Is there a path to responsible disruption?

I hope it's not too late for the kind of clearing of the brush that controlled burns bring.

Have you ever said something you thought would be controversial and maybe even offensive, only to find that you hadn’t gone far enough? Once, at one of those networking unconferences, I said I thought our military would be more effective with a smaller budget.

I had spent four years on the Defense Innovation Board and met literally hundreds of people working in the Pentagon and the services who knew quite well that the way they were working wasn’t fit to the moment, wasn’t going to get us to a force able to meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. Sure, there were the defenders of the status quo, but there were far more well-intentioned would-be change agents. They often had an air of slight desperation, usually hoping the DIB could champion their initiatives and finally bust through the resistance of the bureaucracy. There were some wins, like the air tanker refueling app we identified, and DIUx got built, which resulted in the Air Force starting Kessel Run and building a strong internal agile development capacity. But mostly these bureaucracy-busters ended up losing in the long run, despite our kind words and shows of support — and despite the support of high-level leadership in the Pentagon. (Read Unit X for an engaging account of how hard change is even when you have the full support of the Secretary of Defense.) Multiple successive boards, commissions, reports, and initiatives all said the same things about the need for change, and yet changes in the DoD are still nibbles around the edges.

That’s why I’d come to conclude that the only way the DoD was really going to change was through major budget cuts — something that forced people’s hands into new ways of working, into true prioritization, into processes that took less time because they were less burdened by the trappings that come with enormous budgets. I began my comment with an apology to the senior Air Force official sitting next to me, a caveat that I meant no disrespect, and wasn’t arguing for less military might — in fact, what I wanted was a more capable military. To my surprise, he piled on. “She’s right,” he said. “But it has to be much deeper than anything we’ve seen before. We had to cut during the last sequestration, and it was around 15% off the top of everything, which doesn’t force meaningful choices. It needs to be like half.”

Half. A military leader arguing we’d get greater military strength with half the budget.¹

This came to mind, of course, reading about Elon Musk’s intentions with his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He’s said he wants to cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget.² His co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy has one-upped him by proposing to fire federal employees with odd-numbered Social Security numbers. Something there rhymes, since that would mean firing half the staff. But it also rhymes chillingly with Thanos’s strategy in Avengers Infinity War for alleviating world suffering by snapping his fingers and sending half of humanity into oblivion. I wonder if Thanos chose his victims based on their galactic social security numbers?

There is also some uncomfortable resonance with points I have made here before. I’ve written that we need to stop making people do the wrong jobs in government, that we need to rebalance between “stop energy” and “go energy,” and that policy, process and procedural accretion turns much of what public servants must do into bullshit jobs. 

So am I cheering on Musk and Ramaswamy?

Yes and no. Or maybe no and yes. These overly blunt instruments are dangerous. If you’re in “blow it all up” mode, go re-read Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, and think what happens when the people who know how to keep our nuclear arsenal safe happen to have the wrong last SSN digit and are suddenly gone. The prospect will chill your bones.

But let’s recognize where this instinct comes from. The problem of government’s addiction to process and procedure at the expense of meaningful results is real. We’ve been very cautious with change for decades. Advocates for de-proceduralization and bureaucracy-busting have been told to do it the cautious, thoughtful way, and ended up despairing of that approach. I remember when a former colleague who had gone on to work for San Francisco city government burst into my office one day, crying “I’m trying to carve Mount Rushmore with a teaspoon! I’m never going to get anywhere!” At some point, you feel like throwing a tantrum, or snapping your magic fingers, letting the chips fall where they may, and hoping someone can clean up the resulting mess. 

