You have to appreciate the genius of Ramaswamy. Out of all the conceivable methods of randomization he could've chosen, he goes for the one that's an arbitrary number GENERATED BY FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS.
Day 1: President Ramaswamy announces plan to lay off all federal employees with an odd final digit.
Day 2: Social Security Administration announces rollout of new 10-digit SSN, beginning with federal employees. The 10th digit will be determined by doubling the 9th.
And the "naughts" reinforce Burns' trend of always using the outdated/less common terminology any time there is an option - like how he answers the phone "ahoy hoy" or calls helicopters "auto-gyros"
That will backfire, because then Ramaswamy will claim that when he said "odd numbers," he meant odd like funny, peculiar. Weirdo numbers, like numerals invented for use in an unfamiliar non-base-10 counting system. The goal all along was just to make sure nobody in federal employ was going around sporting numbers like that.
Day 3: President Ramaswamy signs an executive order proclaiming that henceforth the numbers 2 and 6 shall be considered odd and 0 is half odd- if your SSN ends in 0 due to the change from SSA, you work half hours and get half pay.
Day 500: Entire federal workforce replaced with undocumented immigrants, in a bilateral disarmament agreement ending the ceaseless escalation of attempts at firing or retaining government employees through mathematical manipulation of Social Security numbers.
And President Ramaswamy spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Number of Social Security. Then shalt thou count to nine digits, no more, no less. Nine shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be Nine. Ten shalt thou not count, neither count thou eight, excepting that thou then proceed to Nine. Eleven is right out. Once the number nine, being the ninth number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Number of Social Security towards My odd number detector, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.”
I would ask this question more broadly: why do business types (and I suppose Wall Street in general) think laying off a bunch of people will increase productivity? I'm at mid-career at this point and these layoffs happen at my company every 2-3 years like clockwork, which is probably the average across the industry. So then everyone has to spend a bunch of time figuring out what the new organization will look like, evaluating people for their jobs, doling out severance packages, dealing with the increased attrition that happens when good employees start looking elsewhere, dealing with the lower morale (and then lower productivity) from the remaining employees... and in the end you probably lose ~4-6 months every time you do this, and pretty obviously never increase productivity.
My impression has always been that the benefit is paying lower total salaries, which I suppose makes the quarterly reports look better but doesn't actually get closer to making products we're trying to make. But hearing Ramaswamy and other Rs talk about bloated government and hold up these sorts of business practices as a model makes me think that they actually believe rank-and-file workers don't really do anything.
You can look at increasing productivity in two ways - bringing in more dollars for the same cost, or bringing in the same amount of dollars for lower cost.
The first one is hard because you actually need a vision for new products, space in the market to win, etc. The second one is actually pretty easy because it is true that in many companies there are some number of people who don’t actually do much that is critical.
I don’t think Wall Street believes layoffs make the remaining workers better. But saving a tens of millions of dollars in costs truly does increase profitability.
Well of course, but that’s pretty much the definition of business culture.
As an aside this is why I always roll my eyes at those “toxic workplace” stories that seem to come out every few months about places ranging from the Ellen Degeneres show to Away (the luggage manufacturer) —all workplaces are toxic! All ownership/management will put their own interests before employees! Why are we surprised?!
This complaint doesn't make sense to me. Putting your interest first does not equal toxic. When you buy something from a store, do you put their interest before yours? If you don't, is that toxic?
The point of employment is a mutually beneficial commercial relationship where you provide something of value to them and they pay you (money, benefits, etc.) for it. I want the company I work for to succeed because its good for me, but I'm not there for their interests, I'm there for mine. My assumption is they feel/act the same way.
I understand that claim, in an Econ 101 way, but I think the fact that we think this way about business relations is actually a big part of the problem. If you look at the most successful cooperative human enterprises (both business and non-business), they actually DON'T operate with each player trying to maximize personal gain in a framework of non-aligned interests. Rather, they involve people engaging in a certain amount of altruistic behavior because they share a set of interests beyond simply, "I want the company to make enough money to pay me."
Just as an anecdotal example, my grandfather was an engineer and flight controller at NASA during the Apollo days. He didn't want NASA to succeed in order to pay him. He wanted the rockets to fly because he genuinely wanted the rockets to fly, and he wanted the astronauts to make it to the moon and back because he was genuinely interested in that as an outcome.
