Every group of workers contains 10% who are the best at their jobs and 10% who are the worst. Organizations can spur continuous improvement by periodically culling the bottom 10% and replacing them with employees who are just average. Naturally, this process is made much more difficult when a Union represents the employees. Our Government has been extensively unionized. You can say this is great for allocating money and rights to employees. It is harder to say that this benefits the consumers of Government.
The last big federal workforce expansion I know of was the TSA. As some of you may recall, pre-9/11, airport security was handled by individual airports, usually through private contracts. I was working for a Senator at the time, and I remember getting a call from a constituent worried about losing her job as a result of the takeover. I hope she got hired by the TSA.
The only way it was possible was a literal terrorist attack and a disjointed, non-union industry that didn’t have the organization/ pull to stop it. If we tried something similar with childcare, there would be a tsunami of small businesses calling their congressmen. Given, how many childcare providers are immigrant women of color without AAs in early childhood or whatever would be required, the Dems wouldn’t support it, either.
I truly wish we could bring more functions inside the government. I’m a city worker, and there is so much waste in RFPs, onboarding consultants, managing them, processing invoices, etc. Proving I’m hiring and paying consultants appropriately is the most bureaucratic part of my job.
I work in the private sector but spent 2 years working in the finance group at a small county level agency. Honestly, the quality of the administrative staff was shocking. I ran away screaming and would never take another public sector role. Talent attracts talent and frankly, the opposite is also true.
Even as a crazy libertarian, I will concede that certain functions are “public goods” and cannot be provided by the market.
But in those (rare!) circumstances, what is the method of institutional governance that comes nearest to replicating the accountability of a competitive marketplace? When the people using a service are not the ones paying for it, when the political motivation for an infrastructure project is more about inputs (jobs!) than outputs (building something useful on time and on budget), how do you literally and figuratively make the trains run on time?
Great points from a policy perspective. But makes again painfully aware that Republicans aren't interested in shrinking the federal budget or decreasing spending in any way. They just don't want tax dollars flowing to efficient government programs, but to them. Through contract work and grift.
This is such a situation of heart versus mind to me. I work with a lot of federal agencies getting people disability benefits, particularly Social Security. We meet with the heads of one of the regional arms quarterly. Intellectually, I know that they’re starved for bodies and that a lot of the backlog, inability to respond timely to requests, and willingness to turn a blind eye to incompetence and even outright fraud is due to understaffing and inadequate training.
But ooh, emotionally, the idea that my tax dollars are going to snide dunces who refuse to be held accountable for egregiously bad service and refuse to enact even the most minor internal policies to increase efficiency just toasts my rye bread so bad. SSA just wastes so much money per year on costly errors and delays and structural inefficiencies and there’s just no effort whatsoever to do more with the money they’ve already got or allocate it more effectively. Last time, SSA told us they refused to suspend or even discipline an employee committing fraud because it might make it more difficult to hire new employees next year if applicants knew SSA was surveilling them closely enough to notice fraud. It gets my goat that the agency always has their hand out, demanding more and more, while the employees we interact with demand no accountability and decline to take basic steps to get things done. If I were as bad an employee as any given SSA field office rep, I’d have been fired years ago. If I routinely screwed up essential functions of my job, lied about work I didn’t do, failed to understand rudimentary parts of my area of law and stole money from my clients, I’d be fired. At SSA, we’ve been dealing with some of these same incompetent, dishonest employees for years.
So I understand the emotional appeal of Ramaswamy’s stance. I know it’s a bad idea, but the part of me who sits on hold with SSA for hours a day only to get “uh, we lost your client’s file” or “we coded this case wrong so it sat gathering dust for seven months” understands why anyone who’s had to routinely deal with a public-facing federal agency would find it appealing.
To build off of this thing about the two government agencies that people under 65 who aren’t veterans interact with the most are the IRS and DMV and both probably have single digit approval ratings.
Wish I had time today to comment on this, but I have to jump through hoops for a state RFP that we're responding to so the department can cover their ass if things don't go well.
Much of the expense of gov projects and procurement come down to the fact that everyone is protecting themselves from failure, because failure cannot happen. Better that something sort of works, or costs 10 times more, or takes 10 times longer, than having it fail, because the political fallout is not acceptable to politicians, because whatever opposition there was to the project will make as much hay out of any failure as possible, and it works. Think Healthcare.gov website not working for the first week.
