Having spent 15 years in civil service, I find a lot in this post to agree with. It is much, much too hard to do things in federal government. And I learn a lot from all your posts.
But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.
Maybe more importantly, recent cases are have made it so easy to sue - and to reopen longsettled decisions - that it’s almost malpractice if the private bar doesn’t tell their clients to sue. Was an agency rule upheld 15 years ago by a court that gave the agency Chevron deference? Find a business willing to serve as name plaintiff and sue - this time the agency gets no deference - and statute of limitations isn’t even a problem.
I don’t know who is tracking this, or how, but I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a rapid increase in litigation challenges - which takes up massive amounts of staff time and makes everybody more cautious. Don’t even get me started on the other signals courts have sent about where they might go. A lot of uncertainty raises transaction costs.
I’m not saying it’s the answer to go back to the 1970s. That was excessive the other way. But the courts are a deeply entrenched, massively powerful force that will create more and more and more transactional costs unless they are compelled to change. Don’t want scared bureaucrats who triple-check everything and write impossibly burdensome memos? Do something about the courts. If things stay as they are, and staff is cut, just wait and see how slow and ossified the govt is going to be - you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Completely agree. Do you follow Nick Bagley from UMich? He writes about this and is my guru on the topic. Would love to hear more from you on this too.
We need an overhaul and simplification of stuff like the Administrative Procedure Act, reducing the "attack surface" for litigation challenging agencies' rules. You would think that the conservative legal establishment might like such a victory over trial lawyers, but at least right now, the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system, so they're not interested in a compromise that makes the regulatory system work better. They don't want clear, reasonable rules that are issued and updated at a reasonable pace. They want no rules.
If they want those bills written by Congress, you'd imagine they would have written them when they controlled congress or at least proposed them or offered to compromise with Democrats on simplification, but clearly that's not what they want.
There are hints in the Gorsuch concurrence of W. Va. v. EPA of a SCOTUS majority that would uphold the constitutionality of administrative rulemaking (but consistent with the "major questions" doctrine). It'd be nice to be litigating over the constitutionality of Congressionally-enacted laws, rather than broad administrative regulations which lack democratic accountability, such that the primary way to reform them is to catch the bureaucracy in some APA procedural error in court.
The recent preliminary injunction against the USDA’s SECURE rule is an example in my field. Important simplifying reform of the regulatory oversight of certain kinds of genetic modification of crops, well-known to be free of any reasonable risk, enacted over a 4 year period of careful deliberation by highly conscientious civil servants, got vacated by the court out because of the picayune legalistic objections of a gadfly/Luddite external group.
I'm a new state employee and I see this as well. The sheer volume of work and documentation I have to create to do something as simple as reconcile a month's worth of CC charges is staggering. But it's all part of a process that, I'm told...repeatedly, is designed to ensure compliance and minimize risk of fault arising from a potential audit. The absolute obsession with process to minimize risk to your program, department, and agency murders innovation/creativity in the crib.
And you see this in leadership too - there really isn't any initiative around increasing efficiency/streamlining workflows. Coming from private industry this remains the hardest thing for me to adjust to - leadership is very different. It's less about improving anything and more about just making sure it can actually get completed in a reasonable timeframe (while adhering to process/administrative manual/legislation).
And if you want to use new technology/software to help with this endeavor? Jesus.
I really disagree with this because from a systems perspective it is premised on the belief that a) every single action will get sued over and b) the only way to win is to have a very good case. But this lawyerly perspective fails to recognize that even a perfectly documented process that gets bogged down in a suit for multiple years has already lost.
Much better to just move and make lots of changes. Follow the law, but look for shortcuts at every step. If you deliver 100 projects and 50 get shutdown or restarted because of a lawsuit, that's a winning ratio. Much much much better than 10 mega-efforts that take years to get off the ground because of endless clearance. Risk management should include changing our appetite for risk and accepting a greater failure rate.
The government has plenty of lawyers. It's not a crime to keep them busy and we're not paying a retainer.
It's like the difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin. SpaceX launches, some fail, then they learn from mistakes and go on. Blue Origin hasn't yet launched New Glenn, they've been building it for 10 years and we're about to see tomorrow if their ten year efforts amount to much.
Well yeah - that’s my feeling of the situation as well but management doesn’t see it that way. Frankly many reports and podcasts (Statecraft is great on this) show that a lot of this isn’t actually necessary and that over long time periods legislation and rules were misinterpreted and yet these processes live on.