You could argue (and I would) that this is still an activity with a payoff, and it's the kind of payoff that businesses would like (which is why you can find a whole shelf of books about building "corporate culture" at your bookstore). But it is very hard to quantify and thus often gets short shrift relative to the dollars-and-cents visible value of layoffs that are directly toxic to the culture.
This is not a new problem, and I think it's a very hard one to solve, but models do exist, although I think it is fair to say that the record is pretty mixed. Historically, some businesses attempted to solve it with corporate paternalism. I think you could also describe the labor relations structure in German industry as one attempt at a better solution. But I don't think the pure parallel-interests model you describe is sufficient to deal with the concerns raised above.
I think game theory helps provide the appropriate explanation for this. My employer and I are not in an one off game where each of us is trying to maximize the gain on a specific transaction. We're repeat players where there is significant give and take, and most importantly an understanding that them providing me with more than minimal respect gains them more than minimal effort.
As for the story of your grandfather and NASA, I think its absolutely fantastic that some people are able to find careers in something they have a deep passion about. But I think we need to recognize that the vast majority of jobs aren't like that. Few people are passionate about collecting trash, installing drywall, or doing TPS reports. Something I've viewed with suspicion is this increasing attempt by companies to get their employees to "bring their passion to their work" instead of just wanting excellent work and paying people well. Far to often it ends up with people bringing their politics to work and that's just misery for everyone - and I'm a political junkie!
The best solution for all of this in my opinion is a healthy labor market, where there are plenty of workers but there isn't enormous slack either. Needing/wanting to find a new job shouldn't be a matter of desperation, but neither should the market be so tight that people can get away with being crappy just because there isn't anyone else.
I'm not sure I understand the "all workplaces are toxic." I currently work in a very non-toxic place. But perhaps I am making your argument. I am reluctant to leave even though my pay is low for my industry because the environment is so good.
Yeah ok clearly not all. But most! Most companies treat their employees poorly or with disdain, many bosses create unpleasant team environments, lots of work is not enjoyable.
Like literally people have been complaining about work for as long as work has existed. So why does it make news when it turns out someone famous or some high flying entrepreneur is a bad boss? That should be our default expectation!
Genuinely think this is partly attributable to the cult of Jack Welch. There is obviously never going to be one reason why trends like this occurs but Jack Welch truly was the celebrity CEO of the 80s along with Lee Iacocca.
And Welch’s “just automatically cut 10% of the workforce” became a north star. Obviously most companies didn’t literally follow this model (though many prominent companies do). But I think the ethos was hugely influential. Heck I suspect it’s a part of why Musk fire a bajillion people at Twitter (sorry X).
Point being, layoffs being immediate reaction to any setback became a kind of norm.
Cutting staff has a tendency to juice stock numbers, which is how corporate executives are often judged. Agree it can be "pound foolish" for a lot of companies in the long run.
Because human beings are creatures of inertia, and most of us operate far below our potential level. Taking away resources forces uncomfortable change which often leads to innovation. It’s better to build a culture of trust and innovation from the start, but we largely suck at it as a society hence this.
Well sure, that's the B school logic... I've just never seen this work in practice. I work in an industry of highly educated professionals who are (mostly) well motivated. When the trust factor goes out the window, that motivation disappears, and so does the innovation.
Not saying this is necessarily the case with government agencies, but you know, conservatives used to talk about valuing work and getting people steady jobs, and now they talk about laying people off. I sure as hell don't want the people pushing for this to be running my country.
I see this over and over in the private sector. Organizations naturally hire too much, low-value work and bureaucracy expands, and it's in no one's interest to cut staff.
Then there's a financially-driven layoff round, and management *has* to cut the fat.
It terrifies me that government never has this forcing mechanism. I don't doubt that the federal workforce is massively, massively overstaffed in some areas (while being understaffed in others that never received the budget to expand with organically-growing workloads, like the IRS.)
The part that no one seems to be talking about is how different a 3.9% unemployment rate is from pretty much forever. I feel like when the unemployment rate was higher the government was the employer of last resort - in more a make-work capacity. Now would be the best time to clean some of this up.
