The Department Of Good Living

The advent of the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” is often placed during World War II, when it connoted both an all-encompassing bombardment and the desperation of those under attack trying to save their possessions from impending doom.

Already known for sink-related antics, Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s seeming second-in-command who is busy eviscerating the U.S. federal government, now seems hellbent on embodying the kitchen sink metaphor: a desperate, unthinking, all-out effort at destruction, deploying methods ineffectual and devastating alike. Time has proved Musk to be a human sink of sorts, efficiently draining away value from any particular thing he sits atop: 50% of Tesla, 80% of Twitter (although it has since rebounded) and, he would have us believe, 30% of the U.S. federal budget.

Federal employees on the other end, meanwhile, are forced to live as though under bombardment, scrabbling to rescue everything they can from the wholesale (and likely illegal) dismantling of USAID and the Department of Education; reactionary purges in the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration and military; the shuttering of programs for infectious disease management and scientific research; and the summary firing of thousands of federal employees — 5,700 in the Department of Agriculture and 7,000 in the Internal Revenue Service alone. Or else, they must transform into kitchen sinks themselves, becoming too burdensome to toss out with all the other contents of the U.S. government’s cupboards.

In the weeks since Musk has taken up his unusually prominent position as the Rasputin of Trump’s court, many attempts have been made to understand just what, exactly, is the vision of government dictating the swings of his wrecking ball. From his statements to the press and to Trump’s cabinet, he seems to think of government as little more than a sink itself — a hole into which tax dollars pour, a woeful drain on resources. It’s this vision of government that is at the core of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the team of mostly lawyers and programmers who are even now ripping data from decimated departments like copper wire from a demolition site.

It’s a particularly nihilistic view of government, one that portrays federal workers and their departments as “parasites” worthy of nothing but contempt. But even though Musk and DOGE are largely unpopular, this view of government is not. Nearly 60% of Americans say the government is wasteful and inefficient. Even more say they are dissatisfied with America’s democracy as a whole and the size of the federal government. Just 40% (mostly Democrats) think it does more for average Americans than it gets credit for.

How did Americans’ opinion of their government sink so low? Sixty years ago, nearly 8 in 10 Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. But for an administration that campaigned on making America “great again,” there is remarkably little curiosity about what version of government, exactly, elicited such widespread acclaim. 

The reason is fairly obvious — it was nothing like what they are building now.

The ideal kitchen sink, for a working kitchen of any reasonable size, has two basins. On the right, it’s a shallow five inches, a comfortable depth for washing dishes. On the left, it’s deeper — eight inches, perfect for rinsing down fresh fruits and vegetables. A wire drying rack is sized to fit the deeper basin; a cupboard behind the faucets secrets away soaps and sponges.

You’re unlikely to find this sink design in most modern houses. But it is the fruit of decades of diligent government research conducted primarily by a little-known agency known as the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. From 1923 to 1962, the bureau deployed mass public surveys, built experimental houses and conducted research into hundreds of consumer products from textiles to meats to kitchen sinks, all to deduce scientifically the best possible way to live a middle-class life in midcentury America. The resulting techniques, materials and designs still prompt misty-eyed nostalgia from TikTok traditionalists and bitter 21st-century consumers alike. In the last century, perhaps no other government agency has had such a profound impact on daily life — and yet today, it has been almost completely forgotten.

In many ways, the whole discipline of home economics started from ideological convictions very similar to those held by Musk and his allies: The historian and author Carolyn Goldstein identified “a belief in scientific and technological progress” and a sense of “the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.” In the 19th century, home economics taught best practices for cooking, gardening, sewing and other technical housekeeping skills. As Goldstein told me in an interview, it was “a time when we believed that everything, all of our social problems, had an engineering solution to them.”

At the turn of the century, the American government was actively engaged in building up the country’s rural heartland. While cities industrialized, rural America risked being left behind, and the backbone of 19th-century American identity — the family farmer, the frontiersman, the homesteader — was gradually fading away. “People were leaving their farms,” Goldstein said. “And by contrast, the farm, the farmers and the farm families that stayed looked downtrodden, overworked, inefficient.” 

The Cooperative Extension Service, created in 1914, used the relatively new public land-grant universities as home bases for educational outreach programs, teaching farmers the latest techniques and technologies for farm optimization. Through the predominantly female field of home economics, that outreach extended into the home to the farmers’ wives who ran the household and decided on matters of consumption.

