Efficiency?

One of the things that has upended me so much in the last couple of weeks is the enormous cognitive dissonance between the messaging coming out of DOGE world and my sense of what reality is. I know, that’s naive in a world where virulent propaganda is challenging everyone’s reality every minute of every day, but it’s particularly frustrating to me when it comes to “efficiency”.

I started my professional life as a counterterrorism analyst, but ended up doing a meaningful run as a management consultant for Bain and Company from 1989 to 1993. This was before private equity started really giving consulting a bad name. A lot of my work was evaluating client operations and strategic positions and making recommendations for, yup, improved “efficiency”. Mitt Romney famously build Bain Capital on the back of management consulting skills that he leveraged by buying companies, throwing consulting resources at them, making them more productive, increasing profitability, and ultimately riding the company value to extraordinary wealth for investors.

I never participated in a project that didn’t involve, at a minimum, weeks of in depth research and analysis. We would dig into the nittiest and grittiest of details, spend lots of time interviewing folks at the company, and create complex financial models that would project the various scenarios we could expect based on different business decisions and a wide variety of possible outcomes. We didn’t always get it right, of course, but our responsibility to our clients required significant “due diligence”. We owed that based on our fees, a sense of professional obligation, and the very real fact that our reputation was at stake if we offered poorly prepared advice.

So when I first learned of DOGE and its mandate to make the government more efficient, I was more than a little skeptical. Musk’s approach to all of his companies was notably thoughtless and rash, with little regard for analysis or deep thinking. The result is almost always painful disruption and, at best, mixed results in terms of business productivity. Twitter has lost something like 75% of its value based on Musk’s approach to just tearing things apart and then adding back what he thought was needed.

There is nothing about the current process the DOGE bags are foisting upon federal agencies that creates efficiency. There is no analysis, no effort to understand the current state of affairs, no benchmarking against ideals, no interviews with current staff, just knee jerk, reckless, ideologically driven breaking of things with no consideration. A simple example is eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which has recovered $20 billion for consumers for a fraction of that in expenses. Or gutting the IRS staff who return something like $7 to the government for every $1 they spend.

There are lots of ongoing government operations that return way more than they cost. But there are also plenty that cost a lot and don’t seem to be doing much at the moment. Spending billions of dollars on a new weapons system that never gets used seems inefficient, but if it creates a deterrent value or piece of our national defense that prevents massive conflict, that’s a pretty good return on investment. Maintaining pandemic response teams might feel inefficient when we’re all in good health, but Trump eliminated them before the Covid 19 pandemic and more than 1,000,000 citizens in this country didn’t get to see how that turned out.

I would be all for a detailed, patient examination of lots of areas of government spending to see where we might be able to do things better or differently. Or perhaps with fewer staff. Or increase accountability for spending in places like the Pentagon, where they’ve been unable to even complete a comprehensive audit. Analysis, accountability, and evolution to become more productive can all be good and useful things to do for an organization.

But that’s not what’s happening right now in the federal government and complex things are getting broken so quickly in so many areas that we may not be able to repair them and we might not even fully understand the repercussions until terrible things happen (airplanes colliding, food stocks getting contaminated, mortality rates rising) to most of us. For the billionaires, there will be no terrible things at first because wealth can really insulate you from disaster and pain. Up to a point…

I’m not the first person to point this out and I’m glad more folks are attempting to challenge the very upside down insanity of the DOGE bags. Today Jonathan V Last has an excellent piece in the Bulwark on this topic that I recommend: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/government-efficiency-is-a-myth