As for risk - the appetite seems to be different because of public scrutiny. Departments are always worried about admitting fault for anything for fear of public outrage/criticism and/or scrutiny from a controlling agency. Look at stuff like Solyndra, healthcare.gov launch, future gen, etc. The public exposure can be infinitely larger than a smaller private company/corporation. So you get this - a very risk averse environment designed to ensure responsibility for any fault not be on your program, department, agency, etc.
Have no experience in government but fully agree with the spirit of this comment. Move fast and be optimistic rather than spending tons of time dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" on fewer projects.
It's funny though - as someone who has been watching the SEC attack crypto, I very much have felt the opposite. I realize this industry is not universally loved, but at least for the sake of the discussion believe (1) there are serious people who see value in this technology (2) these serious people are not looking for no regulation - rather regulation that acutally makes sense for the technology at hand (e.g. not requiring properties that are fundamentally at odds with how the technology works) (3) the condemnation of the SEC has been bipartisan both in the courts and from legislators (please go look up the cases they've lost and the rebukes they've gotten - inclusive of shuttering the SLC office when they misrepresented facts to a court)
Personally, I've been frustrated on the SEC's unwillingness to work with folks who want to be good actors, or give clarity - and I had the feeling of "FAFO" when Chevron happened.
What are the bounding constraints on regulators who fail to provide clarity to external participants, accelerate rulemaking to avoid input from the public, routinely mischaracterize everyone in the industry as "hucksters, scam artists, fraudsters, ponzi scheme[r]s"?
From the gov't I can empathize with you feeling like you're mired by rules and regulations, but on the outside we do not have the weight of infinite tax dollars behind us to fight lawsuits from agencies that won't even provide clear rules folks can abide by.
Imho if bureaucrats want more responsibility (and I want an outcome oriented gov't!) it needs to be coupled with personal accountability and responsibility.
It should not be the case that an agency like the SEC can lose so many court cases (and be called arbitrary and capricious by the courts!) - causing millions of legal fees for an industry, because of one chair's personal vendetta. Maybe that accountability only happens at some leadership level - but I don't see how you can have one (which costs the bureaucrats nothing since its public funds, but is insanely expensive for private individuals and companies) without the other.
There's a tension here - you want to give more agency for folks to actually have an impact, but what recourse would you suggest for the people who are affected when a regulator decides to exert more power outside the bounds of the law?
I think that’s where elections come in - if there’s a change in leadership/direction then the freedom granted to gov would translate to faster change to reflect that. As is the incoming admin likely had no illusions about the difficulty they’re about to face - imagine if it was easier for them to implement stated goals and objectives.
Elections are unfortunately slow - and especially for agency positions they can have tenure that extends past an election (so what is the accountability for someone who abuses their role and power?)
4-5 years worth of lawsuits (free for the agency with tax dollars, bankruptcy/devastating for private entities) is not a reasonable outcome imho.
Personally I'd be much more onboard with giving more agency more remit - if there was more democratic checks on their power and some form of personal accountability for leadership (this may already exist - but if you are losing tons of court cases in a regulation by enforcement scheme this is an abuse of our tax dollars; if you're getting rebuked as arbitrary and capricious by judges even more so)
And to be clear - I think there's a bunch of routine stuff which I think is unobjectionably good for folks to have more efficiency, I guess I'm just stuck at how do you protect against the downside case? To me it doesn't even feel like a hypothetical given the last four years
Sometimes, as a middle manager in a large organization, it helps to have a new guy come in, who's obviously a big jerk. Then you can kill that project which the people on your team love but it is taking half of your budget and you know it's never going to achieve any results. And blame the new guy, of course.
Mancur Olson’s seminal “Rise and Decline of Nations” highlighted that bureaucratic sclerosis was virtually guaranteed to grow with a sovereign’s age. The ONLY remedy, from history, was elimination of special interests by war/revolution with Germany and Japan as paradigmatic examples post WWII. Otherwise, “distributional coalitions” take hold like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing growth and efficiency. We have a real-life A/B test taking place right now with Argentina, which is purposefully rolling back state rules & regs (ie scraping barnacles) while California is emblematic of Hayek’s Fatal Conceit of an ordered economy via command & control. History shows, this will ultimately fail. Given the world’s growing demographic math, the only path forward is doing more with less. Embrace DOGE or suffer sclerosis and the death of democracy at the hands of populists.
Seriously? California is an economic powerhouse, wealthy beyond imagination. Argentina is a basket case with 50% of the population in deep poverty, collapsing industry and no way out of its debt cycle. Hayek was a fantasist, at best, and had zero understanding of economics.
