Bad Expectations
Government inefficiency is not a bug, and performative penny-pinching is not a virtue.
Everyone loves to complain about government: it is large, it is cumbersome, it makes mistakes, it is inefficient. This grievance is common to all people, everywhere: in kleptocracies, where the only important measure of efficiency is serving those at the top; in oligarchies, where promises of “trickle down” economics are routinely made and too seldom carefully examined; in autocracies, which combine the worst features of the foregoing -ocracies; and in democracies, where laws and institutional safeguards slow implementation of necessary services and improvements to the proverbial seepage of molasses in January.1
Allegedly to address these frustrations — you can judge the facts for yourselves — the regime launched a “Department of Government Efficiency,” an organization that lacks both the Congressional approval (and financing) required under the law, and any actual organized plan: the organization lacks organization. (Now that Elon Musk has faded from public view, DOGE too has receded from the headlines — but the damage remains unmitigated.)
A complaint often voiced by Republicans, whether they are officeholders or candidates, is that “Government should run like a business.” Let us accept — just for a moment — this premise. Any business looking to improve efficiency would not rush in and begin firing people. A business would spend months studying the problem; studying the workforce; studying how things are done, and planning how to improve those processes. It might even bring in outside consultants to perform these tasks. Perhaps the changes, after implementation, would require fewer workers; perhaps too the improved processes would enable the existing workforce to reduce its backlog and take on other important tasks.
None of that happened: there was no no study, there was no planning, there was no methodology. Musk and his stooges marched into government offices and set about torching them: the Department of Education, the State Department, CDC and NIH and Justice…. the list goes on, and lasting damage was done. Infrastructure that was created over a period of decades (in some cases, many decades) was decimated in an afternoon or two. Amid the wreckage is national pride, prestige, and goodwill; staunch allies around the world watched, shook their heads, and concluded that the United States is an unreliable ally. And really: if your ally is not reliable, it’s not an ally in any meaningful way.
Government — good government, and good governance — is not efficient; it isn’t supposed to be. The information siloes are intentional. Justice and Homeland Security and State and HHS and Labor and Commerce (to name a few of the higher-profile departments) should not be sharing data; their databases and computer systems should not be interconnected and — as the spooks like to say — operationally inter-aware. The firewalls are there to protect us — the citizens, the residents, the beneficiaries of what used to be a functioning bureaucracy — from government overreach.
Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse has long been a catchphrase for Republicans: it’s little more than a dog whistle to communicate that all the wrong people — those people — are using government services and using tax dollars meant for you. Ronald Reagan at least put imaginary faces to his dog whistles: the Welfare Queen and the Strapping Young Buck were entirely inventions of his speechwriters, but the trope stuck. And now with the pretenses gone, and the firewalls dismantled and the watchdogs themselves fired, government is, if anything, less efficient and far less effective than ever before. Making government less effective was of course the point of the exercise: it’s easier to commit robbery in plain sight if the cop on the beat is now over on the unemployment line.
Kleptocracy and kakistocracy are not what Americans thought they were voting for in November 2024. Now the entire world lives with the consequences of a credulous public taking the word of a convicted felon and his cronies. If you didn’t know they were lying to you: why on earth not?
This is not to say that democracies can’t move quickly: for example, the Brooklyn Army Terminal was completed fifteen months after Congress approved the plan and the funding. We ooh and ahh the Empire State Building, completed as a private project over thirteen months during the Great Depression. The Army Terminal covers 95 acres and absolutely dwarfs the Empire State Building — and it is ten years older. The rate of aircraft manufacture in 1942 — immediately following Pearl Harbor — was about twenty times the previous pace — over 40,000 planes, compared to fewer than 2,500 in 1939.