Yeah, I'm in a moment of crisis and crater of trust and motivation, where I realize that I must tell my employees what is the new policy, but I cannot insubordinately tell them how sure I am that other teams will just choose to not follow the new policy and that we should feel free to ignore it. No matter what option I choose, this further erodes any sort of political capital I have with my team and outside of it.
I feel for you. FWIW I have always appreciated honestly from above in such situations. Even if you have to do (or ignore) the stupid thing, I find the acknowledgement that it is, in fact, stupid to be somehow comforting.
I don't particularly mind implementing policies that I don't agree with. What makes you feel like a chump is spending your time, *and directing your employees to spend their time*, working on your team-specific implementation when you know other teams will fucking blow it off.
I wrote a longer reply to this that I guess Substack ate, which was probably just as well given how much of it consisted of throat-clearing "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but..." type of language.
But the basic gist was that it's not so much that people think layoffs will improve productivity within a certain pre-drawn circle of assets and operations aimed at exploiting those assets. (I.e., a "company" you've acquired.) It's that business/Wall Street types see themselves as adding value by drawing different circles. E.g., exploiting the assets of the company you've purchased in a higher-value way only possible because of a different asset you own. Meanwhile, you're slashing the operations devoted to doing legacy stuff with the legacy asset, which you now only care about as a hedge against your synergistic idea not working out.
I think the best idea would be higher pay in exchange for higher accountability. The Republicans are of course wrong that we could eliminate huge swathes of the federal workforce without creating serious problems. The result of that would be worse government, which they can then cynically point to when they make the case for even less of it.
However I did a short stint early in my career as a federal employee of a somewhat overlooked institution. This was almost 20 years ago now but it had serious problems. Hiring was way more focused on demographics than competence. After a year or so probationary period people became virtually unfire-able. People below management level had union protection which made performance management even more difficult, and at times so cumbersome people simply wouldn't do it. The result was a lot of people there more because they checked some demographic box doing poor work on projects of questionable utility and with a serious attitude of entitlement. The contractors weren't always great but at least you could fire them (I actually started as one). Ultimately the experience was so bizarre and disheartening i left for a law career.
This is of course only one side of the story. There were also a lot of selfless people who worked their butts off as hard as anyone in the private sector, typically for less pay and in much more thankless conditions. But the fact remains that the civil service rules need serious reform. Hard as it is for the left of center to accept we also need to just stop caring so much about 'equity.' Color blindness and non-discrimination yes, but not obsessing over percentages of race and sex. The path to the kind of good government program we want is with high standards and high professionalism and accountability. It then becomes effective and starts to make the case for itself.
The number one hiring problem isn’t DEI it’s military preferences. Anyone who has worked for the government recently can tell you this. The expansion of direct hire and an increase in GS compensation is much needed.
The organization I worked for lost some many hires because of the slow, bureaucratic process. Many we extended offers to had already found another job. Most people can't wait six months for a hiring decision and onboarding.
A friend is going through this at the moment. There's a relatively senior position in government she was excited about. It's been at least six months she applied. They still haven't announced the results.
I grew up in the DC area and have a lot of friends who stuck around there. It's absolutely wild how long the hiring process takes for GS jobs and how many people just find something else in the meantime.
Maybe so. Like I said, this was quite a while ago, and at the height of the Iraq war so recent vets were all being stop lost or otherwise occupied. It was also before anyone had ever heard the term DEI. Still, the main issue seemed to be hiring for reasons other than competence for the job then not being able to do anything about poor performers once they were in the door. The natural thing to do was supplement with contractors, which then creates its own set of issues.
100% this. And exactly as you experienced, low accountability not only results in poor performance from some, but a devastating blow to motivation to others.
One question I have for you: say there were no constraints on firing at all, and more discretion in rewarding employees with raises, etc. how much do you think that would have fixed the issues you saw?
I’m very persuadable, but from seeing the inner workings of large private organizations, I think there is still an element of bureaucratic malaise that takes root in large private organizations. You get issues around politically popular (here I mean organizational politics) directors or VPs or their equivalents, that nonetheless are ineffective in delivering for the organization. And those problems in private company’s can self perpetuate for a while, but are usually eventually solved because eventually someone becomes financially accountable for the results.