Women, home economists recognized, were often the key mediators between private families and the marketplace, deciding which materials to buy, what food to eat and what appliances to use. One young woman from rural Virginia wrote to the U.S.D.A. pleading for reliable advice on oil stoves: “Housekeepers all around us are half sick from overwork,” she wrote. “A few real conveniences would stop much of this. … [But] the farmer’s wife seldom know[s] just what to get, where to get it and what it costs.” With voluntary rationing during World War I, U.S. government administrators realized the impact that reaching “the female consumer” could have; a government-issued recipe guide or sewing pattern could rapidly reduce demand or shift it to underutilized products so long as families knew how to use them. Providing parents with good data on nutrition would ensure that the next generation of soldiers would be fitter than the last.

Underlying these early initiatives was a general belief that the government had an active role to play in “promoting modern life,” Goldstein explained — and not just in service of increasing agricultural or wartime output. “Women shouldn’t need to feel they need to leave the family farm to have a modern stove,” she said. “So we needed to define the modern standards of middle class life — how to cook, clean, lay out your family budget — and then we needed to teach it.”

Before the bureau launched in 1923, all sorts of new ingredients and technologies that promised to make life easier — processed cheese, electric dishwashers, “artificial silk” — were proliferating. But many home consumers were ill-prepared to use or choose between them. In the golden age of advertising heralded by the arrival of broadcast radio, false claims abounded and dubious products flooded the marketplace.

The bureau was conceived as the antidote to these problems — an “information clearinghouse about consumer goods,” Goldstein called it in her book “Creating Consumers.” There, home economists evaluated cooking methods, tested fabrics until they wore thin, reviewed “child-rearing practices” and investigated new home accounting systems. To develop and evaluate the meat thermometer, they “roasted 2,200 legs of lamb, 800 rib roasts of beef, 450 cuts of fresh pork and about 50 cured hams” in just six years. “Uncle Sam is paying some of his employees to eat!” newspapers marvelled at the time.

That work was not slowed by either economic calamity or war. During the Great Depression, the bureau pioneered studies of minimum nutritional requirements that set the standards for aid relief from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. And through the Second World War, it produced recipe books for rationing, mold-resistant fabrics for army tents and detailed nutritional studies of beaver, muskrat, opossum and racoon meat, part of an effort to promote wild game consumption. We still eat enriched flour, drink fortified milk, cook meat to certain temperatures and follow certain instructions for washing clothes as a result of the bureau’s research, even if its ideal kitchen sink has since gone out of style.

Always, the bureau’s findings were shared with individual consumers and industry alike. The idea was that both companies and citizens shared a responsibility for building a “rational consumer society” where reasoned, responsible consumption produced good citizenship. It was a two-way street. “Rather than manipulating consumers, ideal producers educated them,” Goldstein wrote. “Bureau home economists sought to supply ‘good’ or ‘progressive’ companies with information about homemakers’ preferences so that they could design better products and label them with useful, factual information.” 

Government threats of heavy regulation ensured companies played ball. Through the 20s and 30s, taking the advice of home economists was increasingly seen as “a means of self-regulation in an era of increased government oversight,” Goldstein told me. Feeling pressure from both the government and increasingly educated consumers, America’s biggest brands felt the need to develop a reputation for “good corporate citizenship.”

The result, unsurprisingly, was better products. There’s a reason the refrigerator designs of the 1950s still elicit wistful desire — they were, unlike today’s appliances, the product of obsessive study by home economists public and private alike, designed first and foremost with the consumer experience in mind, with sliding shelves, detachable fruit and vegetable storage containers and a nifty system to get ice cubes out of trays.

What feels so radical about the bureau’s work today is the way that it went largely unquestioned that government experts, working for no one but the public, could help define the best products and practices in the marketplace. Much like today, the economy and consumer experiences were rapidly changing. But the U.S. government was there to hold people’s hands, to explain new technologies, define their best uses and guide users to the best options they could afford.

The bureau was forbidden from offering specific brand endorsements or granular advice to individual citizens; to do so would almost certainly have been a gateway to corruption. But it didn’t need to. The maternalistic scientists of the bureau — Louise Stanley, Hazel Stiebeling, Ruth O’Brien, Hildegarde Kneeland — correctly believed that well-educated consumers could direct the market toward quality products. At least, in the kind of market that prevailed for the first half of the 20th century.

What really made the bureau’s work possible was two fundamental beliefs that today are all but anathema in American politics: First, that the government must play an active role in bettering consumer products, and second, that industry bears a civic responsibility to take care of its consumers. The second half of the 20th century is, in many ways, the story of a long decline of those two ideas.

