Government is inefficient, because efficiency is not really the point of government. Representation is the point, and it is really hard to represent everyone’s interests and be efficient. We also need government to be resilient, and efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.
I’ve worked in higher education and for-profit companies, served on non-profit boards, and been involved in local government. There are differences in the importance of efficiency, representation, and resiliency in all of them, and differences in how power works in each.
My experience with tech types, particularly, in getting involved with either non-profits or government, is that they don’t understand this, are often resistant to learning this, and as a result, leave in frustration after being ineffective. Unfortunately, nobody is stopping Musk from just kicking everything over, so far.
The real reason government is inefficient is that it's opponents want it to be. Every time Democrats introduce policies that benefit the people - especially the poor and downtrodden - such as SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, you know, things to ensure the general welfare. The opposition, AKA the Republicans, weigh it down with complications to make it inefficient, make it onerous for people to get the help they need, and laden with superfluous paperwork.
If it weren't for all the (Republican authored) complications, it would be exponentially more efficient. The Democrats "compromised" to gain the one or two Republican votes they needed so they could call it "bipartisan".
Now Republican politicians can point to their own handiwork and claim "see how inefficient it is? We need to cut all these inefficient benefits so we can cut taxes for Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and of course the tech frat crowd - Musk, Zuck, Bezos, etc."
Reminds of days gone by when my late wife worked for the IRS in San Jose CA. She commented that the computer system did not use electrons to transmit data to the Fresno data center. Instead each letter typed was carried via pigeon to the center and the center then sent back confirmation that it was received by pigeon. The IRS had been requesting funds to upgrade the system but congress refused the funds.
The entire government, at every level, Fed, State, Municipal, is still using mostly monochrome monitors on old IBM P.C.'s. I don't think their networks are even up to T1. They still use >daisy wheel< and dot matrix printers. It's pitiful.
I see a mix of the Peter Principle and Peter Pan (puer aeternus) Syndrome playing out, people moving into jobs they're constitutionally incapable of doing largely because they're arrested as shit, stuck in puberty or adolescence and saddled with fantasies of omnipotence. And they've never had any motivation to step outside their attachment to the abstract world they love and experience the complexities and limitations involved, for example, in having a conscience and giving a fuck about other people. People are not actors in video games.
The democratic alternative is the election. Over 77 million Americans voted for this to happen. Government is far to big and needs to be cut down to size. This is only the beginning.
"Over 77 million Americans voted for this to happen"
I dont agree. Few voted for exactly **this** to happen.
It is like Brexit. The British voted for Brexit as an abstract concept. Nobody (or certainly not a majority) voted for the particular Brexit we got.
For example, there was a debate before and after the election about hard or soft Brexit. The hard Brexit faction won the power fight against the soft Brexiteers after the election. There never was a referendum where hard Brexit was on the ballot. There never was a majority in favour of hard Brexit.
This is how an undemocratic coup can work in a democracy.
We are a country of 340 million and only 77 million Americans voted for the Felon. Yes, the government is big but remember the 340 million just mentioned. Come on get real!
Stop driving on the roads I paid for. Tell Louisiana to stop whining about coastal erosion and fisheries ruined by fracking. Grow gills if you don't want to discuss Climate Change. If you're so keen on particulate in the air, burn a mattress. Don't call FEMA.
Government is not far too big, but it IS far too ineffective at accomplishing its goals. That is the problem that needs to be addressed.
And while I don't know enough about but what Musk is doing to yet know if his proposed reforms will address that problem, the little I know doesn't seem particularly promising.
Henry: Surprised that the Bluesky starter pack you linked doesn't include Jennifer Pahlka. Any reason?
It absolutely does include her, and a few people have been complaining about it on Bluesky, because she has not been as DOGE-skeptical as she might have been (I would not be surprised if that is changing as things happen).
So we should identify particular inefficiencies and remedy them. That does not seem to be what DOGE is doing.
It is important that when identifying inefficiencies, we take the whole system into account. For example, if one wants to gain efficiency by reducing the number of air traffic controllers one needs to take into account possible negative externalities such as an increase in the number of accidents.
I think that this linear thinking you describe so well is at the root of many of the problems we have. "If sth is good than more is better." A very widely held view. But a view that gets us in troubles again and again in the long run.