The problem is there are things we simply should not break. Take civil service reform. What I’ve said about it mirrors Musk’s language — that incremental change is no longer helpful, and what’s needed is change that will shock the system into fundamentally different behaviors in a complex, adaptive ecosystem. But I’ve also said, and strongly believe, that the foundation is strong, good, and right. Read the Merit System Principles. They describe a system we should all agree we want. But principles, policy, and practice can be very far apart. We got rid of the spoils system in 1883 with the Pendleton Act, which said we would hire on the basis of merit rather than political favors (and of course there’s been lots of subsequent legislation on this topic.) The regulations, guidance, policies, processes, procedures, practices, and just plain lore that grew from these foundational laws over time have resulted in a system that doesn’t hire on the basis of merit (90% of competitive job postings rely on self-assessments), that fails to fire underperformers, that has a whole host of unacceptable issues, unacceptable for the very reason that they aren’t consistent with the principles they are supposed to uphold. But that doesn’t mean we should lose the principles, including that of an independent civil service that can honestly convey their professional judgments, including scientific evidence, instead of what appointed officials want to hear.³ The independence of our civil service is something we should not break, and shouldn’t have to to get the system we need and deserve.

A Thanos strategy might also destroy the very seeds of change we must preserve to rebuild well. Take this promising project: The Army, burdened by decades of accumulation of requirements governing the acquisition of equipment, has identified and inactivated 52 legacy requirements documents that have been holding the service back from prioritizing “war-winning capability” over merely “additive capability.” These war-winning capabilities are the right toppings on Ezra Klein’s metaphorical bagel. The rest were weighing down our war-fighting platforms and diluting our military effectiveness. This is amazing work. Snap your fingers and accidentally fire this team, and what you’re left with is a terrified, demoralized workforce that doesn’t know how to rebuild. We need something between the overly-cautious incremental approach that’s resulted in so much frustration and ripping out our very foundations. Will Muskaswamy understand this?

There are other unintended consequences of this strategy. I’ve been an advocate for reform of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which I insist be referred to as “the comically mis-named Paperwork Reduction Act,” since it results in enormous amounts of paperwork and a higher administrative burden on the public. If Ramaswamy fires half the PRA compliance officers, but does nothing about the law itself, what we’d probably get is even longer delays getting PRA approval, a slower-moving bureaucracy, and worse service to the public. To be fair, there’s a case to be made that the lack of resources would force a right-sizing of the processes that have been built up around compliance, but I wouldn’t count on that.

A smarter approach would be to work with Congress to pass smart reforms. But the theory of change for DOGE, which has been set up outside government (lots of questions about that!) seems to be that Muskaswamy will figure out the changes needed, whisper in Trump’s ear, and his OMB will make them happen. But DOGE will have very limited impact if it relies entirely on executive action. 

If they are able to get de-proceduralization like PRA reform through Congress, then Trump’s team could direct OIRA⁴ and agencies to recraft the compliance jobs that are no longer needed into positions that support the speedy creation of high-quality, low-burden government forms, websites, and services. A large number of them would stay and be thrilled that their jobs consisted of far less bullshit and more serving the public and meeting the nation’s needs. If some of those personnel can’t succeed in their re-designed jobs, use revamped civil service processes to hold them accountable, including, if necessary, termination. I get that this sounds pollyannaish given the fear and dread that many public servants feel right now, but there is a world in which dramatic change taps into and leverages the best intentions and expertise of the change agents I talked about up front. Where public servants feel the procedures that are being right-sized or eliminated are necessary to protect the public interest (and there will be vast differences of opinion about that), this will play out very differently. But there are places where this could work. I want that world, so I’m going to name it.

Call me naïve. Some days I’ll agree with you. But also remember that no matter who is in the White House, social security payments need to go out, veterans need their benefits, people still depend on Medicaid, our global adversaries love our slowness and fumbles, another pandemic may be on the way, FEMA has a lot of work to do….the list goes on. There are stated policy priorities of this administration I would not touch with a ten-foot pole, and I know that is true for many others. But abandon government entirely and even more people will get hurt. And if you believe that we may still have a democracy (I don’t know, but it’s possible) and power may be in different hands at some point in the future, as the “thermostatic” theory of the election supports,⁵ I don’t want a future non-Trump administration to inherit the government we have today because it hasn’t been up to the task we need it to do. Sometimes it takes a sledgehammer (but not dynamite, not a bulldozer) to begin much-needed renovations. We should be trying to break down walls, not uproot the foundation.

