Yves here. Of course, one looming question regarding efficiency is efficient for whom? If we look at a private sector example, lousy insurance claims processing is efficient by lowering costs (staffing levels) and pushing costs onto policy holders, with the actual main objective to reduce payouts rather than to achieve particular cost or throughput levels at the claim processing unit level.
Here, as with the successful push to get the inherently higher cost money-pit Uber widely accepted, the goals, despite being expressed as budgetary, are ideological, to further weaken government so it cannot interfere much with rule by oligarch.
And to raise a related issue, highly efficient systems are unstable. Increasing safety has costs and that is a major function governments provide, as do private insurers. Going naked is cheaper than buying coverage, unless/until you are hit by a bad outcome.
By Jennifer Selin, Associate Professor of Law, Arizona State University. Originally published at The Conversation
As President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders and directives on his first day of his second administration, he explained his actions by saying, “It’s all about common sense.”
For over a century, presidents have pursued initiatives to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government, couching those efforts in language similar to Trump’s.
Many of these, like Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which he appointed billionaire Elon Musk to run, have been designed to capitalize on the expertise of people outside of government. The idea often cited as inspiration for these efforts: The private sector knows how to be efficient and nimble and strives for excellence; government doesn’t.
But government, and government service, is about providing something that the private sector can’t. And outsiders often don’t think about the accountability requirements that the laws and Constitution of the United States impose on government workers and agencies.
Congress, though, can help address these problems and check inappropriate proposals. It can also stand in the way of reform.
Charles E. Merriam, left, and Louis Brownlow, members of the President’s Reorganization Committee, leave the White House after discussing government reorganization with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Sept. 23, 1938. Harris & Ewing, photographer, Library of Congress
Proposing Reform Is Nothing New
Perhaps the most famous group to work with a president on improving government was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management, established in 1936.
That group, commonly referred to as the Brownlow Committee, noted that while critics predicted Roosevelt would bring “decay, destruction, and death of democracy,” the executive branch – and the president who sat atop it – was one of the “very greatest” contributions to modern democracy.
The committee argued that the president was unable to do his job because the executive branch was badly organized, federal employees lacked skills and character, and the budget process needed reform. So it proposed a series of changes designed to increase presidential power over government to enhance performance. Congress went along with some of these proposals, giving the president more staff and authority to reorganize the executive branch.
Since then, almost every president has put together similar recommendations. For example, Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed former President Herbert Hoover to lead advisory commissions designed to recommend changes to the federal government. President Jimmy Carter launched a series of government improvement projects, and President George W. Bush even created scorecards to rank agencies according to their performance.
In his first term, Trump issued a mandate for reform to reorganize government for the 21st century.
This time around, Trump has taken executive actions to freeze government hiring, create a new entity to promote government efficiency, and give him the ability to fire high-ranking administrators who influence policy.
Most presidential proposals generally fail to come to fruition. But they often spark conversations in Congress and the media about executive power, the effectiveness of federal programs, and what government can do better.
Most Presidents Have Tried the Same Thing
Historically, most presidents and their advisers – and indeed most scholars – have agreed that government bureaucracy is not designed in ways that promote efficiency. But that is intentional: Stanford political scientist Terry Moe has written that “American public bureaucracy is not designed to be effective. The bureaucracy arises out of politics, and its design reflects the interests, strategies, and compromises of those who exercise political power.”
A common presidential response to this practical reality is to propose government changes that make it look more like the private sector. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan brought together 161 corporate executives overseen by industrialist J. Peter Grace to make recommendations to eliminate government waste and inefficiency, based on their experiences leading successful corporations.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton authorized Vice President Al Gore to launch an effort to reinvent the federal government into one that worked better and cost less.
The Clinton administration created teams in every major federal agency, modeled after the private sector’s efficiency standards, to move government “From Red Tape to Results,” as the title of the administration’s plan said.
Presidential attempts to make government look and work more like people think the private sector works often include adjustments to the terms of federal employment to reward employees who excel at their jobs.