Back in the day at NASA, when the FAA did not have the skills to spend their budget, NASA was studying putting the ATC in the cockpit. I left 20 years ago so don't know if any progress was made. Back then what I do remember was a full scale computerized tower mockup. The view from the tower was via flat screens. The engineers had fun flying tower visitors around the circuit.
"There are many people on the center left too who are frustrated by how clunky, unresponsive and unfit for purpose the federal government is." This is 100% true and needs more discussion across the board. The center left has been cowering in fear of the left more than the right has been. Energizing this sector to accomplish common sense policy and structures will be the challenge.
You just sounded like Musk: 'the federal government needs massive reform". Reads like tear it down to the roots and built it back. Depends on who does the "Massive Reform".
The assumption seems to be that Tech is universally better at everything than government and so it will obviously be better at governing than government. But tech isn’t good at a lot of things except, of course for making money, which is its raison d’être. It produces a lot of things that are deeply damaging to society and actually needs to be regulated…by government. Government, in the other hand, is not good at making money, something that Elon Musk finds deeply flawed. He and his henchmen like Thiel, and Andressen aren’t really capable of understanding how it works and will only create a mess. But for a megalomaniac, the power to make the mess is the point.
The parallels with the occupation "government" of Iraq in 2003-4 are startling. Never expected America, even the GOP, to actually inflict that sort of damage on itself.
Government isn't a single enterprise like a company. There are three branches in an oft-antagonistic relationship with each other, and a surprising amount of executive branch inefficiency is a result of one of the 535 Members of Congress raking a senior official over the coals over something a decade ago. We also have IGs who don't always understand the work that they're investigating so end up focusing on the minutiae of standard operating procedures and other bureaucratic processes rather than the bigger picture. No wonder, then, that government can seem a bit like a schizophrenic blob at times to the average outsider.
Government will never be as responsive to your needs as you'd like because it also needs to consider other people's needs as well (sometimes more so). Government has to satisfy its CEO and other levels of management, 535 men and women who also sometimes like to act like CEOs, judges, white-shoe law firms hired by big business, a cranky and highly motivated citizen, and so on. The feedback loop will constantly send contradictory signals (e.g., NIMBYs vs. YIMBYs), and as soon as you respond to one signal, you're bound to get citizens who throw up their hands and complain about government tyranny.
So before people go on about how government is ineffective at accomplishing its goals, they need to agree what its goals are in the first place. That seems unlikely in our polarized environment, where Congress can barely manage to pass budgets, authorization bills, etc. without histrionics.
I'm pretty much done with the word "efficiency." Whenever I see somebody use it, they mean they want to optimize a system for some particular thing, but don't want to tell you WHAT. From Republicans in particular, the thing has been either "the system rejects everyone so we can shut it down" or "the system funnels my buddies a huge wad of cash" for at least the past fifty years, neither of which are good. From Democrats it's much murkier, but that's not good either.
It's just not a useful term. If you want something done, tell people what it is and what effects you think it will have; saying it's "efficient" is meaningless.
I like this post but I think it’s not “systems” in the IT/Cyber sense, although that’s what Doge is attacking now … precisely because those systems can’t speak up … until they break. Anyone who has worked for government knows there are more efficient ways to do things but that’s a matter of increasing transparency and changing the reward structure, not so much at the nitty-gritty level, although that would be useful, but in the ability of corporations and business organizations (and frankly, non-profits and the courts as well) to influence how government operates.
Bureaucratic AND Autocratic control systems ARE typically more effective at achieving their mission whether it is profits or space travel. The problem is that in actuality, actions have many effects, not just one. So they achieve THE mission potentially better but the process has many other effects, unplanned and some, often many, inevitably damaging to other issues important to people and the country. Balancing out the benefits AND harms done to multiple people, groups of people, areas of the country is difficult and NOT possible to do perfectly. Bureaucracies (mission/mandate) and Corporations (profit) succeed relatively well for the goal but also do much other damage. Democracy and Competition (IF there are NON-dominant companies) balances these out –– as best we can in our imperfect existence. Autocracy does not. Medicine for example struggles with this when the treatments often, even typically, have damaging side-effects. Traffic laws stop harmful accidents but slow us down and interfere, and sometimes unnecessarily, with our desires to get somewhere quickly. Zoning laws interfere with building housing while protecting neighborhoods. International trade, while increasing output and affluence, lead to job losses –– for some while producing job and goods gains for others. WHAT TO DO:?–– yes, we need to examine the whole structure and seek and make improvements AND to recognize that destroying the annoying systems will produce sever eharms as well as some benefits (E.g. impure water, internet fraud, absence of support for the less able and ill and rule by those with the biggest armies and weapons of individual and mass destruction). It's taken centuries to leave the damage of feudalism behind and a new autocracy will recreate it.
