Red Tape Fraternities examines how the modern administrative state was less a product of Washington politicians than a new technocratic system of federalstate relations shaped by decentralized networks of mid-level professionals and bureaucratic managers. Based on a system of grants-in-aid, this fundamentally new form of state building both expanded democratic allocations of power and created new forms of exclusion. One of the distinctions between grants-in-aid and earlier federal aid or regulatory programs was how the cost-sharing mandate facilitated the emergence of a new class of autonomous, bureaucratic managers. They operated at the periphery, rather than the centers of power and force us to rethink where power was centered. The defining feature of this new class of managers was their mobility. Rather than working out of offices, they spent much of their time traveling to oversee new state agencies and programs. They conducted a vigorous cross-agency correspondence with other state and non-state actors. Meetings between stakeholders occurred in agency-neutral locationsnational parks, hunting preserves, fishing cabins, and golf coursesplaces also associated with new forms of male leisure activities. Amidst these all-male venues, lines between work and leisure blurred to create new centers of male political power where managers engaged in the informal negotiations that shaped modern state policies. Using these powerful, networked policy coalitions, they tempered the forces of national politics as they bent federal programs to local needs. The homosocial nature of these gatherings have important implications for assessing questions of gender and state power, because intentional or not, they effectively excluded women from key policymaking centers of the modern state. Nowhere did the re-centering of state power play out more powerfully than in the contest between public health officials and maternalist reformers and force us to reevaluate how successful women reformers were. I argue that although women were making progress in gaining access to the stationary bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., the mobile bureaucratic managers that comprised the emerging red-tape fraternities used alternative workspaces to reconstruct, for women, the gendered disadvantages of an earlier era.