California is far from perfect, but a lot of its problems are because it has created so much wealth, making it very expensive to live there because so many really wealthy people want to live there. CA has the 6th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $4trillion - that's TRILLION. CA Gdp grew more than 6% last year. Argentina has a GDP of $600million which is shrinking. And I would never call CA government great, but it's stumbling forward - the state is slowly forcing communities to stop blocking housing growth for example. California did have a right wing state government that embraced austerity at one point - it ended up trying to pay bills with IOUs because austerity is terrible economic policy. I live in Texas, btw, where the Democratic cities drive the economy forward despite the best efforts of the Republican state government to destroy it.
Assuming that Musk is acting in good faith seems like a huge assumption. DOGE seems to me like more grift and yet another way for private individuals to capture government for their personal benefit.
I don't assume Musk is going to act in good faith. I think we should watch closely what he does. But he has identified some problems that have been sorely neglected, and his conflicts of interests are not a reason to continue to dismiss the problems.
I am somewhat frustrated that the National Partnership for Reinventing Government has barely been mentioned at all. Not that I'm all that surprised that Muskaswamy either are ignorant of Gore's work, or have a knee-jerk rejection of it because Gore is so uncool... But if you want an example of positive incremental work, it's there.
You are, as ever, the north star for making government truly work for the people. And your (no surprise) incredibly well-reasoned arguments here are very sobering for those of us who do tend to lean more reactionary. I think the biggest and, perhaps, simplest concern I have is not just who is leading DOGE but the way in which DOGE operates on an underlying premise that efficiency is *the* most important goal when it comes to government reform.
One thing I've always loved about Code for America and (at least sometimes) the broader ecosystem of public-interest tech is that the top priority isn't improving *efficiency* but ensuring greater *effectiveness* in the actual delivery of a service to the communities that need it most. Obviously there is overlap and great need for both, but my worry is that DOGE-like efforts on a deeper philosophical level are fundamentally changing the entire conversation. When reducing the bottom line dollar amount is made the ultimate metric of success (complete with a whole leaderboard and other honestly gross stabs at gamification) and overspending is turned into the biggest bogeyman, it's the most vulnerable communities who stand to lose the most.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not endorsing DOGE by any means. My whole point is that I would not go about reform this way, which is part of why I'm not in charge. What I'm saying is DOGE is what we are getting, and it will be interesting to watch what happens. We don't know what they'll do, if anything. It's slightly possible they'll realize that it's actually not a great idea to blow it all up because it turns out government is not a nice to have like Twitter but a have to have, that the people who voted his boss in actually rely on government to work. But I'd love to see him realize that his friend Larry is part of who is screwing government and the people, and decide if he's still going to disrupt the government tech ecosystem after all. I can not want him to break medicaid but still want him to fight Larry, if that makes sense.
it's possible, isn't it, that he breaks medicaid and doesn't fight Larry at all? I hear your clarification that you're not endorsing DOGE but there's an undercurrent of glee based on the premise that Elon/DOGE is just going to change the things you don't like.
Maybe an indiscriminate bulldozer is what is needed but let's not pretend that it's not that. Brexiteers in the UK did the same, pushed for Brexit as the needed bulldozers for various things that they weren't happy about whilst at the same time taking as an article of faith that they can cherry pick or have their cake and eat it.
You increase effectiveness the most by removing regulations, IMO. That maximizes upside for the public. I think this is also the top priority of DOGE, not cost-cutting.
James is talking about the effectiveness of the U.S. economy. You seem to be talking about the effectiveness of how the government bureaucracy itself works.
You *may* be right about the second, though I have my doubts.
The premise of DOGE is to cut expenditures in order to reduce the deficit.
Its purpose is not to improve how government functions. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy is saying anything about making tax forms easier or application forms better. For re-emphasis, its purpose is not just to reduce the deficit, but more specifically to cut expenditures to reduce the deficit. Otherwise, they would surely be putting revenue generating actions on the table, but I have not seen anything of the sort.
The premise has nothing to do with reducing the deficit, which is going to zoom up under trump, or to cut expenditures which will also zoom up. The premise is that government should subsidize the rich and suppress the general population.
The premise that Musk and Ramaswamy present in the news is that they can reduce the deficit by cutting expenditures. We shouldn't pretend that they are interested in efficiency or in reducing the deficit through other means.
"But it's not as if mere attention would solve the problem. There are entrenched interests for the status quo. It's easy to imagine these as exclusively or even mostly commercial interests, but if that were true, why would it take three years to issue guidance as anodyne as the hiring memo the Biden Administration put out this summer? Among other provisions, it declared job titles could now be listed accurately (you could say it was a software developer instead of an IT specialist) and that you could now share “certs” of candidates who qualified for positions across agencies — but only under certain circumstances, and it’s still not widely done, so we mostly lose good applicants because they apply for one position and aren’t considered for others. These and a few other changes took a smart, dedicated, caring team three years to get done."