In 1905, for example, President Theodore Roosevelt established a Committee on Department Methods to examine how the federal government could recruit and retain highly qualified employees. One hundred years later, federal agencies still experienced challenges](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-03-2.pdf) related to hiring and retaining people who could effectively achieve agency missions.
So Why Haven’t These Plans Worked?
At least the past five presidents have faced problems in making long-term changes to government.
In part, this is because government reorganizations and operational reforms like those contemplated by Trump require Congress to make adjustments to the laws of the United States, or at least give the president and federal agencies the money required to invest in changes.
Consider, for example, presidential proposals to invest in new technologies, which are a large part of Trump and Musk’s plans to improve government efficiency. Since at least 1910, when President William Howard Taft established a Commission on Economy and Efficiency to address the “unnecessarily complicated and expensive” way the federal government handled and distributed government documents, presidents have recommended centralizing authority to mandate federal agencies’ use of new technologies to make government more efficient.
But transforming government through technology requires money, people and time. Presidential plans for government-wide change are contingent upon the degree to which federal agencies can successfully implement them.
To sidestep these problems, some presidents have proposed that the government work with the private sector. For example, Trump announced a joint venture with technology companies to invest in the government’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Yet as I have found in my previous research, government investment in new technology first requires an assessment of agencies’ current technological skills and the impact technology will have on agency functions, including those related to governmental transparency, accountability and constitutional due process. It’s not enough to go out and buy software that tech giants recommend agencies acquire.
The things that government agencies do, such as regulating the economy, promoting national security and protecting the environment, are incredibly complicated. It’s often hard to see their impact right away.
Recognizing this, Congress has designed a complex set of laws to prevent political interference with federal employees, who tend to look at problems long term. For example, as I have found in my work with Paul Verkuil, former chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, Congress intentionally writes laws that require certain government positions to be held by experts who can work in their jobs without worrying about politics.
Congress also writes the laws the federal employees administer, oversees federal programs and decides how much money to appropriate to those programs each year.
So by design, anything labeled a “presidential commission on modernizing/fixing/refocusing government” tells only part of the story and sets out an impossible task. The president can’t make it happen alone. Nor can Elon Musk.
I just always assume that government efficiency is a kind of a) very tired dog whistle to (mostly) white voters and b) a thinly veiled allusion to the cutting of social services. Lately I’ve realized that it can also be a kind of trough that wealthy interests line up behind. When the next vital service is outsourced they want to be there to ‘privatize’ it. Since privatization always means profit needs to be taken out, foremost, AND that a path–usually tenuous and poorly constructed–back to government needs to be created, the odds that the endeavor is more efficacious, let alone cheaper, at the end of the day. . . remote. That’s certainly what we see here in Florida state gov.
Privatization driven by the persistent myth that the private sector is more efficient, despite e.g. the fact that Medicare has much lower overhead than private health insurance.
Thanks to Yves for noting right at the top that the supposed “virtues” of efficiency absent any understanding of objective function are meaningless.
And this whole premise that government ought to be run “more like a business” is profoundly shallow, revealing the extent to which many people don’t understand the purpose of either.
Jane Jacobs Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics is good on explaining why the two types of organization are, in fact, antithetical.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85403.Systems_of_Survival
The assumption being made is that the goal is to reform government agencies. This may not be the case. This situation maybe to justify eliminating the agencies altogether and turning over responsibility to the individual states. You can’t reform what won’t be reformed, so the only course of action is to eliminate it. You have a receptive Supreme Court, party alignment in Congress, and a general population dealing with inflation that would welcome Federal tax relief.
So take the Department of Education, appoint Linda McMahon who knows nothing about education, but her job is to dismantle her agency. Send responsibility for it to the states, where 50 states will attempt 50 different tactics for implementing public education. US Supreme Court to ultimately decide the inevitable lawsuits. Repeat this for various agencies, except defense, public highway system, and any other agency the US Constitution says is the responsibility of the Federal government.
Most importantly, this moves the cost structure of these services away from the currency issuer and onto the individual states. So whatever 50 tactics the various states use, solvency becomes a real issue and debasing the wealth of the uber wealthy won’t be part of any solution.
