In the 20th century, people didn’t appreciate government employees, whom they viewed as officious, interfering types who made life difficult and expensive. However, now that leftists have completely integrated themselves into the federal bureaucracy, they are heroes, and a minute downsizing is treated as the heroic stand of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

To make your day happier, here are a few 20th-century jokes about bureaucrats, a collection that must always begin with Ronald Reagan’s famous quip: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Russians, victims of the Soviet state, fully understood the bureaucratic burden:

A man goes to a Soviet government office to get a car.

The clerk says, “Your car will be ready in ten years.”

The man asks, “Morning or afternoon?”

The clerk responds, “What difference does it make?”

“The plumber is coming in the morning.”

In post-WWII France, people complained, “France is a country where the bureaucracy is so big, it takes three months to get permission to be buried.” Meanwhile, the Germans complained that “A man files a form in triplicate to request permission to buy a form.”

Americans have traditionally seen their bureaucrats as nothing but trouble. In the 1940s, they complained, “In Washington, when you want to get something done, you write a memo. When you want to make sure nothing gets done, you form a committee.”

By the 1960s, lightbulb jokes took on the bureaucrats:

Q: How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Two. One to assure everyone that everything possible is being done, and another to screw it into a water faucet.

Even by the 1970s, as leftists were accelerating their inroads into the federal government, people quipped, “Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”

In other words, while most people in the last century would have said that bureaucrats were necessary, most also viewed them as an evil or, at least, a burden, inconvenience, hindrance, and source of endless frustration.

Things have changed a lot. After battling unelected federal judges, Donald Trump was finally able to make headway with his plan to trim the bloated federal bureaucracy’s 2.2-2.3 million employees. To that end, his administration issued reduction-in-force (“RIF”) notices to 1,350 State Department employees, consistent with Trump’s Executive Order that the government should eliminate “waste, bloat, and insularity” from federal agencies:

All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website.

The terminated employees constitute 0.06% of the total federal workforce and 1.7% of all State Department employees. We are not talking the workplace equivalent of a bloodbath.

Nevertheless, from the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth on the left, you’d think that the entire State Department had been drained of people, leaving a building as empty as the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Just look at the theater within the building, as the remaining 98.3% of employees wave farewell to their compatriots:

WATCH! Employees carry out belongings after over 1300 fired at the State Dept pic.twitter.com/sLpwiYWPZk

— Alex Raufoglu (@ralakbar) July 11, 2025

Mark Hemingway had the right response (although he overestimated the percentage of now-former employees):

The fact the State Dept. can’t go through a two percent staff reduction without making a scene and patting each other on the back about fighting “fascism” should be nauseating to normal people. https://t.co/SBF1bCJbGK

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) July 12, 2025

And if you’re wondering why he mentioned “fascism,” it’s because the theater extended to exhortations with the building calling on the remaining allegedly non-partisan civil servants to “resist fascism.”

At the State Dept, signs have been posted in bathrooms reading “Colleagues, if you remain: RESIST FASCISM Remember the oath you vowed to uphold” (1st spotted by @CamJourno; 2nd shared w/ me; another spotted in a communal area @CBSNews) pic.twitter.com/FT4yHaV0bv

— Sara Cook (@saraecook) July 11, 2025

Once again, we’re seeing that leftists are, at heart, theater kids. And yes, the statistical likelihood is that both those leaving and those staying behind are leftists. Of those State Department employees who donated to a presidential candidate in 2024, ~94% of them contributed to Kamala. I think that, given their political orientation, we can assume that these State Department employees cheered on policies that destroyed coal mining jobs and that forced people to get vaccinated or get fired. It’s always different when they do it.

 In the public sector, people are fired all the time, whether for cause or not. It’s part of life in the real world. For decades, though, left-leaning college graduate drama queens have been held gently in the government’s coddling arms as they convinced themselves that they were revolutionaries fighting “the system.” Well, now the system is fighting them, and they’re about to discover life in the real world.

Image created using ChatGPT.