Yikes! Let me repeat that: Yikes!
Back in 1981 I was part of a team NASA put together to make recommendations on how to up their computing game, particularly with respect to AI. That's one of the problems we identified: the job classification system didn't recognize computer science and programming. You could hire mathematicians or electrical engineers but not computer scientists or programmers. That was over 40 years ago.
The Democrats controlled congress for 54 years out of the 64 years from 1931 to 1995. The Democrats had combined control of the Presidency and congress for 32 years of that period to only 2 years for Republicans.
They used that time to build the current system. They're not going to fix it.
A lot of these problems are endemic to large organizations, public or private. Risk aversion, opaque lines of authority, entrenched incumbents, vendor capture, and weak management is common even in our at-will large corporations. When I was starting out in business, we had a fruitless engagement with a big company that couldn't get past the door. I gave up and told one of the managers that it was impossible to do business with them. He interrupted me, mid rant, and said: "You think its bad, but I have to work in this environment, it's much worse for me".
The “endemic” stuff is more than the negative fctors listed here— there are of course positive factors involved in the attempt to keep any enterprise in control, such as structures of authority/decision making, accounting systems, hiring practices, materials and safety standards etc. The legal structures of governments. I think of these as systemic behaviors learned by trial and error throughout human history: a kind of social infrastructure with deep roots (Florentine accounting) along with institutions’ own local histories.
The ultimate problem is that human organizations have grown in interrelated complexity far beyond the point of anyone being able to control anything. It’s the inevitable side effect of the emergence of a highly social, intelligent species with opposable thumbs. At this point all we can do is look for clever wedges that can leverage systems beyond their relative magnitude or power.
Pahlka describes organizational shortcomings without applying moral judgments. The trick is to know where the threshold of effective moral language should be applied. CEOs and elected officials have to operate under systemic constraints. On the other hand, I don’t refrain from harsh moral criticism of oligarchs, billionaires, people seeking limitless power, wagers of war for trivial reasons, misinforming exploiters of human nature for personal gain, blackmailers, [add your bogeyman here.]
“DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo” (I’m not sure it’s even weaponized—maybe it just exists even for those who are eager to change the status quo.)
But I’ve also been thinking along these lines with a couple of scenarios that involve DOGE having to abandon their all-encompassing slogan-based plans and start reforming the Federal government on a smaller scale. The most probable scenario is that their currently threatened measures will prompt such an outcry from the public that either Trump or the GOP will make them pull back. If the stock market reacts negatively, all the better.
Or, when they confront “the wall” of bureaucracy, they realize how unintelligent their slogans make them look. They become interested in the kinds of actual challenges that Pahlka writes about. In other words, they start “paying attention”. They read “Recoding America” and realize that they have stumbled into a role that can re-charge their jaded, oligarchic intellects and have meaningful, historical impact at the same time.
As for the finger-wagging on social media, it seems to be yet another instance of the Manichean thinking that’s taken over country. I think of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican and yet took great pains to help his own autocrats govern better (after all, he had to live with the results.) There may come a time for outright condemnation of the Trump administration, but for now we need to pay close attention for ways to influence its intentions and motives.
From the Tweets, Elon does not even WANT to reform regulations. He wants to reduce expenditures. Making bureaucracies slower and more sclerotic just might save money.
Having spent 15 years in civil service, I find a lot in this post to agree with. It is much, much too hard to do things in federal government. And I learn a lot from all your posts.
But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.
Maybe more importantly, recent cases are have made it so easy to sue - and to reopen longsettled decisions - that it’s almost malpractice if the private bar doesn’t tell their clients to sue. Was an agency rule upheld 15 years ago by a court that gave the agency Chevron deference? Find a business willing to serve as name plaintiff and sue - this time the agency gets no deference - and statute of limitations isn’t even a problem.
I don’t know who is tracking this, or how, but I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a rapid increase in litigation challenges - which takes up massive amounts of staff time and makes everybody more cautious. Don’t even get me started on the other signals courts have sent about where they might go. A lot of uncertainty raises transaction costs.
I’m not saying it’s the answer to go back to the 1970s. That was excessive the other way. But the courts are a deeply entrenched, massively powerful force that will create more and more and more transactional costs unless they are compelled to change. Don’t want scared bureaucrats who triple-check everything and write impossibly burdensome memos? Do something about the courts. If things stay as they are, and staff is cut, just wait and see how slow and ossified the govt is going to be - you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Completely agree. Do you follow Nick Bagley from UMich? He writes about this and is my guru on the topic. Would love to hear more from you on this too.