Yes she is not looking at the the real goal of this administration.
They have nothing but a sneering contempt for anyone that not american and conservative.
At least there was comedy relief some of the time in hes first administration.
This will go very sideways. I am already sick of it.
What if the goal of this is not to punt services and obligations to the states, but to privatize them. Find private entries to lead/enforce whatever is deemed to be inefficient, give them a pile of no-bid self-oversight money to do nothing beyond cash the checks. Voila- efficiency! Well connected oligarchs get to loot the Treasury, and the rest of the oligarchs get to be free from regulation.
The sell to the public is simple (if they bother at all): threaten to eliminate it all, opponents clutch pearls, “save” the program through privatization.
Please let me be wrong.
Absolutely agree, if not outright elimination, where privatization is possible it’ll be the primary, if not only, consideration. It’ll be under the guise of efficiency but it doesn’t actually have to turn out that way. The goal is to limit the scope and size of the federal government. The sell to the public is simple, we can cut your taxes, lower your payroll deductions, and put money back into your paycheck because your government managed your money terribly.
This outcome is reflected in the piece, which notes that moves like shuttering the Dept of ed require congressional action. And it is exactly such a requirement that may hamper Trump’s efforts, especially given the thin House majority.
And his reelection was going to be hampered by felony convictions, being impeached – twice, being sued left, right, and center, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t once again be too quick in dismissing him. He was clear with Linda that she was being brought in to eliminate herself and return education to the states. He does what he says. Even if by chance, he fails in Congress, I would imagine future President Vance (which I’m willing to wager on at this point) will get further cracks at it.
As someone who worked in the federal government I can tell you that I would be happy with less corruption often caused by Congress which is, to be blunt, is increasingly dominated by bribery and, almost worse, political correctness. When you see most of the offices of a government agency partying most of the time and just a handful doing real work, when your hired as a consultant to do something which is swiftly thrown out and given to a more politically connected rival contractor and on and on, on begins to wonder.
As a contractor, I was hired to do something and did nothing–my job was to occupy a seat and that same agency had most of that floor partying most of the time all. Once I was hired to do something that, I found out later, several other contractors had done and produced nothing and the minute we were winding it up the job was interrupted and a completely new method and new contractor was brought in. Old fashioned corruption, lack of supervision, revolving doors, racial/sexual preferences (a “minority” was hired by agencies who then took something off the top and hired us non-minority workers to actually do the job) and so on.
That was almost fifteen years ago when I quit–I know that hasn’t changed. I know offices are given budgets that they spend freely sometimes just to make sure they will get the same money next year. I saw little accountability of efficiency except here and there–there are workers and offices that do very well and care about their work but too many didn’t in my experience. I am sure any attempt to resolve to add efficiency will be helpful–the emphasis I would want to see is firing deadwood and those who just want to party.
If you and other contractors weren’t producing the desired outcome, and were therefore changed up, including introducing new requirements, I would argue that seems more like efficiency than corruption. If the team isn’t producing, change the team?
Also, contractors are changed up regardless, once the contract ends, it’s how contract work works.
Corruption and bribery happens in the corporate world as well.
But if you’ll allow me to call your attention to something – you quit, presumably because you couldn’t stand not doing anything? The general sentiment is people are no good lazy somethings, would gladly take money and do nothing, everyone’s a welfare bum, hence all the bribery and corruption. Your particular instance would seem to speak to the opposite, that at least some people genuinely want to contribute, make a difference in the world, will quit even a paying role to do so.
I also quit a job with a co that was a fed subcontractor because I was clearly doing nothing in the long run. I stayed long enough to get a couple publications to put on the resume to justify the time, then got outta dodge.
The people involved have neither the patience nor powers of concentration to do a proper job of reform which is sorely needed. They will place some key people in the personnel and budget groupings and try to influence outcomes as best they can.
Remember that much legislation is written by corporations for Congress already and although Congress has power to enforce spending their writ doesn’t run to the minutiae of the daily running of these huge bureaucratic machines which can be easily used for political purposes as we have seen repeatedly.
