Former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Emanuel Isac Celedon “has been sentenced to federal prison in two separate cases for allowing aliens and cocaine across the border,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last Friday. He provides a particularly egregious example of how career federal employees can undermine America.

In 2023, Celedon reached out to a Mexican cartel, offering to allow drugs and illegal immigrants through his travel lane in exchange for bribes. He subsequently allowed human smugglers through his lane on at least nine separate occasions. He twice “allowed several kilograms of what he believed to be cocaine into the United States” in exchange for $6,000, unknowingly falling into the clutches of a sting operation. He subsequently received 117 months in prison, or nearly 10 years.

Celedon was essentially a dirty cop, taking money from a criminal organization in exchange for looking the other way when they carried out their criminal enterprises. And he was trapped, arrested, and sentenced just as other dirty cops are. But, as a CBP officer, he was no ordinary cop. By allowing illegal immigrants and dangerous drugs through our country’s border, Celedon’s actions directly undermined U.S. national security. Because this federal employee didn’t like his civil service salary, he chose to join a plot against America.

If Celedon showed how a single individual can undermine America, imagine what a more systematic effort could do.

Unfortunately, no imagination is necessary. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee published records from an internal chat log at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which “shows the FBI deliberately withheld information about the FBI having Hunter Biden’s laptop,” the Committee said, manipulating Twitter into censoring the story as misinformation.

In a 2023 deposition, FBI official Laura Dehmlow testified concerning a call between Twitter employees and FBI officials, at the time when the FBI was actively directing Twitter how to censor the free speech of American citizens. “Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real,” said Dehmlow. “And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment.’”

The internal chat log further authenticates Dehmlow’s account and provides additional detail. One message indicated that concealing the true facts was the FBI’s deliberate stance, as a senior official (name redacted) instructed, “do not discuss biden matter.” Another message indicated that DOJ lawyers had placed a “gag order” on the FBI employee who had spoken out of turn. Further discussion revealed that the analyst had been “admonished” by FBI staff, but still wouldn’t “shut up.” These last messages came right after another user reported that “twitter is treating as disinformation” the story about the Biden laptop, which the FBI knew to be true.

In this incident, we see senior officials at the FBI scrambling to silence their own staff to conceal information, knowing that would cause social media platforms to censor Americans exercising their free speech rights by repeating true information. The sole reason for this course of action was to influence the political process during a presidential campaign by protecting their preferred candidate from a potential scandal.

FBI officials did this, again, without any public accountability because they are unelected, career federal employees.

These are two anecdotes. They do not, by themselves, prove a trend. There are doubtless other cases of bureaucratic misconduct — perhaps many more — that still fall short of demonstrating that every bureaucrat is out there trying to undermine America. But just these two anecdotes demonstrate the outsized impact bureaucrats can have when they selfishly pursue an interest contrary to that of the American people for whom they ostensibly work.

One fairly obvious conclusion is that bureaucrats have too much power and too little accountability. An emotionally satisfying but oversimplified solution is to eliminate bureaucracy, but that is not an achievable outcome.

Instead, conservatives should push to review the incentives that bureaucrats face. Prudent policymakers recognize the fallen nature of man and account for it. They create incentive structures that harness our natural self-interestedness so that it works for the general good. Free and open markets achieve this economically. Frequent elections accomplish this goal for politicians.

But most of America’s bureaucracy was established at a time when America was governed by people who believed in the inherent goodness of man. They believed that government could be perfected by placing it in the hands of benevolent technocrats. Consequently, they devised inadequate constraints on the power of those technocrats, as well as inadequate mechanisms to hold them accountable.

America needs a serious conversation about how to reform the incentives bureaucrats face. Yes, this includes eliminating wokeness and DEI hiring requirements. Yes, it involves finding ways to fire bad employees. But we also need to discuss more changes at the structural and incentive level, too.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is going about reforming the bureaucracy in a crude, hasty manner — one which circumstances may even justify. But mowing the 18th green with a steamroller does not create a surface golfers will want to play on. Eventually, you have to find the right tool for the job.

In any event, DOGE’s efforts have made one thing clear: judging by the hornets’ nest they have stirred up, reforming the bureaucracy will be no easy task.