In principle I’m for a bigger, more effective government. But I have (what I think is) a healthy fear of how effective government can be in the limit.
I think that's true. I am also not sure if it's a magic bullet or if there is one but hard to see any reform succeeding without including, at minimum, the ability to performance manage. There is a larger cultural issue we have in the US about government work as a jobs program as opposed to delivery of public services that is admittedly a much harder nut to crack.
Agree that the conservative view of who "works for the government" also seems like a bunch of DEI administrations and obscure office workers keeping you from driving a big truck.
In reality Vivke's plan would mean things like your uncle learning from the the VA that "We regret to inform you appointment with an oncologist is now delayed for 24 to 36 months, please do not call this number again as it will no longer be answered. Thank you."
I mean this genuinely and not as some bank shot critique: I’d like to see you tackle more specifically how we can perpetually reinvigorate government functions and put more specifics behind your thesis of needing to spend more money. To be clear I think you are right, but I think your idea is highly contingent on good execution of how that money is spent at many different levels of government by many different actors (eg see the transit spending you have been rightly critical of). In other words, I think you have left the hard part I’ll-defined.
After all, it’s really not just the direct personnel spending, but the extent to which those personnel are efficient stewards of non-personnel spending (again, see transit spending). One of my favorite takes that you have is “managing people is hard, actually.” And your experiences at Vox surely seemed to have shown you how difficult it can be to mold culture and orient people toward achieving common goals even at a small organization. After all, you left Vox to write this newsletter (I’m glad you did!). But I don’t believe (and I don’t think you do either) a disillusioned park ranger’s recourse should be to go buy some land and start their own park.
I agree Ramaswamys idea is nuts. But I think it resonates with some in part because I think tearing it down (to the inevitably let someone else build it back up later) is in effect what happens (in a less chaotic way) in most other major organizations. Having been around management of large private organizations, I get it: even in the private organizations, if management finds their isn’t the cultural or political will or vision or appetite or alignment to do the hard tactical work of fixing an organizational issue, sometimes you just nuke the whole thing and start over.
So, if you got to control congress and the executive branch for four years, what principles/systems/processes/etc (beyond cloning yourself and personally twisting the arm of each and every federal employee) would you change to deploy the money in a way that achieved positive results?
Francis Fukuyama tackles some of this in his book Political Order and Political Decay, which includes the federal Park Service as one case study in excellence and eventual decay.
One takeaway from the book is that any kind of civil service reform is likely going to be an extremely long process and it is hard for me to imagine how the US as it stands today has the political will and attention span for an effort like that.
Getting rid of the "spoils system" and building up the current civil service system was a long process from 1830-1930.
Getting to actually good bureaucracy is likely another century long endeavour.
At the federal level, I agree with this 100%. At the state/local level, I would offer one cautionary note, which is that many agencies simply don't do certain things -- big software procurements, design and construction of major capital projects, etc. -- frequently enough to justify having permanent staff that specialize in those things. So outside consultants can be a better approach, and hopefully they can bring experience to bear from other agencies so that the wheel isn't being reinvented.
Now, does that argue for consolidation of local agencies into regional or state agencies? Maybe! But local politicians tend to like having local control. Perhaps having higher-level agencies with specialized capacity that lower-level ones can contract with for these major infrequent efforts, as I think others have discussed here...
Great point, and I would answer “yes” to your question in the second para. But how to do that politically? I don’t know. During the pandemic I lived in a small midwestern town and served on the planning commission and some other local boards. Lack of capacity was a *huge* problem, but a previous sensible effort to consolidate the government and services of this town with an adjacent jurisdiction failed. As someone told me, “the thing you have to understand is that these people all hate each other.”
Hahahaha yeah that makes sense! But this was actually western MI "lakeshore" region (Saugatuck etc). Weird combination of gay-friendly and naked racism. *Lots* of Gadsden flags there too. There was a house in the township that displayed toy gorillas hanging from nooses on their trees.
WaPo has been doing some reporting on Holland, MI (near where I was); apparently the crazies have taken over the previously sensible and civic-minded Republican party there. So glad I'm out...
Regarding the design and construction of major capital projects - who does that *more* often than the federal government? If the government is the entity that does it most often, then it makes sense for them to employ the people that do it, even if you have to create it as a floating agency that does all the design and construction work for all the branches of government.