Vivek's naive VC mindset is not prepared for this reality. VCs accept high volumes of failure because eventually something will hit and be successful. Established companies fail all the time, despite all the nonsense they may spew of their management not accepting failure, they can usually get away with releasing something that doesn't work well for the first month, we just don't see it sensationalized, or we laugh and move on and the company is fine, maybe a small internal shakeup happens, some people get laid-off.
Occasionally something is important enough or bi-partisan enough happens where failure is accepted as part of innovation, like say the early space program, or VA programs, and DARPA like initiatives, but that's a lot rarer these days, and unless that changes, I don't see any level of bureaucracy changing much about successful projects.
There are numerous other issues, quality management at an agency matters, project management matters, etc., properly managing competing interests and lobbying groups matters politically, but the need to cover your ass on gov projects drives so much waste.
I think that's actually just standard Joe Biden stuff. Dark Brandon would have LIBERATED the pandas we already had, declaring that, having breathed the air of freedom, never again would they live under the totalitarian yoke of the ChiComs!
The "we need actual reform" is the most crucial part. Yes, hiring is a shit-show and many people do not want to or cannot wait months for the civil service hiring process to check all the wickets.
But that is just one example. All of the "state capacity" problems that keep government from effectively doing things have analogs in the civil service. While I enjoyed my time and my work as a GS employee, there were many constant and intractable frustrations that eventually caused me to leave. The civil service has it's roots in the 1940's and 1950's and has iterated from there, layer more and more on top of those foundations. This legacy is what keeps the civil service from having any dynamism and the intractable nature is what drives policymakers (and other civil servants) to outsource to the private sector.
So it's not just a question of hiring more bureaucrats, or even primarily a question about doing that - more fundamental changes are required.
Building out government capacity and, more importantly, public trust in the government capacity is probably the most progressive thing an elected official could do right now.
Until that happens, laying off government workers or downsizing government capacity will continue to be a winning political position. Because, let's be honest, dealing with the government is infuriating and voters tend to be more emotional than logical.
Don't necessarily disagree with Matt's specific points, but working for a medium-sized local government that's been going through a modest building boom over the past decade, we've plowed quite a bit of that increased tax base into carpet bombing the organization with various high grade and/or middle/upper management positions for people with public policy master's degrees. Think lots of positions with words like "innovation" in them. The organization does..........not work better than it did in 2013.
in a healthy democracy, what tends to happen is a virtuous cycle that goes something like this
liberals see a shortcoming that can be addressed via direct government action, so they set up an agency to deal with it. this agency then hires people, pays for things to be built, etc. etc.
conservatives come into power and see this program and think it's pretty wasteful and expensive, so they look for ways to trim the fat and make the program less costly
liberals come back into power and, armed with the previous agency's success story, are able to further address problems with additional new government actions.
of course, it sometimes turns out that the agency wasn't really needed at all and it needs to be cut. but still, the point remains that our democracy is dysfunctional largely because we do not have a serious conservative party. one thing i wish liberals would come around to is that America really desperately needs the republicans to get their shit together, not just because their chaos is incredibly dangerous but also because conservatives have a legitimately very important role in how our democracy should function. this is also a reason why drastic education polarization is pretty bad, since it means that anyone competent is a liberal.
notably, the CPC in Canada is poised to do this exact thing if all goes as it seems, so maybe that will provide some inspiration south of the border. i doubt it though, conservative politicians are generally unaware of the state of reality more broadly.
Health care providers are not “reimbursed”; they are paid for their services, just like everyone else. Once upon a time, patients paid directly for their care and were reimbursed by insurance. It made more sense for insurers to pay providers directly but providers still referred to this as “reimbursement” because it implied, unlike for the rest of us, that their work should be considered unsullied by filthy lucre.
Every group of workers contains 10% who are the best at their jobs and 10% who are the worst. Organizations can spur continuous improvement by periodically culling the bottom 10% and replacing them with employees who are just average. Naturally, this process is made much more difficult when a Union represents the employees. Our Government has been extensively unionized. You can say this is great for allocating money and rights to employees. It is harder to say that this benefits the consumers of Government.