I'm just spit-balling because that's all I can do from my humble vantage point but I think the conservative turn in big tech, and the widening political divide with its workforce, began around 2010 and was more or less the culmination of the monetizing mandate placed on big tech by Wall Street after the dot.com bubble burst in 2001. I don't mean by this we ought to blame the neolib order instead of a bigot and greed monster like Musk but we ought to be clear about what created and enabled the monsters in our midst now.
Government is inefficient, because efficiency is not really the point of government. Representation is the point, and it is really hard to represent everyone’s interests and be efficient. We also need government to be resilient, and efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.
I’ve worked in higher education and for-profit companies, served on non-profit boards, and been involved in local government. There are differences in the importance of efficiency, representation, and resiliency in all of them, and differences in how power works in each.
My experience with tech types, particularly, in getting involved with either non-profits or government, is that they don’t understand this, are often resistant to learning this, and as a result, leave in frustration after being ineffective. Unfortunately, nobody is stopping Musk from just kicking everything over, so far.
The real reason government is inefficient is that it's opponents want it to be. Every time Democrats introduce policies that benefit the people - especially the poor and downtrodden - such as SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, you know, things to ensure the general welfare. The opposition, AKA the Republicans, weigh it down with complications to make it inefficient, make it onerous for people to get the help they need, and laden with superfluous paperwork.
If it weren't for all the (Republican authored) complications, it would be exponentially more efficient. The Democrats "compromised" to gain the one or two Republican votes they needed so they could call it "bipartisan".
Now Republican politicians can point to their own handiwork and claim "see how inefficient it is? We need to cut all these inefficient benefits so we can cut taxes for Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and of course the tech frat crowd - Musk, Zuck, Bezos, etc."
Reminds of days gone by when my late wife worked for the IRS in San Jose CA. She commented that the computer system did not use electrons to transmit data to the Fresno data center. Instead each letter typed was carried via pigeon to the center and the center then sent back confirmation that it was received by pigeon. The IRS had been requesting funds to upgrade the system but congress refused the funds.
The entire government, at every level, Fed, State, Municipal, is still using mostly monochrome monitors on old IBM P.C.'s. I don't think their networks are even up to T1. They still use >daisy wheel< and dot matrix printers. It's pitiful.
I see a mix of the Peter Principle and Peter Pan (puer aeternus) Syndrome playing out, people moving into jobs they're constitutionally incapable of doing largely because they're arrested as shit, stuck in puberty or adolescence and saddled with fantasies of omnipotence. And they've never had any motivation to step outside their attachment to the abstract world they love and experience the complexities and limitations involved, for example, in having a conscience and giving a fuck about other people. People are not actors in video games.
I agree, and to this I would add entitlement.
Donny Boy is a FAKE reality TV CEO. His policies only enrich his family, not the USA.
Flush The Orange Turd
The democratic alternative is the election. Over 77 million Americans voted for this to happen. Government is far to big and needs to be cut down to size. This is only the beginning.
"Over 77 million Americans voted for this to happen"
I dont agree. Few voted for exactly **this** to happen.
It is like Brexit. The British voted for Brexit as an abstract concept. Nobody (or certainly not a majority) voted for the particular Brexit we got.
For example, there was a debate before and after the election about hard or soft Brexit. The hard Brexit faction won the power fight against the soft Brexiteers after the election. There never was a referendum where hard Brexit was on the ballot. There never was a majority in favour of hard Brexit.
This is how an undemocratic coup can work in a democracy.
We are a country of 340 million and only 77 million Americans voted for the Felon. Yes, the government is big but remember the 340 million just mentioned. Come on get real!