As far as design and construction management, I would be interested in that. At least you would get away from "consultants managing consultants" as mentioned. But I assume you would still want private contractors pouring the actual concrete.
I don't know much about the General Services Administration (GSA) -- is the sense that they are broadly achieving the goal of effectively handling supplies, transportation, office space, etc., for federal agencies, rather than expecting each agency to have that expertise in house?
GSA works with the physical workspaces. Supplies and transportation are in-agency, but office space, common areas (elevators, lobbies) are GSA's to worry about
I'm puzzling over these examples a little bit. The federal government should just buy computers, because there's a strong private market for computers. The government shouldn't farm out bridge building, because there's no private market for bridges. But the federal government *shouldn't* farm out daycare, despite there being a strong private market for daycare?
My guess is that due to Baumol's cost disease reasons, just injecting a bunch of money directly into the childcare industry would only just continue to cause the prices to skyrocket, something people are already pissed off enough about. What I think the alternatives would be would be for, as Matt says, to directly run and operate the childcare at a loss (like we do with public schools), or, as Jeff Rigsby says in a parallel reply, give a child allowance and give parents the choice as to whether spend to that on hiring childcare, or to work less hours in lieu of spending them with children. I prefer the latter solution on both the merits, and the politics given the potential culture war aspects that could come into play.
If you want to support families with children, *and* all parents want to work outside the home, then a Swedish-style network of state-run daycare centers is likely to be fairer and more efficient than paying private contractors to offer daycare.
In reality lots of parents would appreciate financial help from the federal government but don't necessarily want it to come in the form of free daycare. They'd prefer cash child benefits that give them the flexibility to work part-time, or for one parent to drop out of the labor force when the kids are young. (Or to put their kids in daycare and pay for it, which they'd still be free to do with the money. It just wouldn't be the sole option.)
This issue is separate from the point Matt was trying to make, so perhaps it wasn't the best example. Family support policies are an area where people want to make individual choices, but in areas where individual choice isn't possible (buying fighter jets, building bridges) you probably do want more direct provision of goods and services by the state.
Oops, Swedish daycare isn't free. But it's subsidized and parents pay on a sliding scale, which still means government benefits are being given to households that choose the two-income option and withheld from the ones who prefer stay-at-home parenting:
Yeah, I've evolved my views over the years to reach the conclusion that it's just better in many cases to give people cash and let them make their own decisions.
In international development programming, giving money to poor people seems to be more beneficial than any type of subsidized service except health care.
But there's an identifiable reason for the health care exception: people with no medical training aren't qualified to decide what kind of treatment they should buy. And some kinds of treatment, like vaccination, produce positive externalities.
In-kind provision of aid is fine as long as you can demonstrate a market failure. But for daycare (and more importantly, low-income housing) there's no good argument for that.
It's weird that anyone ever misses this. People love their children and want to spend time with them. People are all different, so the amount of time varies.
Daycare could be treated like schools or like hospitals - there are probably cases for either method, if we were thinking in the abstract about a system that is already running. But I think his point is that if you want to drastically *increase* the number of daycare centers, it’s probably going to be easier to build them directly.
I think that a problem the article didn’t address is the time tax, and the tendency for all welfare to be hidden and obfuscated. If the federal government wrote checks to families with children, people would complain of abuse. So we hide those payments behind as many layers of bureaucracy as possible so that we can say we’re only helping the “good ones.” And then every interaction with the federal government becomes a massive headache, and people start to see the wisdom of firing all the bureaucrats.
Also, there is a market for construction, it's just not a private market. Why does the private part matter? And doesn't the amount of construction you want vary over time in a way that means you can't predict the staff size you want?
I worked as a contractor for a defense agency for many years, and I while I think some of your points here are well-taken, I do think that a huge problem with much of the federal workforce is how insanely difficult and almost impossible it is to fire federal employees, regardless of how incompetent or even actively problematic they are. It is often a multi-year process to have somebody fired for cause, involving tens or hundreds of hours of documentation and then, no matter how well-documented the case is, it almost always still results in a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Having someone removed because they're bad at their job is, in practice, essentially impossible. Many times, I observed offices get rid of the deadweight on their staff by promoting those people, as it was the only way to get them out of their hair. This resulted in a culture where the good motivated people almost all burned out and quit to go into contracting or the private sector, and the bad incompetent people stuck around, got promoted by default, and ended up running entire divisions.
