# Jenga Politics **Jenga politics** is scholar [[danah boyd]]'s name for the way the [[Administrative State]], the agencies and career staff who carry out the law, has been weakened over decades. In the game of Jenga, players take turns pulling a block out of a wooden tower and setting it on top, so the tower gets taller and shakier with every move. Nobody is building anything. Each player is trying to make sure someone else is holding the block when it falls. boyd argues that American politics has treated the machinery of government the same way: support is pulled out from below, new demands are stacked on top, and the contest is over who takes the blame for a collapse. The idea comes out of roughly eight years she spent in and around the [[Census Bureau]], and it is the closing argument of her 2026 book *[[Data Are Made, Not Found]]*. She set it out for a general audience in a February 2025 blog post, written as the [[Second Trump Administration]] carried out mass firings and its appointees gained access to the [[Department of the Treasury]] payment systems run by the [[Bureau of the Fiscal Service]]. > [!quote] "We've been playing Jenga Politics for a long time now." > — danah boyd, "What Game Are We Playing?", February 3, 2025 ## How the game works - **Blocks come out.** boyd's examples are [[Austerity]] budgets and outsourcing, along with the elimination of programs that were doing useful work. - **Blocks go on top.** New laws, administrative burdens and personnel rules are added, many of them well meant. Each one is more weight on a structure with less holding it up. - **The staff are hobbled.** In the 2025 post she adds lawsuits and requests under the [[Freedom of Information Act]] used as weapons, by people with good intentions as well as bad ones. - **Civil servants patch the tower.** Career staff keep it standing with improvised repairs. Her image for this is duct tape. - **It falls slowly, then all at once.** boyd told the Cornell Chronicle that when vital systems fail, "it's always slow, then fast." She borrows the sociologist Charles Perrow's term *normal accident* for the result: a system so layered and strained that one wrong move can bring down the whole thing, without any single move being the cause. ## Who plays This is deliberately not a story about one party. In boyd's telling, conservatives have mostly pulled blocks out, in keeping with a goal of smaller government they have stated openly for close to a century, and liberals have mostly added blocks on top. She says each side has also done the other. Democratic presidents come in for specific criticism: [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] for bringing in the economists, [[Bill Clinton]] for outsourcing, [[Barack Obama]] for seeding the government with elite outsiders. Her complaint about both parties is the same. No recent politician, she writes, has really valued the career workforce. People acting in good faith are players too. The book's cases include what its publisher calls the not-so-helpful help of well-intended groups trying to prevent an undercount. None of this is a claim of equal blame. boyd separates players who mean well from players who do not. Her 2025 post argues that the people out to bring the tower down inherited its weak points instead of creating them, and had watched long enough to know which blocks to pull. ## The census as the worked example boyd first met the Census Bureau in 2016, as a member of a federal advisory committee, and stayed on as an ethnographer through the [[2020 Census]]. The book tells that count as a series of controversies in which, by the publisher's summary, political forces squeezed the budget, micromanaged the schedule and attacked the statisticians' methods. Its conclusion is that career staff saved the 2020 count and that future counts are precarious. Several of those fights have their own pages here: the [[Census Citizenship Question]], the deadline battle on the [[2020 Census]] page, the Bureau's confidentiality method at [[Differential Privacy]], and the people every count misses at [[Census Undercount]]. The frame reaches past the census. boyd applies it to other federal data-making on elections, health and the economy, the territory mapped on the [[Federal Statistical System Tree]] and worked by agencies such as the [[Bureau of Labor Statistics]]. ## How it fits the dismantling story Most of this wiki's coverage of the administrative state follows a deliberate campaign: the legal doctrines that shrink agency power, [[Schedule F]], [[DOGE]], and the firings and closures recorded on the [[DOGE and Government Dismantling Timeline]]. Jenga politics is a different kind of claim, and it complicates that story in three ways. - **It is older.** The game boyd describes was under way for decades before 2025. - **It is bipartisan, though not symmetrical.** Both parties made moves, in different directions and for different reasons. - **Adding counts as much as removing.** In this account a new requirement placed on an agency is a move in the game, just as a budget cut is. The two accounts meet in 2025. If boyd is right, the campaign did not have to make the government fragile. It found a tower already patched and top-heavy. That changes what repair would mean. Undoing the firings would bring back the tower of 2024, which her post describes as already precarious after the [[First Trump Administration]] and left unrepaired under [[Joe Biden]]. ## What she says would help In a September 2026 interview with Tech Policy Press, boyd's prescription was to stop adding weight to the top, strengthen the core, and repair infrastructure before it breaks. She also said Congress has long avoided its own responsibility for the census and has to take it back. A third thread, from her Cornell interview, is that trust in official data rests on relationships with the people who make it, not on a formula for quality. The test case is the [[2030 Census]]. Its design is being settled now, with the Bureau's outside advisory committees disbanded, its main field test cut back and the Director's seat vacant. ## Limits Jenga politics is a metaphor drawn from close study of one agency. boyd applies it to the administrative state as a whole, but the detailed evidence in the book is the Census Bureau's. It describes how fragility builds up. It does not measure how much each player contributed. ## Connections - [[danah boyd]] — the scholar who coined the term - [[Data Are Made, Not Found]] — the book that makes the full case - [[Administrative State]] — the tower itself, and the campaign against it - [[Census Bureau]] · [[2020 Census]] · [[2030 Census]] — the agency she studied and the counts at stake - [[Austerity]] · [[Starve the Beast]] — the politics of pulling blocks out - [[Schedule F]] · [[Deferred Resignation Program]] · [[Reduction in Force]] — how the career workforce has been cut since 2025 - [[DOGE]] — the operation under way when boyd published the frame - [[Boiling Frog]] — slow change that goes unnoticed until it is too late - [[Single Point of Failure]] — why some blocks matter more than others