Overall they probably intend to use the dictum of Admiral Jacky Fisher that favouritism is the secret to efficiency.
Employees of private contractors do not work in the federal government, they partner with federal employees. I think the broad application of your brief experience working many years ago at some unspecified location within some unspecified federal government agency to the entirety of the federal government is driven more by ideology than rationale argument. It is not rational to assume that all/most/many of the multitude of government agencies/departments/entities operating in multiple sectors with vastly different missions have efficiency problems or that staff that “just want to party” based upon your very limited experience.
Contrary to your experience, my many years of experience at one location of a very large agency providing direct material benefits to the public would not provide evidence of either gross inefficiencies or partying. My experience of working in the federal government has convinced me that chronic underfunding, hiring freezes, layoff threats, weakening of labor rights, and other attempts to disrupt an effective bureaucracy impedes my organization’s ability to achieve customer service goals. Most benefit-focused, domestic service agencies have experienced decades of underfunding or anemic funding while DOD, DHS, and intelligence budgets are increasingly bloated to serve as ever-more-profitable money funnels to defense/security/technology corporations.
I think your hope for “helpful” government efficiency is misplaced. Most Americans would not like to see such agencies as the Social Security Administration or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid operated as most of our ruthlessly efficient corporations (i.e., United Healthcare, Boeing, Tesla). As Yves Smith persuasively argues, increased government “efficiencies” have downsides – the use of more vulnerable technology and tools, the use of more corporate contracting, and increasing our wealth and health gaps.
I also don’t agree with your belief that political correctness is almost worse than bribery.
I remember when Carter’s zero based budgeting was going to make the federal government efficient.
I watch with interest the balance between government and corporate power. People like Musk say that rolling back the power of federal agencies will return power to the people, but I suspect “people” will really mean the billionaire class. Never happen, but I suggest a version of paygo be applied. Eliminate agency power offset, say, by eliminating the corporate liability protection. Or eliminate patents and copyrights.
and also vast swaths of government, from the police on up, have immunity from their crimes. to get better results for the american people, remove a lot of immunity, and also limited liability.
yes efficient for whom? that efficiency is always touted by free trade economists. we see who gets the benefits and who gets the shaft from the so-called efficiency.
all bill clinton did was to prove his fascists chops, and privatized a lot of government functions, and its still accelerating.
This is what a deliberate policy choice looks like.
This week, President Biden’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council issued a report recommending the privatization of the nation’s water systems.
President Biden…appointed an investment banker to chair an advisory council for the nation’s infrastructure.
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/president-biden-don-t-give-wall-street-control-of-our-public-water-systems
“zero based budgeting” just results in a lot of paper being generated to justify things that are going to be approved anyway. It takes time and effort away from the things that really need to be analyzed.
Musk likes to compare SpaceX to NASA and I think he has some very good points.
At SpaceX:
1) Employees are not punished, there is a culture and assumption that all employees are trying hard.
2) Failures are expected, seen to be a necessary part of the innovation process.
3) Rapid iteration and testing is favored over excessive caution. It’s ok for stuff to blow up, that’s considered a test in itself.
4) Rocket designs incorporated only the bare necessities for the mission, all excess is removed. An example, what are these fins for? If no real good reason, they’re gone.
At NASA:
1) The culture shifted after Columbia and Challenger disasters, there was deep shame, mistakes became unacceptable.
2) Carefull, lengthy and exhaustive testing became favoured, excessive precaution, leading to high cost.
3) Designs tended to include lots of unnecessary redundancies, backups of backups of backups of backups, leading to high cost.
Here in Toronto, the only subway system in the world to have one train crash into the rear of another, the culture at the TTC shifted into one of excessive safety and overcaution, every little thing stops the lines, every sniff of smoke, every weird smell, every flicker of a light. This culture permeated even the mobile fleet, it’s common to see busses “out of service” on the side of the road, probably some light or other lit up on the panel, even though these busses are over-maintenanced because of the hyper safety culture. As a result, the TTC is one of the most financially inefficient organizations in the world – the subway system is ridiculously underbuilt relative to the population size of this major international city, the overcaution is a direct cost weighing down the whole system, preventing growth and expansion.
