“I’ve got a plan for that.”

With those six words, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have ensured that she would never be president, even though she was at least as well qualified as anyone else.

Running in 2020, the Massachusetts Democrat may have been the most thoughtful candidate of the lot. She seemed to have thought through the challenges of the job. Her answers, it seemed, always began with, “I’ve got a plan for that.”

Some made great sense. Others not so much.

Her admirers heard, “We can do this.” But maybe millions of others may have heard, “I want to set up more programs, hire more bureaucrats.”

Recent events in Lewiston bring bureaucracy to mind. On Tuesday, the Lewiston City Council put off for two months a proposal to scrap the job of city sanitarian in favor of state inspections of eating establishments. The council wants more information about the inspection system.

Two restaurants have complained lately about the enforcement of city regulations. Cowbell Grille & Tap decamped from downtown (to Yarmouth), and DaVinci’s Eatery closed for nine days because of a sanitation complaint. The owners mentioned the obstacles of dealing with city bureaucrats.

David Brooks wrote last week in The New York Times about a Harvard Business Review study that concluded the “growth in bureaucracy costs Americans $3 trillion a year,” a sixth of our output. That was in 2016. We have one administrator for every 4.7 workers, he wrote. (Business-school studies I read years ago said crews work best with one supervisor per seven workers.)

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, wrote “Democracy in America.” He loved what he saw in our nation but he waved a caution flag, foreseeing that from a “crowd of similar and equal men” would emerge a new kind of despotism.

Brooks called the growth in the number of paper-pushers the “soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about,” a power that ‘is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.’”

While Brooks singled out inanities in higher education and health care, bureaucracy’s spread is universal. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. One task the EU took on was regulating the curvature of bananas. Another was to put every law and regulation into all 24 official languages of the member states. (That number shrank to 23 when the UK left.)

The result, reported by The Washington Post, was that the EU employed 5,350 language people.

David Himmelstein, who studies health care, wrote, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” To which Brooks added medical administrators exist “to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.”

Perhaps nowhere is the bureaucratic swell greater than in higher education. We needn’t look farther than Bangor to see this. I wrote in 2016 that the University of Maine System (chancellor’s office) had “grown to 316 employees, 24 of whom are paid more than $100,000 a year. Those 316 never meet a class in a lecture hall or lab, never advise a student.” Or do academic research.

“When I was teaching at Orono (1980-83), the UMaine system office was about seven people on one floor of Alumni Hall. That’s a growth of 45-fold over 30 years.” I tried to update those numbers for this column but couldn’t find them on the UMS website. So much for transparency.

Mark Edmunson, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in Liberties Journal that his one-page annual “self-evaluation” swelled to 15 electronic pages, which, Brooks wrote, are laden with bureaucratese to ensure “his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.”

And the bizarre. Edmundson cited an administrative directive to staff on how to practice sadomasochistic sex. “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, non-consent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal non-consent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Really.

Edmundson wrote that power is held now by people who issue work surveys and reports, create trainings and collect data. This adds up to a “time tax,” as Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic: “Policy is crafted from red tape, entangling millions of people who are struggling to find a job, failing to feed their kids, sliding into poverty, or managing a disabling health condition.”

I know about the time tax. I attended a legislative hearing on a farm issue. A dozen farmers, a dozen or so employees of the Ag Department. The bureaucrats testified first, which took all morning. After 2 p.m., the committee heard from a couple of farmers who hadn’t left in anger.

I spent all day in Augusta, and lost whatever amount of money I might have earned that day farming. The bureaucrats drew full pay while testifying about how they wanted to take away some more of our control over our own businesses. That’s a steep tax.

Give the final words to Brooks. “Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: Working-class people rebelling against administrators.”

Folks want to “lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality” but at work, school and hospitals “confront ‘an immense and tutelary power’ (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.”

Bob Neal believes that if Democrats want to portray themselves as “the party of government,” they need to make government work. By and large, they are failing at that. Neal can be reached at [email protected].