In 1948, the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics celebrated its 25th anniversary in the style of a triumphant victory. Staff snacked on minted fruit cocktail, beef tenderloin with fresh mushrooms, parsley potatoes and roasted asparagus. Ice cream and a birthday cake with coconut frosting made up the final course. At the end of the meal, attendees joined in a triumphant song that had been composed for the occasion: “Gone are the days when only men can roam / Gone are the days when the girls all stay at home / For now you’ll see women working everywhere … These women, these women, how they do love to roam.”

The party may as well have been a funeral. Within four years, the bureau would be gutted, its staff cut by 20%, its funding slashed by even more.

The bureau’s demise and eventual closure in 1963, Goldstein wrote, can be chalked up to many different factors. In the aftermath of the war, men returned to the workforce and muscled in on the work of home economists; new disciplines like “food engineering” disrupted what was once an almost exclusively female field. And then modern marketing was born, and corporate America pillaged home economists who might previously have gone to work for the government to instead write recipes and ad copy for corporate brands.

Concurrent with these changes was a shift in government philosophy. The election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 brought a backlash against the idea of big, bullish government agencies; projects like the bureau were increasingly viewed as surplus to requirements. In 1953, the bureau was consolidated into the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), and its work more narrowly focused on nutrition. By 1955, ARS administrator Byron T. Shaw was proposing the bureau cease virtually all consumer product reviews. The American public, he said, could simply trust the manufacturers.

Ironically, one cause of this shift was America’s postwar prosperity. Stanley and other thought-leaders in home economics had to shift their focus from managing wartime scarcity to distributing unprecedented abundance — in no small part thanks to the decades-long effort they led to modernize America’s farms and factories. It was the belief of many in the bureau that this new American bounty would need to be meted out to the rest of the world in order to prevent the return of war — “Save Wheat, Save Meat, Save the Peace,” read one slogan, which was nixed within a year following objections from the meat and grain lobbies.

But that belief inadvertently redefined the role of government, not only in the market, but in people’s lives. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms were aimed to uplift “the needy,” and increasingly the government’s purpose was defined solely with reference to this amorphous group. In “The Century of the Self,” documentarian Adam Curtis pointed to this era as the moment of transition from a culture of needs to a culture of desires; big government, it seemed, was to be relegated to the former. The rest would have the market — and the market alone.

The “golden age of capitalism” is generally accepted to have come crashing to a close in 1973 when simultaneous shocks hit many Western economies. Empowered by a growing speculative finance industry and a new capacity to move money across borders, the manufacturing companies that defined 1950s society rapidly moved to developing economies where they could more easily throw their weight around.

For ordinary Americans, 25 years of rabid anticommunism — coupled with the corruption of the Nixon years and the U.S. failure in Vietnam — had primed the country for a profound reinvention of American identity. Gone was civic nationalism. In its place emerged a sense that citizens ought to stand alone without dependency on neighbor, community or government.

Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan arrived with a mandate to radically shrink the American government, which he characterized as a cabal of wasteful and parasitical “elites.” “The federal government … has overspent, overestimated and over-regulated,” Reagan had previously declared. “Overgrown and overweight,” as he had put it, the federal government was in need of “a diet.”

The result of that “diet,” however, was to deprive the government of the tools to help ordinary people — middle class and “needy” alike — and instead actively antagonize them. Essentially siding with international financial markets over his own citizens, Reagan enforced high unemployment and a devastating recession to bring down inflation. Government services were privatized; regulations were slashed. Institutions established to maintain the delicate balance of power between citizens, corporations and the state, like the National Labor Relations Board, were turned upon the workers they were founded to protect.

Throughout this transition, Reagan continually chastised Americans for ever believing in the kind of shared civic responsibility imagined by the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics and for ever doubting that society existed to serve the market. The true American creed, he repeatedly averred, was “legitimate self-interest.” After all, he opined, capitalism was “a system which has never failed us, but which we have failed through a lack of confidence.”

The irony is that the American government was still acting aggressively to shape the economy, but now on behalf of monied interests. “These policies are invariably described as restoring market forces,” the economists Ben Fine and Laurence Harris wrote in 1987. “But they are in fact,  and rather obviously, state interventions on behalf of capital.”

This shift was ruinous for the American economy: Manufacturing output tanked, industry moved abroad, unemployment soared and inequality rose nearly to prewar levels. “The story that Reagan tried to tell the country in the 80s, which is, basically: ‘Forget about equality; the key to prosperity is to let the top become richer and richer’ — it doesn’t work,” the economist Thomas Piketty, whose work has helped definitively prove the trend toward greater inequality in America since the 1970s, told The New York Times in 2022.

