The State Wants Your Time, Data, and Indifference

The contemporary argument over government has acquired an admirably compact contradiction. It must be ruthless enough to find threats, streamlined enough to cut waste, and restrained enough not to become the threat or the waste. The Trump administration’s record, in the accounts gathered here, suggests that these objectives are being pursued as though they were interchangeable—an administrative theory with the intellectual rigor of using a leaf blower to organize a library.

Consider the two ends of the state’s encounter with a person. In one direction, Flock Safety’s license-plate-reader network has spread through contracts with roughly 40 percent of US law-enforcement agencies; the New Yorker reports 130,000 cameras in every state but Alaska, collecting vehicle identifiers and other descriptive data. Police can reportedly use the resulting data in arrests or court evidence without a warrant or judicial approval. In the other direction, Annie Lowrey’s account of the American time tax describes people burning hours on paperwork, delays, fees, and procedural exhaustion merely to secure benefits or services for which they may qualify. The New Yorker and The Atlantic describe a system that can locate your car remarkably efficiently while remaining hazily committed to locating your application.

That asymmetry is not just bad user experience. It is a theory of citizenship. The state becomes frictionless when gathering information or exercising coercive capacity, but sticky when distributing help. One function is called public safety; the other is called fraud prevention. Both may be legitimate concerns. The question is why their costs so reliably land on people with the least spare time, money, legal assistance, or confidence that a government database is a benign place to be.

Flock’s founder, Garrett Langley, frames the bargain in the familiar grammar of safety: citizens must “sacrifice our privacy.” The technology has real claimed and reported public-safety uses, including a case in which Flock data helped track a Brown University mass shooter. But a constitutional system is not supposed to assess a surveillance power by displaying its best case in a glass cabinet and then quietly discarding the rest of the inventory. The New Yorker’s account also describes allegations of officers using the system to stalk people, a Texas deputy querying a pool of more than 80,000 cameras in an abortion-related investigation, and ICE using Flock data with municipal police assistance to locate immigrants.

The striking political development is that the resistance is not obeying the old party map. Late in August, Governor Greg Abbott directed Texas agencies to freeze Flock-camera spending. Days later, Governor Ron DeSantis revoked permits for automated license-plate readers on Florida state highways and ordered their removal; Republican officials in Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee have also endorsed restrictions. This is not evidence that civil libertarianism has returned from its long sabbatical in a cabin with Thoreau. It is evidence that ubiquitous monitoring becomes more ideologically legible once enough people suspect the machine may eventually point at them. The New Yorker reports that almost half of Americans oppose these systems, though the underlying polling methodology is not included in the supplied account.

Langley’s stated posture—that builders build and elected officials decide how tools are used—sounds seductively modest. It also describes a world in which the party that profits from scale declines responsibility for scale’s foreseeable consequences. The vendor sells the panopticon; the public is invited to take its concerns to a zoning meeting. Yet the design choices—who can search, what data are retained, whether judicial approval is required—are not weather patterns. They are politics that have been converted into procurement.

The second Trump administration’s DOGE was charged, according to the Radio Atlantic discussion, with cleaning up government, modernizing systems, and improving efficiency. Lowrey’s assessment is that its implementation instead involved random civil-service firings, weekly five-point emails, slower purchasing, and litigation; she recounts NASA needing approval for bolts under DOGE-related procedures. The grand project of liberation from bureaucracy thus appears to have discovered bureaucracy’s oldest survival skill: reproducing under pressure. The Atlantic presents these as Lowrey’s characterizations, not a comprehensive independent audit of DOGE.

Her larger point is more durable than any one blue-ribbon—or black-meme—efficiency initiative. Administrative burdens are political decisions disguised as neutral process. Means-tested programs demand research, applications, recertification, and compliance; meanwhile, many higher-income tax advantages arrive through far less humiliating channels. Lowrey notes that nine in ten households take the standard deduction and argues the IRS already holds enough information to pre-fill returns for many of them, though it is legally barred from doing so. The average American, she says, spends 12 hours annually on the 1040 and roughly $300 on preparation. The Atlantic calls this an administrative burden; ordinary citizens call it Sunday evening.

There is a serious tension here, not a software demo waiting to happen. Better data-sharing could enable cross-enrollment for Medicaid and SNAP, simpler taxes, and fewer missed benefits. But Lowrey also warns that in a period of democratic backsliding, mixed-status families may reasonably fear that seeking help for citizen children exposes them to a threatening state. The Flock story supplies the missing cautionary footnote: data gathered for one purpose have a recurring habit of developing career ambitions. The sensible reform is neither maximal collection nor maximal paperwork. It is services designed to be easy to access, with information use narrowly constrained and power subject to real oversight—a sentence that will never fit on a DOGE slide deck, which may be its chief virtue.

Democrats have their own version of the administrative error: mistaking elite alarm for mass salience. Sarah Longwell recalls convening reluctant 2016 Trump voters in Columbus shortly after Trump’s 2018 Helsinki appearance alongside Vladimir Putin. Washington treated Trump’s public posture toward US intelligence and Russian interference as an institutional five-alarm fire. When the moderator asked the voters about it, Longwell recalls “a lot of blank stares.” The Atlantic offers this episode as an illustration from Longwell’s much larger body of focus-group work, not as a representative survey finding.

The lesson is not that constitutional norms, foreign interference, or presidential conduct are trivial. It is that voters do not experience politics as a graduate seminar in democratic erosion. They experience it as the cost of filing taxes, the length of a benefits queue, whether an agency can see them but not serve them, and whether a camera records their movements without a judge involved. A party that cannot translate institutional danger into lived stakes will continually discover that the public has failed to assign the correct homework.

Trump’s political advantage has often been his ability to turn complexity into emotional clarity, even when the resulting clarity is an aggressively simplified product. His governing challenge is that systems eventually reveal their actual operating instructions. A government that is all muscle toward the vulnerable and all paperwork toward the needy is not efficient; it is selective. And a politics that counts on voters never noticing the difference is gambling on the indefinite durability of the blank stare. History is not usually that accommodating.