recognized the dangers it presented.

The culture of expertise and the relentless pursuit by the members of bureaucracies for status within them make it highly likely that those organizations will attempt to increase their own power, even at the expense of the institutions within which they exist and were created to support. The expert’s certainty of access to what are seen as objectively superior values and methods become justification for independence from the rules governing lesser men, such as those social bodies bureaucracies are supposed to serve.  

In Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency, Mark Moyar has written a granular study of the corruption within one such organization, USAID, most recently the object of dismantling by the second Trump administration’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). Broader insights into the administrative state’s war on the first Trump administration, though present here, are overshadowed in volume by the close detail of Moyar’s own surreal experience in USAID. In fact, because of his skills as a political historian, Moyar is well situated to tell both stories. The reader who does not know of his work will learn the key details in this book’s early chapters.

Moyar began his professional life as a young Ph.D. in history. He sought an academic appointment after earning a doctorate from an elite school and publishing a well-received book on various aspects of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War just a few years after receiving his bachelor’s degree. Within a few years of finishing his thesis, he had published a voluminous and compelling account of the first decade of the American military effort in Vietnam. Despite his outstanding pedigree, he applied for more than 200 academic history positions and received no offers. It was not hard to gather—and he provides some of the proof here—that the reason he was denied appointment had to do with his conservatism, and especially the fact that he challenged the leftist academic mainstream narrative about Vietnam. Eventually, he was hired to teach history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, but, after funding for his position dried up, he ended up moving into the defense world. There, he aided the U.S. military effort against counterinsurgency during our engagement in Afghanistan.  

In early 2018—the second year of the first Trump administration—Moyar was appointed director of the USAID Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation. He immediately gained empirical confirmation of much that his conservative political perspective told him was typical in federal bureaucracies.  

Some new elements of the corruption Moyar documents would have had Weber shaking his head in disbelief. At an orientation just after his appointment to USAID, Moyar had to undergo a “privilege walk.” The identity he picked out of a hat for the simulation was “North American woman of Scandinavian descent.” Other identities picked were along the lines of “transgender activist,” “blind person of African descent,” and “indigenous woman with unwanted child.” Yes or no questions (for example, “I may face discrimination when applying for government services”) were then put to the participants and each took a step forward or backward according to their answers. It makes one’s head spin to realize that this childish exercise took place as an orientation training in a federal administrative unit that had the responsibility of distributing billions of American dollars in foreign aid. 

Bureaucracies, Moyar learned, are places in which much empty talking is done by people eminently skilled at that game. Endless meetings are held, presided over by those who enjoy hearing themselves talk, while attention to accomplishing necessary tasks is more infrequent. Moyar discovered that, in addition to those who talked much and produced little, there were many in USAID who came to work only infrequently and seemed to do their hardest work avoiding work. Efforts to get them to be more attentive to their duties often resulted in retaliation by these recalcitrant employees, especially if they happened to be members of one or another protected identity category. 

USAID, like many parts of the administrative state, tends to attract people motivated by world-saver philosophies. This character type is eager to toss as much American tax money as they can get their hands on at every humanitarian and cultural leftist cause under the sun. We might call these the idealistic crooks. In addition to these, however, Moyar also found many narrowly self-interested thieves. Much energy was spent inside USAID by the most self-interested and careerist of the staff to advance their own professional and material causes. These egoists never missed an opportunity to position the trough so that it placed plenty of feed before their snouts or to manipulate colleagues and rules in ways facilitating their accumulation of more power within the organization.  

But perhaps the most assiduously devoted among the unscrupulous at USAID were those dedicated passionately to the cause of sabotaging the agenda of President Trump. He recalls a meeting at which those present were apprised of the fact that employees of the organization had been endeavoring to hide from the president and other senior officials the knowledge of ongoing USAID humanitarian aid to Syria, as they were fearful Trump might stop it. One might, naively, imagine such a report being relayed to the group to remind them of their moral and legal duties to ensure their work was consonant with policies of the elected administration. But Moyar found that the general feeling in the room was of support for such subversive activity. He reported this event to his direct superiors. Nothing came of it.

In traveling around to investigate USAID operations overseas, Moyar noted that more than a year after Trump took office, many of these offices still had Obama’s image up on office walls—with no indication whatsoever that there had been a change in administration. He found that Obama-era programs, like promoting transgender awareness in Third World countries, were purposely rebranded in obfuscating ways so as to pass them under the radar of the Trump administration. 

Moyar brought a fine-tuned conservative sensibility to all of these perversions at USAID. His investigations produced a sizable list of offenses and offenders. The result was perfectly predictable and followed exactly the logic of function Weber predicted bureaucracies would follow. Barely a year into his tenure, Moyar was relieved of his position after his office computer was seized without his knowledge. Shortly thereafter, he was notified that one of his earlier books, Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Forces Operations allegedly divulged classified information and he was under investigation.

Moyar demonstrates at great length the ludicrousness of the charge. All the allegedly classified information was in fact already in the public domain at the time of the book’s publication. He provided superiors with the information to refute the charges and pursued every avenue for the reversal of his termination within the administrative state’s labyrinthine structure. The Office of the Inspector General failed to investigate his response to the charges and simply accepted the termination. Moyar eventually brought a lawsuit against the Department of Defense and Senator Chuck Grassley publicly took up the criticism of corruption in the Department. But when the first Trump administration ended after the 2020 election, Biden placed Samantha Power at the head of USAID, and she ensured business as usual would continue there.  

Moyar’s description of this process is a stunning account of the progressivist, anti-conservative politicization of the administrative state. It is politics all the way down in this deep and murky swamp.

Moyar, who had presented himself as a threat to the corrupt operation of the machine, was eliminated in a fishing expedition designed to find something that could be embellished and presented as reasonable cause for termination. That effort was instigated precisely by one or more members of the group of his colleagues who Moyar revealed as corrupt in his exploration of the activity of USAID.  

Though the minute detail can at times make for a difficult slog, Moyar has done us all a great service. This book can be thought of as an ethnography of the tribal world of the corrupt body of unelected experts who control much of the action of the federal government and the distorted mechanisms by which they enrich themselves and their progressive causes while systematically purging any renegade elements. It provides an excellent insider account of the corruption that must have confronted Elon Musk and the rest of the investigators at DOGE in their important, and unfinished work.