But it was more ruinous still for the American psyche, which would never recover a positive vision of the government’s role in the marketplace. During the 1990s, politicians on both the left and right herded behind the “neoliberal consensus,” the idea that the free flow of capital and unrestricted markets produced trickle-down benefits for the American middle class, and that the government should take an ever-diminishing role in daily life.

In American political circles, that dogma remains largely unchallenged. After the 2008 financial crisis once again exposed the failures of neoliberal economic policy, Barack Obama appointed the same financial advisors who had helped Bill Clinton aggressively deregulate the financial sector. “They didn’t challenge the fundamental premise, the market triumphalist premise — namely, that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good,” the American political philosopher Michael Sandel said in an interview with the New Statesman.

Today, it would seem we have reached an apotheosis of this view, where deregulation has allowed American companies to grow so large and so valuable that they rival states in both economic and political power. Such entities no longer feel any semblance of civic responsibility; despite benefiting from billions in government subsidies, Tesla has paid virtually no federal income tax in the last three years, and it is far from exceptional in that regard. Governments, meanwhile, have become so weak across the Western world that they cannot raise capital gains or business taxes even minimally without facing dark threats of ruinous consequences from America’s biggest brands, much less increase taxation to the astronomical levels — marginal rates as high as 90% or more — that sustained ambitious government initiatives like the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics.

But as evidenced by Musk’s purges, there are those now in power who would like to go further: to see the state entirely subsumed to private interests. In recent weeks, a growing number of outlets have been bold enough to call this vision what it is: techno-fascism, or rule by engineers, where the human aspects of democratic deliberation and governance are subsumed to the determinations of algorithms designed and maintained by a select few. “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control,” the political scientist Andrea Molle told The New Yorker. “They can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

This is the vision for a government that has totally abandoned any idea that it should act as a countermeasure to the market or, even less, a unifying civic establishment. It is subservient entirely to a “CEO-king,” in the worldview of neoreactionary pseudo-philosopher Curtis Yarvin, for whom citizens are merely employees or property.

It may sound hyperbolic, but there is reason to believe this vision of government is now being enshrined at the heart of the American executive. Yarvin’s ideas have animated Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Musk himself, all of whom have encircled the president. As the journalist Robert Evans wrote, Yarvin inspires in “a lot of young techie kids the idea that CEOs should run the world. Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon because those kids are useful footsoldiers [and] Yarvin’s ideas … are convenient for his own ambitions.”

And what, exactly, are those ambitions? In the word of one “close associate,” it’s not far off from a CEO-king. “Elon believes he should be emperor of the world,” they told Vanity Fair. “He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.”

The problem is, when it comes right down to it, the world created by the big tech monopolies — unfettered from government regulation, largely immune from taxation and unbound by any sense of duty to the customers, citizens, institutions, legal systems and environments that sustain them — is kind of shit.

These days, if you want the “best” kitchen sink, you could choose the SWISH KS 02000111-82, an app-connected smart sink with waterfall faucets, hydroxyl water ion cleaning technology and multiple inserts for washing and chopping vegetables. Connecting the sink to your phone (in theory for the purpose of seeing and setting the water temperature that is already visible on the sink’s LED display) will likely log sensitive data in a place where it could be exposed to hackers. 

The market is full of relatively inexpensive, touchscreen-laden, right-angled, hard-to-clean smart sinks, mostly from opaque Amazon brands — companies with names like SDGRP and MWIDCIEW that are nonetheless evidently esteemed enough to get on SEO-optimized listicles of “smart kitchen sinks you need in 2025.” Many of the janky but profitable lessons of disrupting the digital world are now being eagerly applied to the appliances market, with washing machines that can be hacked to mine crypto, ovens with paywalled downloadable functions and lightbulbs that need regular software updates. What seems to be taking shape is an endless hierarchy of subscriptions and unlockable add-ons, at first offered for free but then often clogged with performance-degrading ads. There is no Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics to tell us, or them, what makes a good product, what will function well over a long period of time, what serves customers best. There is only the “free” marketplace, where cash is king.

The tech journalist Cory Doctorow described this phenomenon of everything, everywhere, getting worse all at once as “enshittification,” a process by which companies have profited by progressively cheapening consumer products. For Doctorow, enshittification results partly from the government’s abandonment of and capture by the marketplace — competition laws go unenforced, intellectual property laws are written to benefit incumbents. “Industries collapse into these cartels or monopolies or duopolies,” he told me. “Everywhere you look, you see this. … It really amounts to a collapse in market discipline, and a collapse in regulatory discipline.”

In recent years, this has been supercharged by what the tech critic Ed Zitron has called the “Rot Economy,” a fundamental shift in business ethics brought about by the growing power of financial markets. “Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what ‘good’ business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth,” he wrote. Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla are now constantly rewarded for short-term, self-destructive policies like downgrading the digital search experience or clogging software with invasive and annoying AI tools because it provides a marginal gain for shareholders.