Now, attempting to translate Musk’s SpaceX culture to the world of government, I would say it would be like trying to reverse the culture of excessive caution and safety. Regulations are there for a legitimate reason, to ensure fairness, to ensure competition, remove conflict of interest, ensure lawfulness, but they are also the reason for inefficiency and extreme cost. If the goal of a project is to cut that cost, and improve efficiency, I expect we’ll see regulations sacrificed – and it’s a proper challenge whatever you think of Musk or Trump or any organization.
I just had another thought. I think what we want to see in terms of government efficiency is dissoluton of agencies such as the CIA, which serve no good purpose, cause more problems than they solve.
How bout you add the NIH, most of CDC, and HUD to the list? At the state level, there is at least a chance for accountability. DeSantis seems to have done pretty well at the last hurricane season there.
Rumor I heard is there are 17 “intelligence agencies” supporting the “national command authorities” which itself suffers unproductive redundancies……
NSA needs AI to run itself and a layer of AI feeding it from the intel agencies.
More potential info glitches than reasonable, which covers for the agenda spreading.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this article but maybe Musk is not after all the real brain genius running SpaceX.
Meet Gwynne Shotwell, the woman who really runs SpaceX for Elon Musk Business Insider
I would be inclined to believe that as it’s consistent with the facts of who Musk is, rather than the version he wants to present. True Anon did a huge multipart podcast covering his real accomplishments and which ones he bought or sued to put his name on.
Having worked with NASA, including first-hand and with people in the room during some disasters (large and small, well known and unknown), i don’t think your points are accurate. Given the enormous public investment and bright spotlight, preventable mistakes were unacceptable. Even then they still happen(ed).
Think about it for a minute- if you are going to send a team into orbit, what kind of person other than a sociopath would send them without the tools to address every conceivable issue that might arise? Overnighting parts from Amazon Prime isn’t going to happen.
Consider the value of over-engineering these systems- most equipment sent off on expiration missions survive the mission, allowing subsequent missions. Voyager, the various Mars rovers, the ongoing Jupiter mission, etc. It’s a long list. I got to study lunar regolith with my own eyes because Jack Schmitt correctly deduced that he could stash several hundred pounds of samples in the module beyond the authorized amount because the engineers used at least a 3:1 safety factor (personal communication 1998) when calculating the return load.
“3) Rapid iteration and testing is favored over excessive caution. It’s ok for stuff to blow up, that’s considered a test in itself.”
Maybe this is not a good approach for the TTC
I think there are differences of approach on public organizations that do stuff, at operational level (like TTC, health organizations providing health care) and governments overseeing stuff, developing policies, etc. Sometimes they can be mixed.
For NASA or TTC, the accidents probably reflected badly on management decissions upstream and the bureaucrat/administrator, being usually a spineless coward, prone to backstabbing, ends up investing mostly in covering ass. Goverments end up being very reactive in nature, because bureaucracy has that old Chinese flavour – is run by eunuchs.
Government is not designed or intended to work like private enterprise. The pressures and demands are essentially totally different. Private enterprises are intended to maximize profit, government is designed to maximize well-being for its citizens.
Private industry is simple compared to government. Typically private industry has a reasonable idea of who it’s competitors are and what the general business environment is going to be like though this may be a bit optimistic. And it has a basic goal of not going broke.
Government may not know who its allies and enemies are moment to moment; at any time it has multiple goals, sometimes competing. I suppose you could say the final goal is similar to private enterprise—to continue to exist but in a private enterprise you normally walk away from the disaster. In a serious government collapse, you may get pillage and massacres and find yourself decorating a lamp post.
Gordon Osbaldson, a former Clerk of the Privy Council of Canada (the most senior civil servant in the Canadian government) had a description of private industry versus government.