Stop driving on the roads I paid for. Tell Louisiana to stop whining about coastal erosion and fisheries ruined by fracking. Grow gills if you don't want to discuss Climate Change. If you're so keen on particulate in the air, burn a mattress. Don't call FEMA.
Where’s your evidence for this tired rerun?
Government is not far too big, but it IS far too ineffective at accomplishing its goals. That is the problem that needs to be addressed.
And while I don't know enough about but what Musk is doing to yet know if his proposed reforms will address that problem, the little I know doesn't seem particularly promising.
Henry: Surprised that the Bluesky starter pack you linked doesn't include Jennifer Pahlka. Any reason?
It absolutely does include her, and a few people have been complaining about it on Bluesky, because she has not been as DOGE-skeptical as she might have been (I would not be surprised if that is changing as things happen).
I have been surprised at her recent posts pushing hard on the feeling that, "the status quo isn't worth defending."
Oh. My bad. Maybe I just missed her or she didn't appear because I was already following her. Definitely not a Bluesky expert.
I agree that government can be improved.
So we should identify particular inefficiencies and remedy them. That does not seem to be what DOGE is doing.
It is important that when identifying inefficiencies, we take the whole system into account. For example, if one wants to gain efficiency by reducing the number of air traffic controllers one needs to take into account possible negative externalities such as an increase in the number of accidents.
Pedantic note: This isn't an externality, it's a straightforward case of fewer inputs = fewer/worse outputs.
I think that this linear thinking you describe so well is at the root of many of the problems we have. "If sth is good than more is better." A very widely held view. But a view that gets us in troubles again and again in the long run.
Back in the day at NASA, when the FAA did not have the skills to spend their budget, NASA was studying putting the ATC in the cockpit. I left 20 years ago so don't know if any progress was made. Back then what I do remember was a full scale computerized tower mockup. The view from the tower was via flat screens. The engineers had fun flying tower visitors around the circuit.
Scott Alexander had a nice post making the same ultimate point from a different angle:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats
A fool knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
DOGE echoes Meta’s “Year of Efficiency”, which was only desperately required after they blew $65B on VR/AR in a failed Year of Ineffectiveness.
Being more efficient is an utter failure if you’re not effective.
But they had to feed something to their [strikeout] suckers [/strikeout] investors.
"There are many people on the center left too who are frustrated by how clunky, unresponsive and unfit for purpose the federal government is." This is 100% true and needs more discussion across the board. The center left has been cowering in fear of the left more than the right has been. Energizing this sector to accomplish common sense policy and structures will be the challenge.
A couple observations:
First, in the "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words" category:
The new official portrait of First Lady Melania Trump. If you haven't already seen it, grab it on Google, and then contemplate.
Second, in the "We Should Have Seen This Coming" category:
"The Inmates Are Running the Asylum," by Alan Cooper, a guide to why techies and their works are the way they are.
Putting examples 1 plus 2 together...what happens when you combine power seekers, and actual power?
Do the math.
I'm not going to search for the Royal Sugar Baby's portrait. I just don't think I can stomach it.
I hear you, but I encourage you to have a look, it is not what you think. It wasn't what I was expecting, for sure.. She one-upped Donald.
This is who is in charge now.
You were right, I wasn't expecting that. It looks like a propaganda piece. Especially that Oval setting.
New boss of the Ministry of Love?
Whoops, looks like 1984 came early this year, Winston!
Apologies to Pat Oliphant. Wish I could find that cartoon of his.
No more rainbow coalitions here, more like "shades of grey."
Cue the Village People – not!
Yeah. Like O'Brien in drag.
You just sounded like Musk: 'the federal government needs massive reform". Reads like tear it down to the roots and built it back. Depends on who does the "Massive Reform".
I think he meant something more along the lines of "shrink it till it's small enough to drown it in the bathtub".
The assumption seems to be that Tech is universally better at everything than government and so it will obviously be better at governing than government. But tech isn’t good at a lot of things except, of course for making money, which is its raison d’être. It produces a lot of things that are deeply damaging to society and actually needs to be regulated…by government. Government, in the other hand, is not good at making money, something that Elon Musk finds deeply flawed. He and his henchmen like Thiel, and Andressen aren’t really capable of understanding how it works and will only create a mess. But for a megalomaniac, the power to make the mess is the point.
