Dead weight?

Reader question:

Please explain “dead weight of bureaucracy”. Dead weight?

My comments:

The heaviness of bureaucracy, that is, the cumbersomeness of it.

Cumbersomeness?

I’m sorry. I never thought I’d ever write that word. But why not? Cumbersomeness goes well with bureaucracy, with all its inertia, inaction and immovability.

Bureaucracy?

If you need a stamp on a document from some governmental agency and the clerks make you go to many different offices without you ever finding the one person who’s supposed to be responsible for it, you are experiencing bureaucracy.

Generally speaking, bureaucratic agencies are lazy, unresponsive, undemocratic, inefficient and often incompetent.

Bureaucracy, in short, makes you go through lots of procedures without getting anything actually done.

Bureaucracy slows things down and holds society back.

It’s like dead weight on the collective shoulders of all of us.

Dead weight?

Dead weight, literally, refers to the weight of a person that’s dead or sleeping, unconscious, limp.

Dead weight feels heavier than live weight, the weight of someone who’s alive. If you’ve ever carried someone on your shoulders in a play, you know that when that someone is healthy and active, he feels lighter than when he’s injured. When he’s healthy, he can cling to you tight – by clutching your shoulders with his arms and wrapping his legs round your hips. That way, he feels like part of your body.

When he’s injured and limp, however, he’s unable to move his limbs freely. This time, he feels much heavier to carry. He feels like, well, dead weight, a body of weight that pulls you in one direction and one direction only.

Downward, that is.

Metaphorically, bureaucracy feels like that, an immeasurably large piece of dead weight that pulls society down and holds it back.

All right, that’s “dead weight of bureaucracy”.

Now, let’s read a few media examples of “dead weight”:

1. For years, congressional Republicans have promised that their policy ideas, paired with a Republican in the White House, would lead to an instant obliteration of President Barack Obama’s health care law and the advent of something less expensive, more efficient and delivering better care.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, that plan unraveled on the floor of the Senate, undermined by a toxic brew of a poorly assembled bill, the undeniable rising popularity of the current health care law among many Republican governors and voters, and a president who undermined the efforts at every turn, spending the final crucial days threatening the senators he was trying to woo while attacking an attorney general they admire.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, tried after the failed health care vote to blame Democrats, whom he criticized for not participating “in a serious way” in the process that he pointedly prevented them from joining.

President Trump blamed Congress, and did not spare his own party. “They’ve been working on that one for seven years,” he said at an appearance Friday on Long Island. “You can believe that? The swamp.” He said the best strategy now was simply “to let Obamacare implode.”

But after six months of repeated failures to pass any meaningful legislation during what is traditionally the most productive time for a party with unified control of both the White House and Congress, it is Republicans who are clearly flailing.

Once architects of conservative policy, the party appears short of fresh ideas, left to try to find often incoherent compromises between the hard right flank that helped bring it to power and the populist notions that fueled President Trump’s victory last year. Republicans talked incessantly about “patient-centered health care,” but it was a slogan that never had much meaning. Their only coherent argument for excising the health care law was because they said they would for seven years.

“This is what you get when you have a president with no fixed principles, indifferent to policy and ignorant of the legislative process,” said Charlie Sykes, a veteran Republican operative and former radio host. He added, “There’s a difference between whiteboards and legislating in the real world. It’s hard to take away benefits once conferred.”

Many of the party leaders appear to remain out of step with their own voters, who took seriously Mr. Trump’s warm embrace of some government entitlement programs, even as he abandoned those notions in recent months. While some conservative pundits attacked their failure to repeal the health care law this spring, scant protests rose up from the right to counter the thousands of Affordable Care Act supporters who appealed to lawmakers for months to maintain much of the law.

Congressional Republicans, especially in the House, are hamstrung by their lack of legislative experience. Many of them have never served under a president of their own party or passed major policy reforms that require at least token bipartisan support, and remain in chin-out oppositional mode.

Most of the health care bills they have passed were largely symbolic gestures that they knew would be vetoed by President Obama. But those bills, including a root-to-branch repeal vote in 2015, came back to haunt them, creating expectations with the party’s base that they were unwilling to revisit once in power.