The result is not just, as Zitron has written, “a constant state of digital micro-aggressions”; it is a deformed and degraded civic ethos. Fifty years of antisocial rhetoric has generated a climate where the once-noble pursuit of producing a good or providing a service is increasingly thought of in zero-sum terms: I win when my customer loses. “It’s the abandonment of not just any sense of a common cause but a workable consensus reality,” the journalist David Roth wrote in the wake of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, a showcase for Silicon Valley’s latest ambitious projects. “It’s the swamping of every collective effort or any nascent social consciousness in favor of individuals assiduously optimizing and competing and refining and selling themselves, not so much alongside the rest of humanity as in constant competition with all of it.”

Inevitably, that has consequences for how Americans are able to conceive of their own government. “The idea that government is fundamentally suspect has been around for so long, has become so widely held — and has had such a dumbing-down effect on public conversation — that a full-throated defense of the ideals and institutions of American government seems cringe-worthy,” the critic M. Gessen wrote in The New York Times. 

But increasingly, that is what opponents of Trump and Musk’s destructive project are demanding from their leadership. “We are in this moment because, for decades, Republicans have told us that government is bad,” California Congressman Ro Khanna said recently. “Democrats must have the courage to make the case that government is good and can work.” As many have observed, voters who do not sense a vision for comprehensive reform and a move away from the economic orthodoxy that has held sway for the last half-century seem happy enough to endorse Trump’s disruption, however ruinous. 

So what could an alternative vision be? The first step may be to finally recognize that “running government like a business” has always been a red herring. The government is not a business — it is the thing that makes business possible. Unregulated markets frequently fail to produce good businesses so long as we define “good” as beneficial to their customers. And unregulated businesses, as we’ve recently been forced to witness, are even worse at producing good government. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has long argued, the libertarian CEO types now running Washington are willfully ignorant of just how dependent their industries are on the backbone of public services like roads, telecoms, courts and publicly-funded research — services they have enjoyed largely for free since financial liberalization and business tax cuts have allowed them to shelter the vast majority of their profits.

Step two is much harder: articulating some positive idea of an activist government in the marketplace. For Doctorow, as for many others, this begins with “a very aggressive antitrust agenda” aimed at breaking up the monopolies that have become powerful enough to capture — and try to replace — the federal government under Trump. “You cannot have a referee who is weaker than the players on the field,” he told me.

But there are other, more constructive roles the government could play. Doctorow suggested a federal jobs guarantee that would put a meaningful floor on the value of labor. Or a database of publicly funded, patent-free research, which would compel corporations to support interoperability — what Mazzucato has called, in the context of AI, a “decentralized innovation ecosystem that serves the public good.”

As with the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, it’s tempting to imagine bigger: a government department that drives research and development into consumer electronics, software and other tools — potentially even social media and news, not to mention the fields that Trump and Musk and their henchmen are actively destroying, like health, science and energy. Arguably, the best recent example of this kind of government-led consumer activism is the universal adoption of USB-C, a shift prompted by European Union policy that has simplified life for hundreds of millions of people. How many more simple fixes are possible that way?

Of course, now is not a great time to be in the optimism business. U.S. civil society, especially after Musk’s interventions, may need years to recover the capacity to deliver ordinary goods and services, let alone ambitiously pursue market interventions. “We don’t need a bunch of scientists measuring counter heights,” the labor reporter Hamilton Nolan told me. “We need public healthcare. We need adequate mass transit in cities. We need affordable housing. Basic things.”

For Nolan, meeting these basic needs would be on the government’s agenda if the U.S. could return to a state of “functional democracy.” The problem is, as Piketty ominously warned in 2022, “the rules of the game” have long been set up to “entrench” the power of rich elites. The lesson from history, he said, is that without a serious countermovement — “a reaction, a mobilization” — the taxation of the rich trends toward zero. “Historically, you always need a great crisis to snap out of these things,” Nolan said. “And that’s where I think we’re headed. I just don’t know if it’s World War III or Great Depression II — but I think it’s got to get really fucked up.”

But for those waiting to pick up the pieces — or optimistic enough to try to stop the disintegration — anti-government nihilism cannot be countered without a defense of the government’s role in daily life. The Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics was by no means a perfect institution: It lacked regulatory teeth, it was probably too cozy with corporations and many of its recommendations never made the impact that its researchers had hoped for. But it did represent a fleeting, hopeful vision: a government committed to creating a society — reaching for better, not racing to the bottom.