Private enterprise was like playing on a football field, there were two teams, two goal posts and generally agreed upon rules that applied while you were trying to get the ball across the opponents’ touch line.
Government was played on an irregular shaped field that could change shape without warning, there were multiple teams and multiple goal posts, the teams could change sides at any time, and the goal posts moved at odd moments.
I am sure the paragons of private industry will have no problem adjusting to the slightly different paradigm.
Efficiency, simplification of processes, and maximization of returns are the three golden idols of High Modernism. The result is systems that are brittle, unable to adapt to real world conditions (especially those involving changes from the baseline), and so focused on short-term goals and metrics that they’re likely to fail in the intermediate to long term. In the postmodern world you need to think instead about resilience, flexibility, and sustainability. And, as you allude to, being efficient in doing the wrong thing is not a sane approach.
I prefer the other “e” which is EFFECTIVE. The focus on efficiency often leads to “lean” and often saves money…in the short term. As Yves noted, this often leads to a less robust and resilient system where something like losing a key employee throws the system into chaos. (Ask me how I know!).
Effective means examining your charter and what you are doing and IS IT WORKING?
For example, the Dept of Education was established about 50 years ago to improve the level of American education. From everything, I can see with my own 2 eyes, it hasn’t worked at all and in fact, the levels of knowledge, literacy, and numeracy have dropped significantly.
It isn’t effective and all the tinkering hasn’t done squat. Get rid of it and start over. If there are functions that are still required, move only those functions to another agency (maybe atudent loan adminstration?).
Oh, it’s working alright, just not for us plebs.
Aye. And it’s not just the quality of education that has deteriorated. The Department of Education’s federal student loan program has ruined the financial futures of literally millions of people, both by lending excessively and by servicing the loans poorly.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently banned Navient from servicing federal student loans and issued sizeable fines. But how did Navient end up servicing those loans in the first place? Because the Department of Education hired them. Year after year after year. Despite an endless stream of heavy criticism that included hundreds of lawsuits and tens of thousands of formal complaints.
Why did the CFPB have to step in? Why hadn’t the Dept. of Ed. already given Navient the boot?
This isn’t just “inefficient” government. It’s broken government. The whole student loan concept needs to be re-thought.
Now there are parts of the US government that do extremely valuable work. Like the FDA. [Would we really want both foods and medicines being sold based on whatever marketers could convince us we wanted, with no standards for purity or effectiveness or even label accuracy? I suspect not.] But with the Department of Education, the word “ineffective” is certainly a reasonable adjective to use. I personally think that “destructive” also fits.
Waiting to see someone with a passenger car challenge tailpipe testing on the basis of the Chevron Deference. SE side of Chicago/near burbs and Lake County Indiana have 100 year old steel mills, 140 year old massive oil refinery, freight railroads all over, flights in/out of Midway and O’Hare, interstate highway crossings, but it’s the local sap with the passenger car in the ‘problem’? Wonder if R. Barnes would take the case?
My experience is you have to work at the program level. If a program isn’t effective get rid of it. Moving boxes around on the org chart, having public-private competition, etc only is working at the margins.
That said there are small efficiencies to be had. I remember when to buy an electric typewriter you had to go through GSA and get a special approval. When PCs arrived they updated the typewriter process to put GSA in charge of all computer buying. Eventually though Air Force got authority to contract so all DoD PCs came via Air Force procurement. This stemmed from Public Law 89-306 known as the Brooks Act after Rep Jack Brooks of TX, who worked with LBJ to get it enacted. P.L. 89-306
A history of its effects (not sure I am in complete agreement though)
Brooks
In DoD we had the advantage of the “Warner Amendment” which exempted “tactical computers” from much of the GSA oversight.
Some things are just public policy; probably good looked at from 30,000 feet. If you need furniture, you pretty much have to use Federal Prison Industries for example.
Here in Germany in the 1990s, “the problem” (or more accurately, “the task”) was described as follows:
Perhaps Herr Musk will bring capitalism with American characteristics to USA
As has been wisely said-
‘One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don’t get as much government as we pay for.’