The UK under Thatcher and Blair pushed hard on outsourcing public services. But for the last few years, the big buzzword has been "insourcing".
https://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2023/03/outsourcing-out-public-sector
We are also seeing a big backlash in Australia, following scandals with PwC and other big consulting companies.
Did Matty happen to see what the FDIC has been up to before he wrote this? That's American bureaucracy.
So true and well-said/written! Thank you
The last big federal workforce expansion I know of was the TSA. As some of you may recall, pre-9/11, airport security was handled by individual airports, usually through private contracts. I was working for a Senator at the time, and I remember getting a call from a constituent worried about losing her job as a result of the takeover. I hope she got hired by the TSA.
The only way it was possible was a literal terrorist attack and a disjointed, non-union industry that didn’t have the organization/ pull to stop it. If we tried something similar with childcare, there would be a tsunami of small businesses calling their congressmen. Given, how many childcare providers are immigrant women of color without AAs in early childhood or whatever would be required, the Dems wouldn’t support it, either.
I truly wish we could bring more functions inside the government. I’m a city worker, and there is so much waste in RFPs, onboarding consultants, managing them, processing invoices, etc. Proving I’m hiring and paying consultants appropriately is the most bureaucratic part of my job.
I work in the private sector but spent 2 years working in the finance group at a small county level agency. Honestly, the quality of the administrative staff was shocking. I ran away screaming and would never take another public sector role. Talent attracts talent and frankly, the opposite is also true.
Even as a crazy libertarian, I will concede that certain functions are “public goods” and cannot be provided by the market.
But in those (rare!) circumstances, what is the method of institutional governance that comes nearest to replicating the accountability of a competitive marketplace? When the people using a service are not the ones paying for it, when the political motivation for an infrastructure project is more about inputs (jobs!) than outputs (building something useful on time and on budget), how do you literally and figuratively make the trains run on time?
Great points from a policy perspective. But makes again painfully aware that Republicans aren't interested in shrinking the federal budget or decreasing spending in any way. They just don't want tax dollars flowing to efficient government programs, but to them. Through contract work and grift.
This is such a situation of heart versus mind to me. I work with a lot of federal agencies getting people disability benefits, particularly Social Security. We meet with the heads of one of the regional arms quarterly. Intellectually, I know that they’re starved for bodies and that a lot of the backlog, inability to respond timely to requests, and willingness to turn a blind eye to incompetence and even outright fraud is due to understaffing and inadequate training.
But ooh, emotionally, the idea that my tax dollars are going to snide dunces who refuse to be held accountable for egregiously bad service and refuse to enact even the most minor internal policies to increase efficiency just toasts my rye bread so bad. SSA just wastes so much money per year on costly errors and delays and structural inefficiencies and there’s just no effort whatsoever to do more with the money they’ve already got or allocate it more effectively. Last time, SSA told us they refused to suspend or even discipline an employee committing fraud because it might make it more difficult to hire new employees next year if applicants knew SSA was surveilling them closely enough to notice fraud. It gets my goat that the agency always has their hand out, demanding more and more, while the employees we interact with demand no accountability and decline to take basic steps to get things done. If I were as bad an employee as any given SSA field office rep, I’d have been fired years ago. If I routinely screwed up essential functions of my job, lied about work I didn’t do, failed to understand rudimentary parts of my area of law and stole money from my clients, I’d be fired. At SSA, we’ve been dealing with some of these same incompetent, dishonest employees for years.
So I understand the emotional appeal of Ramaswamy’s stance. I know it’s a bad idea, but the part of me who sits on hold with SSA for hours a day only to get “uh, we lost your client’s file” or “we coded this case wrong so it sat gathering dust for seven months” understands why anyone who’s had to routinely deal with a public-facing federal agency would find it appealing.
To build off of this thing about the two government agencies that people under 65 who aren’t veterans interact with the most are the IRS and DMV and both probably have single digit approval ratings.
Actually, as of earlier this year, the IRS had a 51-42 rating.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/30/americans-feel-favorably-about-many-federal-agencies-especially-the-park-service-postal-service-and-nasa/#:~:text=The%20least%20popular%20federal%20agency,42%25%20have%20a%20favorable%20view.
Remember, most people don't actually have issues w/ the IRS. They get their W2, they file, and they're done.
Wish I had time today to comment on this, but I have to jump through hoops for a state RFP that we're responding to so the department can cover their ass if things don't go well.