There are hundreds of people like me who, despite our enormous reservations about Trump’s policies, could show the DOGEies where to aim those sledgehammers where they’ll do some good. And there are folks on the right, like the Foundation for American Innovation, whose ideas I’ve long admired. We’ve been talking about these challenges across the aisle for years, and there is far more we agree on than disagree. They say politics can make for strange bedfellows, but despite my time working for Obama, I don’t find my alliance with voices on the right strange at all — in fact, today, I work with a bipartisan coalition of think tanks that include left, right, and center. The path to responsible disruption has been beaten by heterodox thinkers of various political stripes. The team at DOGE should know about that path. Whether they choose to take it is up to them. 

I’ve made the argument for responsible disruption, but now let me speak to those who are afraid — afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of the damage to the institutions they have stewarded, afraid of the impact on the public from that damage. Of course you are. These fears are well founded. But the right metaphor may not be teaspoons vs. sledgehammers, it may be forest fires. 

I live part of the year in a small town in California with the highest fire risk in the state. When we first moved in, the fire chief came by to talk to us about clearing a defensible perimeter around our house and other common sense measures that the previous owners had neglected. But he was also clear that in a mega-fire, none of those things may help save our house. “When this was native land,” he told us, “there were about 50 stems per acre. Today, there are about 1500.” Native peoples didn’t put out fires — they routinely started them, to clear out the brush and make room for healthy new growth. We now know that fires are necessary for healthy forests, that a century of fire suppression in the West has been disastrous.⁶

We are now trying to re-learn those practices, to do controlled burns to reduce the fuel load, but now it's far more dangerous to do them because of the unnatural density of the forest around us. When I talk about smart reforms above, about finding the right places to aim the sledgehammer, I’m advocating for the equivalent of today’s smarter fire management strategies that mitigate the environmental, economic, and human harm. But large parts of the West (and elsewhere) burn every year now, and those fires cause enormous damage and disruption anyway. It has become a fact of life.

Prescribed fire in ponderosa pine forest in eastern Washington, United States, to restore ecosystem health. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn

I can speak of these dangers from a place of relative safety. For us it's a summer home, but when our town burns (I believe it is a matter of time, though it could be longer than my lifetime), it is likely most of our neighbors will lose their year-round home, and everything they own. For some, it is where they have lived their whole lives. The loss of property will be devastating, even if everyone escapes unharmed. And yet you could give CalFire all the resources in the world, and they would not be able to stop every fire forever. I don’t know how our community will recover when the fire comes, and I do hope everyone will get out alive. But the land is going to burn one day, as it used to regularly, and keeping it from its natural cycles of renewal has made the next fire far more dangerous. 

When that Air Force official wished for a 50% budget cut, he was not wishing for half his colleagues to lose their jobs. He did not want to do away with critical controls on use of weapons that are meant to keep us from horrific abuses. He did not want contracts to go to the biggest bribe. What he wanted was a controlled burn, a way to clear out the brush and make it easier to do his job. I wish he’d gotten it. 

More good reading: 

A Letter To Elon Musk

The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One

1. I’m well aware this won’t happen. It’s not in the realm of the possible given the current political environment, even with the appetite for cuts.

2. This is a wildly implausible number. Trump explicitly said he won't touch entitlements. There is no way defense spending is getting slashed in the current climate. And so you'd have to cut like >200% of non-defense discretionary spending to make that work.

3. Civil servants are also prohibited from making public, political statements, so this mostly means conveying professional judgments up the chain, ultimately to appointed officials, who generally are aligned with the administration.

4. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is part of the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House.

5. From Charlotte Swasey: “There’s a theory that voters behave “thermostatically”, essentially moving right when the government moves left, and vice versa. This matches well with what I’m seeing right now- Biden governed as a historically left presidential and the Democratic party as a whole moved historically left. A rightward swing from voters in response to this would make complete sense under thermostatic theory.”

6. From Wikipedia: The California Legislature first mandated fire suppression in its very first session in 1850, and made "cultural uses of fire" (controlled burns) illegal as far back as the Weeks Act of 1911.