We need an overhaul and simplification of stuff like the Administrative Procedure Act, reducing the "attack surface" for litigation challenging agencies' rules. You would think that the conservative legal establishment might like such a victory over trial lawyers, but at least right now, the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system, so they're not interested in a compromise that makes the regulatory system work better. They don't want clear, reasonable rules that are issued and updated at a reasonable pace. They want no rules.
No, just by and large, they want those rules written by congress
And they don't want to bunch of discretion by the administrative state
If they want those bills written by Congress, you'd imagine they would have written them when they controlled congress or at least proposed them or offered to compromise with Democrats on simplification, but clearly that's not what they want.
There are hints in the Gorsuch concurrence of W. Va. v. EPA of a SCOTUS majority that would uphold the constitutionality of administrative rulemaking (but consistent with the "major questions" doctrine). It'd be nice to be litigating over the constitutionality of Congressionally-enacted laws, rather than broad administrative regulations which lack democratic accountability, such that the primary way to reform them is to catch the bureaucracy in some APA procedural error in court.
“the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system…”.
Exactly. O
The recent preliminary injunction against the USDA’s SECURE rule is an example in my field. Important simplifying reform of the regulatory oversight of certain kinds of genetic modification of crops, well-known to be free of any reasonable risk, enacted over a 4 year period of careful deliberation by highly conscientious civil servants, got vacated by the court out because of the picayune legalistic objections of a gadfly/Luddite external group.
https://natlawreview.com/article/district-court-grants-summary-judgment-part-plaintiffs-vacating-and-remanding-final
One of thousands of such across all domains we can anticipate when DOGE starts getting real.
I'm a new state employee and I see this as well. The sheer volume of work and documentation I have to create to do something as simple as reconcile a month's worth of CC charges is staggering. But it's all part of a process that, I'm told...repeatedly, is designed to ensure compliance and minimize risk of fault arising from a potential audit. The absolute obsession with process to minimize risk to your program, department, and agency murders innovation/creativity in the crib.
And you see this in leadership too - there really isn't any initiative around increasing efficiency/streamlining workflows. Coming from private industry this remains the hardest thing for me to adjust to - leadership is very different. It's less about improving anything and more about just making sure it can actually get completed in a reasonable timeframe (while adhering to process/administrative manual/legislation).
And if you want to use new technology/software to help with this endeavor? Jesus.
Apologies for the typos. iPhone at lunch…
Isn't the solution to get actual legislation through congress?Instead of trying to do it through the administration street of state?
I really disagree with this because from a systems perspective it is premised on the belief that a) every single action will get sued over and b) the only way to win is to have a very good case. But this lawyerly perspective fails to recognize that even a perfectly documented process that gets bogged down in a suit for multiple years has already lost.
Much better to just move and make lots of changes. Follow the law, but look for shortcuts at every step. If you deliver 100 projects and 50 get shutdown or restarted because of a lawsuit, that's a winning ratio. Much much much better than 10 mega-efforts that take years to get off the ground because of endless clearance. Risk management should include changing our appetite for risk and accepting a greater failure rate.
The government has plenty of lawyers. It's not a crime to keep them busy and we're not paying a retainer.
It's like the difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin. SpaceX launches, some fail, then they learn from mistakes and go on. Blue Origin hasn't yet launched New Glenn, they've been building it for 10 years and we're about to see tomorrow if their ten year efforts amount to much.
Well yeah - that’s my feeling of the situation as well but management doesn’t see it that way. Frankly many reports and podcasts (Statecraft is great on this) show that a lot of this isn’t actually necessary and that over long time periods legislation and rules were misinterpreted and yet these processes live on.
As for risk - the appetite seems to be different because of public scrutiny. Departments are always worried about admitting fault for anything for fear of public outrage/criticism and/or scrutiny from a controlling agency. Look at stuff like Solyndra, healthcare.gov launch, future gen, etc. The public exposure can be infinitely larger than a smaller private company/corporation. So you get this - a very risk averse environment designed to ensure responsibility for any fault not be on your program, department, agency, etc.
Have no experience in government but fully agree with the spirit of this comment. Move fast and be optimistic rather than spending tons of time dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" on fewer projects.
It's funny though - as someone who has been watching the SEC attack crypto, I very much have felt the opposite. I realize this industry is not universally loved, but at least for the sake of the discussion believe (1) there are serious people who see value in this technology (2) these serious people are not looking for no regulation - rather regulation that acutally makes sense for the technology at hand (e.g. not requiring properties that are fundamentally at odds with how the technology works) (3) the condemnation of the SEC has been bipartisan both in the courts and from legislators (please go look up the cases they've lost and the rebukes they've gotten - inclusive of shuttering the SLC office when they misrepresented facts to a court)
Personally, I've been frustrated on the SEC's unwillingness to work with folks who want to be good actors, or give clarity - and I had the feeling of "FAFO" when Chevron happened.