I don't think what I observed was unusual for federal (or state) agencies, as born out by my many friends and colleagues working throughout federal government agencies. So while I disagree with Ramaswamy that random firings would do any good, I do think that a crucial part of making the federal government more effective has to be overhauling labor practices to make it easier to get rid of the deadweight. Obviously, that's a super hard problem, especially with extremely powerful federal labor unions, but without it I can't see much value in ramping up federal hiring.
I think the meat of this article is largely sensible, but whether or not we need a larger bureaucracy is dependent on whether or not people want a bigger or smaller government. This article just doesn’t engage with the reality that many conservatives want the government to do less, and if that’s the case the bureaucracy should be smaller (maybe better paid and better staffed in some regards, but still overall smaller).
I think overlooking the fact that Matt addressed your point in this article. The amount spent on labor in the Federal Government is quite small all things considered. Even if for the sake of argument we agree NEPA and EPA should be eliminated, the amount of money saved by the Federal government would be quite small.
But the main cost of environmental review as implemented is not the paychecks of federal bureaucrats, it's the money spent on doing environmental impact studies, reviewing the studies for compliance, battling legal challenges that want to block construction for generic NIMBY reasons but find an avenue of attack through the procedural requirements of environmental review, etc.
The cost of compliance, litigation, and the opportunity cost of deterred construction and development can be much larger than the payroll of the (relatively small) federal agency that has oversight over some of these requirements.
That may all be true. I've been pretty onboard with Matt's multiple posts noting that CEQA and environmental review in general have been weaponized by wealthier homeowners to block even modest new developments or infrastructure. I'm definitely on board with the idea that regulation should at least be amended. For example, I'm quite happy with moves that Gavin Newsome and the CA state legislature have made to try to basically force localities to actually build more housing in part by pre-empting environmental review.
I think you guys are maybe missing the point Matt was trying to make. There's a economic and heck philosophical argument as to what role government should play in a variety of different spheres; is it government's job to provide healthcare, how much environmental regulation is appropriate, is small government by its very nature better for society. I suspect we can have a pretty good and fruitful debate on these things.
But Matt is trying to say something else I think. One of the most important anecdotes I've ever heard was at a 2009 town hall, a man supposedly got up to argue with his Congressman about the ACA negotiations and said "Keep government out of my Medicare". Like "chef's kiss" encapsulation of the dynamics at play in regards to cutting spending. Because something Matt noted on other posts but I don't think emphasized here enough is that for all of voters talk about hating big government, once you get to nitty gritty details regarding programs to cut that appetite falls away quickly. Writers at Reason, GOP staffers and commentators on this substack may sincerely believing in big spending cuts to things like social security or Medicare, but vast majority of American public is not; including large chunk of GOP voters. As Matt has noted a number of times, Trump's promise to not cut entitlements is an underrated part of why he won in 2016 (and also clearly didn't hurt him in the primary).
Point is Vivek's pretty absurd "let's fire everyone with a particular social security number" gambit is actually just the the most absurd iteration of an idea that GOP has put out for years that you can massively cut spending (and therefore put money in your pocket) by getting rid of "useless bureaucrats". I'm sure you've heard many many times some politician (by the way, while more associated with GOP, plenty of Dems have parroted this stuff too) say we can cut spending by getting rid of "waste, fraud and abuse". It's just this line trotted out there because those politicians can read the same polling we do and know this is a way of sounding vaguely against spending without actually doing anything.
But beyond that, I think Matt is making possibly even more important point; it's not all that clear that firing bureaucrats would actually save you money. In fact, quite the opposite. He made passing reference to this in the post but has noted many times in the past. The way we contract out infrastructure spending is almost certainly a huge part of why infrastructure costs are wildly out of control. There's a lot of reason to believe that hiring more bureaucrats and higher salaries to actually build our nations train tunnels and highways is very likely to lead to LESS government spending as infrastructure projects may actually be built somewhat on time and somewhat near budget.
That last paragraph makes a point that I think is the key to this entire piece. I did a worked example of this in another comment about the NRO.