The parallels with the occupation "government" of Iraq in 2003-4 are startling. Never expected America, even the GOP, to actually inflict that sort of damage on itself.
This must be why I wake up every day lately from a dream of assassinating Trump, Musk, and Mike Johnson.
Government isn't a single enterprise like a company. There are three branches in an oft-antagonistic relationship with each other, and a surprising amount of executive branch inefficiency is a result of one of the 535 Members of Congress raking a senior official over the coals over something a decade ago. We also have IGs who don't always understand the work that they're investigating so end up focusing on the minutiae of standard operating procedures and other bureaucratic processes rather than the bigger picture. No wonder, then, that government can seem a bit like a schizophrenic blob at times to the average outsider.
Government will never be as responsive to your needs as you'd like because it also needs to consider other people's needs as well (sometimes more so). Government has to satisfy its CEO and other levels of management, 535 men and women who also sometimes like to act like CEOs, judges, white-shoe law firms hired by big business, a cranky and highly motivated citizen, and so on. The feedback loop will constantly send contradictory signals (e.g., NIMBYs vs. YIMBYs), and as soon as you respond to one signal, you're bound to get citizens who throw up their hands and complain about government tyranny.
So before people go on about how government is ineffective at accomplishing its goals, they need to agree what its goals are in the first place. That seems unlikely in our polarized environment, where Congress can barely manage to pass budgets, authorization bills, etc. without histrionics.
I'm pretty much done with the word "efficiency." Whenever I see somebody use it, they mean they want to optimize a system for some particular thing, but don't want to tell you WHAT. From Republicans in particular, the thing has been either "the system rejects everyone so we can shut it down" or "the system funnels my buddies a huge wad of cash" for at least the past fifty years, neither of which are good. From Democrats it's much murkier, but that's not good either.
It's just not a useful term. If you want something done, tell people what it is and what effects you think it will have; saying it's "efficient" is meaningless.
I like this post but I think it’s not “systems” in the IT/Cyber sense, although that’s what Doge is attacking now … precisely because those systems can’t speak up … until they break. Anyone who has worked for government knows there are more efficient ways to do things but that’s a matter of increasing transparency and changing the reward structure, not so much at the nitty-gritty level, although that would be useful, but in the ability of corporations and business organizations (and frankly, non-profits and the courts as well) to influence how government operates.
First we have to shrink "Citizens United" till it's small enough to drown in the bathtub.
Then we need to bomb K-Street.
Here's the central issue:
Bureaucratic AND Autocratic control systems ARE typically more effective at achieving their mission whether it is profits or space travel. The problem is that in actuality, actions have many effects, not just one. So they achieve THE mission potentially better but the process has many other effects, unplanned and some, often many, inevitably damaging to other issues important to people and the country. Balancing out the benefits AND harms done to multiple people, groups of people, areas of the country is difficult and NOT possible to do perfectly. Bureaucracies (mission/mandate) and Corporations (profit) succeed relatively well for the goal but also do much other damage. Democracy and Competition (IF there are NON-dominant companies) balances these out –– as best we can in our imperfect existence. Autocracy does not. Medicine for example struggles with this when the treatments often, even typically, have damaging side-effects. Traffic laws stop harmful accidents but slow us down and interfere, and sometimes unnecessarily, with our desires to get somewhere quickly. Zoning laws interfere with building housing while protecting neighborhoods. International trade, while increasing output and affluence, lead to job losses –– for some while producing job and goods gains for others. WHAT TO DO:?–– yes, we need to examine the whole structure and seek and make improvements AND to recognize that destroying the annoying systems will produce sever eharms as well as some benefits (E.g. impure water, internet fraud, absence of support for the less able and ill and rule by those with the biggest armies and weapons of individual and mass destruction). It's taken centuries to leave the damage of feudalism behind and a new autocracy will recreate it.
I'm just spit-balling because that's all I can do from my humble vantage point but I think the conservative turn in big tech, and the widening political divide with its workforce, began around 2010 and was more or less the culmination of the monetizing mandate placed on big tech by Wall Street after the dot.com bubble burst in 2001. I don't mean by this we ought to blame the neolib order instead of a bigot and greed monster like Musk but we ought to be clear about what created and enabled the monsters in our midst now.
Thanks for staying on the case.