What are the bounding constraints on regulators who fail to provide clarity to external participants, accelerate rulemaking to avoid input from the public, routinely mischaracterize everyone in the industry as "hucksters, scam artists, fraudsters, ponzi scheme[r]s"?
From the gov't I can empathize with you feeling like you're mired by rules and regulations, but on the outside we do not have the weight of infinite tax dollars behind us to fight lawsuits from agencies that won't even provide clear rules folks can abide by.
Imho if bureaucrats want more responsibility (and I want an outcome oriented gov't!) it needs to be coupled with personal accountability and responsibility.
It should not be the case that an agency like the SEC can lose so many court cases (and be called arbitrary and capricious by the courts!) - causing millions of legal fees for an industry, because of one chair's personal vendetta. Maybe that accountability only happens at some leadership level - but I don't see how you can have one (which costs the bureaucrats nothing since its public funds, but is insanely expensive for private individuals and companies) without the other.
There's a tension here - you want to give more agency for folks to actually have an impact, but what recourse would you suggest for the people who are affected when a regulator decides to exert more power outside the bounds of the law?
I think that’s where elections come in - if there’s a change in leadership/direction then the freedom granted to gov would translate to faster change to reflect that. As is the incoming admin likely had no illusions about the difficulty they’re about to face - imagine if it was easier for them to implement stated goals and objectives.
Elections are unfortunately slow - and especially for agency positions they can have tenure that extends past an election (so what is the accountability for someone who abuses their role and power?)
4-5 years worth of lawsuits (free for the agency with tax dollars, bankruptcy/devastating for private entities) is not a reasonable outcome imho.
Personally I'd be much more onboard with giving more agency more remit - if there was more democratic checks on their power and some form of personal accountability for leadership (this may already exist - but if you are losing tons of court cases in a regulation by enforcement scheme this is an abuse of our tax dollars; if you're getting rebuked as arbitrary and capricious by judges even more so)
And to be clear - I think there's a bunch of routine stuff which I think is unobjectionably good for folks to have more efficiency, I guess I'm just stuck at how do you protect against the downside case? To me it doesn't even feel like a hypothetical given the last four years
Sometimes, as a middle manager in a large organization, it helps to have a new guy come in, who's obviously a big jerk. Then you can kill that project which the people on your team love but it is taking half of your budget and you know it's never going to achieve any results. And blame the new guy, of course.
Mancur Olson’s seminal “Rise and Decline of Nations” highlighted that bureaucratic sclerosis was virtually guaranteed to grow with a sovereign’s age. The ONLY remedy, from history, was elimination of special interests by war/revolution with Germany and Japan as paradigmatic examples post WWII. Otherwise, “distributional coalitions” take hold like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing growth and efficiency. We have a real-life A/B test taking place right now with Argentina, which is purposefully rolling back state rules & regs (ie scraping barnacles) while California is emblematic of Hayek’s Fatal Conceit of an ordered economy via command & control. History shows, this will ultimately fail. Given the world’s growing demographic math, the only path forward is doing more with less. Embrace DOGE or suffer sclerosis and the death of democracy at the hands of populists.
Seriously? California is an economic powerhouse, wealthy beyond imagination. Argentina is a basket case with 50% of the population in deep poverty, collapsing industry and no way out of its debt cycle. Hayek was a fantasist, at best, and had zero understanding of economics.
California's not wealthy because of all that red tape
The way to combat bureaucratic sclerosis is to give Democrats time and majorities, not to embrace Hayek's crackpot theories.
I feel like California has had Democratic majorities for a long time, and has only gotten worse.
California is far from perfect, but a lot of its problems are because it has created so much wealth, making it very expensive to live there because so many really wealthy people want to live there. CA has the 6th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $4trillion - that's TRILLION. CA Gdp grew more than 6% last year. Argentina has a GDP of $600million which is shrinking. And I would never call CA government great, but it's stumbling forward - the state is slowly forcing communities to stop blocking housing growth for example. California did have a right wing state government that embraced austerity at one point - it ended up trying to pay bills with IOUs because austerity is terrible economic policy. I live in Texas, btw, where the Democratic cities drive the economy forward despite the best efforts of the Republican state government to destroy it.