“The Republicans were never really forced in their years of opposition to come up with a coherent alternative,” said Peter Wehner, a director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under President George W. Bush. “There was no human cost in those artificial votes, and that did not force them to come up with a real governing alternative.” He added, “As the years went by the Affordable Care Act’s roots grew and it became entwined in the health care system. It was an extremely complicated legislative task to undo it.”

…

But most Republicans believe that their path to repealing the law would have likely succeeded had it not been for Mr. Trump, whose comments about other topics and inconsistent support for their work – he celebrated a House-passed bill in a Rose Garden ceremony only to denounce it as “mean” weeks later – undermined their efforts.

“I think this is in good measure Trump’s fault,” Mr. Wehner said, echoing what many Republicans said privately and increasingly in public. “He has no knowledge of public policy and is indifferent to it. To try and get massive reform through Congress, even if you have control of Congress, you need the president to be an asset. He isn’t only not an asset, he is an active adversary. He is dead weight for Republicans.”

- On Health, Republicans Find They Cannot Beat Something With Nothing, NYTimes.com, July 28, 2017.

2. Kamala Harris may have been all smiles and welcoming after her crushing presidential election defeat to Donald Trump, but, a report has claimed that she has placed the blame on her husband, Doug Emhoff, for her electoral loss.

On January 17, while preparations were underway for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Kamala Harris’s staff packed into her ceremonial office to watch her sign the desk, a tradition performed by her predecessors for decades. All this while, her husband was seen standing behind her for a photo, as she wielded her Sharpie marker.

“It is not my nature to go quietly into the night,” Harris told reporters, adding, “So don’t worry about that.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” she said, upon being asked what was next for her.

Many blamed Joe Biden for running in the first place and putting Harris in an impossible position. Harris faced her own criticism, too.

Some said she should have sent a more populist message instead of focusing on Trump’s antidemocratic threats by campaigning with Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman. She also failed to separate herself from Biden, who remains deeply unpopular with voters.

Now, that Donald Trump has taken the President’s charge, Harris is apparently playing the blame game, and her target is her husband Doug Emhoff, whom she reportedly considers “dead weight”.

Quoting a source, the Daily Mail reported that Doug has his share as far as Kamala’s blame game is concerned.

“Doug did Kamala no favours during the election,” the report quoted the source as saying.

- Kamala Harris Blames Husband Doug Emhoff For Her Election Loss, Considers Him ‘Dead Weight’: Report, News18.com, January 23, 2025.

3. Donald Trump has ignited fresh health worries after he was seen with a noticeable limp while spending time with his grandson.

The US president was accompanied by his nine-year-old grandson, Theodore Kushner, in the White House Presidential Walk of Fame over the weekend as the pair were seen throwing an NFL football back and forth - but the 79-year-old appeared to have difficulty walking in a straight line. Viewers of a clip showing the interaction, which has been viewed nearly a million times on X (formerly Twitter), have claimed that Trump appeared unstable on his feet, dragging one leg as he walked.

“Trump’s walk would demand a breathalyser under other circumstances,” one X user wrote, joking that the well-known teetotaller appeared drunk, while another said: “I always walk like that...when I’m drunk”.

“Limpy Don,” a third user nicknamed the president. “Trump is not well...” another person claimed. The US president seemed to be dragging his left leg in the footage.

It comes after a clinical psychologist raised concerns about the president's right leg “swing”. Dr John Gartner argued that the president’s coordination has deteriorated in recent years, noting that this kind of decline is a sign of dementia.

“When we talk about deterioration from dementia, I was focusing on language because that’s the thing we most observe, but also we always see deterioration in motor performance,” he told The Dean Obeidallah Show.

The psychologist went on to argue that Trump has repeatedly displayed one symptom that he described as “diagnostic” of Frontotemporal dementia as he disclosed other experts have identified the same indicator in him.

“The other things that's actually even more diagnostic, and I had a neurologist point this out and then several neurologists confirmed it, if you watch the way he walks, he has what they call a leg swing, where his right he kind of swings it in a semicircle like it’s a dead weight, and he’s just kind of swinging it around,” Dr Gartner explained.

“It’s very apparent in some tape and not so much in others, but that right leg swing is considered to be very diagnostic of a specific type of dementia, Frontotemporal dementia,” he added.

- Donald Trump sparks fresh health fears as he’s seen limping in video with grandson, Mirror.co.uk, November 24, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）