Explaining Bureaucratic Bloat
8th June 2026
In recent posts, I’ve noted that the nation’s transit agencies are carrying far fewer riders than in 2019 and yet since that year the size of the transit bureaucracy has grown by more than 50 percent. Two MIT researchers, Vicky Yang and Levi Grenier, have offered a new explanation for such bureaucratic bloat. Instead of looking at transit, they were struck by MIT, whose faculty has grown by 9 percent and the number of students has grown by around 30 percent since 1985, but the number of administrative staff has almost tripled.