Again, the wealth generation in CA, is in spite of the state government policies not because of them (or at least not the recent ones)
Much of that wealth is generated by silicon valley. Silicon valley didn't happen because of CA red tape.
And of course a lot of people have historically wanted to live there because of the very nice weather.
But many people like my family have fled there in recent years. Tired of high costs, too much red tape, and high crime.
Assuming that Musk is acting in good faith seems like a huge assumption. DOGE seems to me like more grift and yet another way for private individuals to capture government for their personal benefit.
I don't assume Musk is going to act in good faith. I think we should watch closely what he does. But he has identified some problems that have been sorely neglected, and his conflicts of interests are not a reason to continue to dismiss the problems.
Has Musk identified any problems not previously identified (by you, or others)? It seems like his main benefit is his lack of inhibition.
I am somewhat frustrated that the National Partnership for Reinventing Government has barely been mentioned at all. Not that I'm all that surprised that Muskaswamy either are ignorant of Gore's work, or have a knee-jerk rejection of it because Gore is so uncool... But if you want an example of positive incremental work, it's there.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2013/04/what-reinvention-wrought/62836/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/has-government-been-reinvented/
And if you look around at the pockets of government that are still highly competent and get high satisfaction ratings, like these...
https://slate.com/business/2013/07/renewing-your-passport-visit-the-incredibly-efficient-new-york-city-passport-office-on-hudson-street.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/
...you can see the fingerprints of the NPRG and its relentless focus on efficient customer service.
You are, as ever, the north star for making government truly work for the people. And your (no surprise) incredibly well-reasoned arguments here are very sobering for those of us who do tend to lean more reactionary. I think the biggest and, perhaps, simplest concern I have is not just who is leading DOGE but the way in which DOGE operates on an underlying premise that efficiency is *the* most important goal when it comes to government reform.
One thing I've always loved about Code for America and (at least sometimes) the broader ecosystem of public-interest tech is that the top priority isn't improving *efficiency* but ensuring greater *effectiveness* in the actual delivery of a service to the communities that need it most. Obviously there is overlap and great need for both, but my worry is that DOGE-like efforts on a deeper philosophical level are fundamentally changing the entire conversation. When reducing the bottom line dollar amount is made the ultimate metric of success (complete with a whole leaderboard and other honestly gross stabs at gamification) and overspending is turned into the biggest bogeyman, it's the most vulnerable communities who stand to lose the most.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not endorsing DOGE by any means. My whole point is that I would not go about reform this way, which is part of why I'm not in charge. What I'm saying is DOGE is what we are getting, and it will be interesting to watch what happens. We don't know what they'll do, if anything. It's slightly possible they'll realize that it's actually not a great idea to blow it all up because it turns out government is not a nice to have like Twitter but a have to have, that the people who voted his boss in actually rely on government to work. But I'd love to see him realize that his friend Larry is part of who is screwing government and the people, and decide if he's still going to disrupt the government tech ecosystem after all. I can not want him to break medicaid but still want him to fight Larry, if that makes sense.
it's possible, isn't it, that he breaks medicaid and doesn't fight Larry at all? I hear your clarification that you're not endorsing DOGE but there's an undercurrent of glee based on the premise that Elon/DOGE is just going to change the things you don't like.
Maybe an indiscriminate bulldozer is what is needed but let's not pretend that it's not that. Brexiteers in the UK did the same, pushed for Brexit as the needed bulldozers for various things that they weren't happy about whilst at the same time taking as an article of faith that they can cherry pick or have their cake and eat it.
You increase effectiveness the most by removing regulations, IMO. That maximizes upside for the public. I think this is also the top priority of DOGE, not cost-cutting.
This is uninformed. It depends on the regulation and the implementation. Have you read Jennifer’s book?
“This is uniformed”
As is almost surely your comment here.
James is talking about the effectiveness of the U.S. economy. You seem to be talking about the effectiveness of how the government bureaucracy itself works.
You *may* be right about the second, though I have my doubts.
You are almost certainly wrong about the first.
The premise of DOGE is to cut expenditures in order to reduce the deficit.
Its purpose is not to improve how government functions. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy is saying anything about making tax forms easier or application forms better. For re-emphasis, its purpose is not just to reduce the deficit, but more specifically to cut expenditures to reduce the deficit. Otherwise, they would surely be putting revenue generating actions on the table, but I have not seen anything of the sort.
The premise has nothing to do with reducing the deficit, which is going to zoom up under trump, or to cut expenditures which will also zoom up. The premise is that government should subsidize the rich and suppress the general population.
But upward transfers that DOES require cutting some expenditures. Deficits will increase.