Much of the expense of gov projects and procurement come down to the fact that everyone is protecting themselves from failure, because failure cannot happen. Better that something sort of works, or costs 10 times more, or takes 10 times longer, than having it fail, because the political fallout is not acceptable to politicians, because whatever opposition there was to the project will make as much hay out of any failure as possible, and it works. Think Healthcare.gov website not working for the first week.
Vivek's naive VC mindset is not prepared for this reality. VCs accept high volumes of failure because eventually something will hit and be successful. Established companies fail all the time, despite all the nonsense they may spew of their management not accepting failure, they can usually get away with releasing something that doesn't work well for the first month, we just don't see it sensationalized, or we laugh and move on and the company is fine, maybe a small internal shakeup happens, some people get laid-off.
Occasionally something is important enough or bi-partisan enough happens where failure is accepted as part of innovation, like say the early space program, or VA programs, and DARPA like initiatives, but that's a lot rarer these days, and unless that changes, I don't see any level of bureaucracy changing much about successful projects.
There are numerous other issues, quality management at an agency matters, project management matters, etc., properly managing competing interests and lobbying groups matters politically, but the need to cover your ass on gov projects drives so much waste.
DARK BRANDON™ IS GETTING US NEW PANDAS!! 🐼
I think that's actually just standard Joe Biden stuff. Dark Brandon would have LIBERATED the pandas we already had, declaring that, having breathed the air of freedom, never again would they live under the totalitarian yoke of the ChiComs!
The "we need actual reform" is the most crucial part. Yes, hiring is a shit-show and many people do not want to or cannot wait months for the civil service hiring process to check all the wickets.
But that is just one example. All of the "state capacity" problems that keep government from effectively doing things have analogs in the civil service. While I enjoyed my time and my work as a GS employee, there were many constant and intractable frustrations that eventually caused me to leave. The civil service has it's roots in the 1940's and 1950's and has iterated from there, layer more and more on top of those foundations. This legacy is what keeps the civil service from having any dynamism and the intractable nature is what drives policymakers (and other civil servants) to outsource to the private sector.
So it's not just a question of hiring more bureaucrats, or even primarily a question about doing that - more fundamental changes are required.
Building out government capacity and, more importantly, public trust in the government capacity is probably the most progressive thing an elected official could do right now.
Until that happens, laying off government workers or downsizing government capacity will continue to be a winning political position. Because, let's be honest, dealing with the government is infuriating and voters tend to be more emotional than logical.
Don't necessarily disagree with Matt's specific points, but working for a medium-sized local government that's been going through a modest building boom over the past decade, we've plowed quite a bit of that increased tax base into carpet bombing the organization with various high grade and/or middle/upper management positions for people with public policy master's degrees. Think lots of positions with words like "innovation" in them. The organization does..........not work better than it did in 2013.
in a healthy democracy, what tends to happen is a virtuous cycle that goes something like this
liberals see a shortcoming that can be addressed via direct government action, so they set up an agency to deal with it. this agency then hires people, pays for things to be built, etc. etc.
conservatives come into power and see this program and think it's pretty wasteful and expensive, so they look for ways to trim the fat and make the program less costly
liberals come back into power and, armed with the previous agency's success story, are able to further address problems with additional new government actions.
of course, it sometimes turns out that the agency wasn't really needed at all and it needs to be cut. but still, the point remains that our democracy is dysfunctional largely because we do not have a serious conservative party. one thing i wish liberals would come around to is that America really desperately needs the republicans to get their shit together, not just because their chaos is incredibly dangerous but also because conservatives have a legitimately very important role in how our democracy should function. this is also a reason why drastic education polarization is pretty bad, since it means that anyone competent is a liberal.
notably, the CPC in Canada is poised to do this exact thing if all goes as it seems, so maybe that will provide some inspiration south of the border. i doubt it though, conservative politicians are generally unaware of the state of reality more broadly.
Matt-
Stop saying “reimbursement”!!!
Health care providers are not “reimbursed”; they are paid for their services, just like everyone else. Once upon a time, patients paid directly for their care and were reimbursed by insurance. It made more sense for insurers to pay providers directly but providers still referred to this as “reimbursement” because it implied, unlike for the rest of us, that their work should be considered unsullied by filthy lucre.