In contemporary politics, the goals of persons, groups, and campaigns vary significantly in their scope, feasibility, and magnitude. A certain arbitrariness has long since characterised these goals, from “waging implacable war against poverty” to “draining the swamp”. This article posits that political vagueness of this sort is a deliberate choice, meant to increase the degree of discretionary power wielded by those who make it.
Public choice theory flows from the following basic assumption (or observation): politicians and bureaucrats are typically self-interested agents. This is not to say they are evil, but merely to point out public-sector employees are not exclusive servants of the public weal; they do their jobs with their own self-interest in mind, which may include wealth, prestige, or political power for themselves, their families, or their constituents.
Ideally, political actors would (in liberal-democratic societies) maximise their own credibility, electability, and prestige by prioritising goals that align with the demands of the public, and then achieving those goals in a way they can prove. Central to this incentive structure is the “testability” of the achievement of the stated goals of politicians. A promise to (for instance) reduce government spending by a specified degree, by a specified time-stamp, is easy to verify; a promise to “drain the swamp” is not.
In declaring the latter as a goal, however, Donald Trump altered this incentive structure – he took away (from every member of the public) the ability to check if a political promise was kept, and concentrated it in himself. What “the swamp” is – and what draining it would entail – is unclear. A popular understanding of the term would suggest it refers to the Washingtonian web of special interests and lobbies that stand in the way of the common good. By this metric, the swamp was surely not drained: the number and generosity of lobbyists changed little, nor was the “revolving door” walked through by them closed. One of the final acts of Trump’s first term was revoking the ban on public appointees working as lobbyists immediately after their term.
And yet when asked to face his failure to do as he said he would, Trump’s responses ranged from suggesting he didn’t know the swamp was “this dirty and this deep”, to gesturing vaguely at the “lot of people” he fired. Far from losing face in the eyes of his supporters, many of them continue to believe he will “run the country like a business”, never mind the increase in government spending produced by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The choice of a vague goal allows Trump to simply evade public scrutiny: nobody knew for certain what Trump meant when he promised to “drain the swamp”, and so Trump could simply decide what he meant by his promise retroactively.
The primary result of political vagueness is, therefore, politicians being able to claim success regardless of outcomes. Vague goals are “elastic” and can be reinterpreted constantly; thus, they become a signal of virtue rather than a genuine or “objective” benchmark by which to judge those elected to powerful positions. James M. Buchanan indicated that what is achieved by government typically reflects not the public interest, but the desires of those most effectively organised. Nebulous goals allow political groups allied to them to turn their organisation into a cycle; they can declare they will achieve an unclear goal (“drain the swamp”), then use the resulting political power to reinterpret the goal (“I fired a lot of people”, or “I didn’t know how bad it was”) in a way that guarantees them more power, which in turn they can use to silence opponents, benefit allies, or incentivise more favourable media coverage. Vague goals, therefore, represent a move away from a rules-based politics: if, to quote Buchanan, “good rules constrain bad men more effectively than good intentions can redeem bad rules”, “bad men” could use political vagueness to eliminate the rules that could constrain them.
Waste is another outcome of vague political goals, and (to paraphrase Gordon Tullock) especially so in bureaucratic contexts. If there is no objective standard by which to judge government efficiency or success, one defaults to allowing bureaucracies to define the magnitude of problems they solve, and the degree to which they have solved them. Trump’s DOGE provides a textbook example: it declared its goal to be “government efficiency”, pursuing which, it was argued, could be more effectively done with a “lack of parameters”. The result was DOGE’s work alone costing taxpayers nearly what it claims it saved, and making embarrassingly simple (and large) mistakes along the way.
A takeaway is that public-sector officials have a powerful incentive to engage in precisely this process; vague goals are not accidents, but deliberate choices made by political groups that seek power without responsibility. Leviathan might be termed a monster that engorges on itself, not by accident, but because it is rational for it to do so. Without a vigilant public that demands both goals that are specific and externally verifiable, and a constitutional order that prevents their lack, Leviathan may devour us all.