The premise that Musk and Ramaswamy present in the news is that they can reduce the deficit by cutting expenditures. We shouldn't pretend that they are interested in efficiency or in reducing the deficit through other means.
One of the best essays I’ve ever read. Subscribing.
Thank you!
You say:
"But it's not as if mere attention would solve the problem. There are entrenched interests for the status quo. It's easy to imagine these as exclusively or even mostly commercial interests, but if that were true, why would it take three years to issue guidance as anodyne as the hiring memo the Biden Administration put out this summer? Among other provisions, it declared job titles could now be listed accurately (you could say it was a software developer instead of an IT specialist) and that you could now share “certs” of candidates who qualified for positions across agencies — but only under certain circumstances, and it’s still not widely done, so we mostly lose good applicants because they apply for one position and aren’t considered for others. These and a few other changes took a smart, dedicated, caring team three years to get done."
Yikes! Let me repeat that: Yikes!
Back in 1981 I was part of a team NASA put together to make recommendations on how to up their computing game, particularly with respect to AI. That's one of the problems we identified: the job classification system didn't recognize computer science and programming. You could hire mathematicians or electrical engineers but not computer scientists or programmers. That was over 40 years ago.
JPL is pretty successful, no? I see excellent work from them.
The Democrats controlled congress for 54 years out of the 64 years from 1931 to 1995. The Democrats had combined control of the Presidency and congress for 32 years of that period to only 2 years for Republicans.
They used that time to build the current system. They're not going to fix it.
Thank you for putting into words how messy and frustrating government reform is - showing why transformation is so hard but still so important.
A lot of these problems are endemic to large organizations, public or private. Risk aversion, opaque lines of authority, entrenched incumbents, vendor capture, and weak management is common even in our at-will large corporations. When I was starting out in business, we had a fruitless engagement with a big company that couldn't get past the door. I gave up and told one of the managers that it was impossible to do business with them. He interrupted me, mid rant, and said: "You think its bad, but I have to work in this environment, it's much worse for me".
The “endemic” stuff is more than the negative fctors listed here— there are of course positive factors involved in the attempt to keep any enterprise in control, such as structures of authority/decision making, accounting systems, hiring practices, materials and safety standards etc. The legal structures of governments. I think of these as systemic behaviors learned by trial and error throughout human history: a kind of social infrastructure with deep roots (Florentine accounting) along with institutions’ own local histories.
The ultimate problem is that human organizations have grown in interrelated complexity far beyond the point of anyone being able to control anything. It’s the inevitable side effect of the emergence of a highly social, intelligent species with opposable thumbs. At this point all we can do is look for clever wedges that can leverage systems beyond their relative magnitude or power.
Pahlka describes organizational shortcomings without applying moral judgments. The trick is to know where the threshold of effective moral language should be applied. CEOs and elected officials have to operate under systemic constraints. On the other hand, I don’t refrain from harsh moral criticism of oligarchs, billionaires, people seeking limitless power, wagers of war for trivial reasons, misinforming exploiters of human nature for personal gain, blackmailers, [add your bogeyman here.]
Wow. A lot to digest! My respect grows with each post.
“DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo” (I’m not sure it’s even weaponized—maybe it just exists even for those who are eager to change the status quo.)
But I’ve also been thinking along these lines with a couple of scenarios that involve DOGE having to abandon their all-encompassing slogan-based plans and start reforming the Federal government on a smaller scale. The most probable scenario is that their currently threatened measures will prompt such an outcry from the public that either Trump or the GOP will make them pull back. If the stock market reacts negatively, all the better.
Or, when they confront “the wall” of bureaucracy, they realize how unintelligent their slogans make them look. They become interested in the kinds of actual challenges that Pahlka writes about. In other words, they start “paying attention”. They read “Recoding America” and realize that they have stumbled into a role that can re-charge their jaded, oligarchic intellects and have meaningful, historical impact at the same time.
As for the finger-wagging on social media, it seems to be yet another instance of the Manichean thinking that’s taken over country. I think of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican and yet took great pains to help his own autocrats govern better (after all, he had to live with the results.) There may come a time for outright condemnation of the Trump administration, but for now we need to pay close attention for ways to influence its intentions and motives.
From the Tweets, Elon does not even WANT to reform regulations. He wants to reduce expenditures. Making bureaucracies slower and more sclerotic just might save money.
Remember Elon's motto is "Cut too much, then restore some."
That doesn't work when you cut and kill, unless, like Jesus, you can
reverse death. Elon MAY believe that.
If he fails, so what? He returns to his "private" life, and poor dead people stay dead..
Thanks Jennifer. YOu've changed my mind on this topic.
Remember this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19iht-letter19.html