One reason I chose a military/space example (NRO and spy satellite design and vertical v horizontal integration) was because I think the transport/infrastructure arguments have been exercised so many times that it's useful to bring in different ones.
But there are definitely plenty of very solid transport infrastructure stories, lots of military procurement stories, and I'm sure many more examples across all of government.
Federal environmental review applies only in a fairly limited but important set of circumstances (you take federal dollars or need a federal permit.) Private market commercial or housing construction is largely untouched by NEPA unless you accidentally stumble into a clean water act issue.
But the spillover effects would be quite large in the former case.
The costs of NEPA fall almost entirely outside the government, in the form of almost any private sector entity jabbing to hire environmental consultancies and lawyers, and the opportunity cost of all the stuff which doesn’t get done at all.
The EPA outside NEPA has a much more sensible regulatory model for most things.
To "Conservatives want 'smaller government', but aren't able to get to specifics of what should be smaller." you suggested "NEPA". To which I say:
The NEPA isn't government! That's the problem, and fixing it requires *bigger* government.
Under NEPA, you can't start a business because your neighbors (who are private citizens) will sue that you didn't file enough forms first. Which is fine, if they could only sue if you wanted to (say) dump mercury in the drinking water supply; but they can sue whether or not your business actually pollutes. The NEPA tax is onerous because you can't escape it with a good idea.
The best proposal for replacing NEPA is ministerial approval: a government employee checks whether your new project will (say) dump mercury in the drinking water; if it doesn't, they stamp your forms and no one can sue you for purchasing backhoes. But that's *more* bureaucrats, not fewer.
"whether or not we need a larger bureaucracy is dependent on whether or not people want a bigger or smaller government"
Within the bounds of the size-of-government conversations that most people have (sure: people who want to abolish the professional Army and revert to a militia, or who want to abolish Social Security or something are different, but the vast majority of conservatives aren't on that sort of extreme), no, it really isn't.
If you want government to do things more competently, then it will need to bring more people in-house and contract-out less. That means increasing the size of the "bureaucracy" and reducing the size of the contracting corps.
To pick an example of something that most people think the US Government should be doing: certain spy satellites have to be "vertically integrated" onto rockets.* The only US company that makes rockets that can be vertically integrated is ULA and so they have the NRO over a barrel. The most sensible move for the NRO would be to redesign their satellites so they can be horizontally integrated and then they can have SpaceX and ULA bid against each other for the launches and get the prices back down to something reasonable. But they don't actually make their own satellites (they're mostly Lockheed) and just getting a price for that change is costing millions of dollars - actually making the change will obviously cost billions. If they made the satellites in-house, then they could just get the in-house satellite engineers to redesign them. But they don't have in-house satellite engineers and (because they would not be uniformed guardians†, but civilian employees of NRO) those engineers would be "government bureaucrats".
If the NRO saved a bunch of money by building their own satellites instead of getting Lockheed to do it for them, but hired people directly, then there would still be the same number of people working on building NRO spy satellites, they'd just be working for the government, not NRO. That's not a bigger government, but it is a larger bureaucracy. I appreciate that engineers sat in front of CAD designing a satellite, or manual workers in factory metal-bashing to build that satellite aren't exactly what most people think of when they say "government bureaucrats", but that's a lot of the point here: the things the government does should be done by "bureaucrats", ie people employed by the government and not by contractors employed by private companies. Buying an off-the-shelf product or service that is also bought in the private sector is different.
Whether a US spy satellite is made by the NRO or USSF or Raytheon or Lockheed or whoever is not a size-of-government question. The government isn't smaller or cheaper because someone else is making the spy satellites.
* Rockets are manufactured on their sides and then are raised to vertical, usually by a crane or a tower; most payloads, including all commercial satellites, are "horizontally integrated", ie they put the satellite in while the rocket is on its side and it gets lifted up with the rocket. Some spy satellites are too fragile to survive this and the rocket has to be lifted up first and then the satellite is slid into the rocket while the rocket is standing up; this is called "vertical integration".
† Uniformed members of Space Force are guardians, in the way that the Army is soldiers, the Navy sailors and the Air Force airmen (and the Marines are marines).
Based on my favored “bridge design” example I’d guess government is 10-30% larger in budget terms for being reliant on outside contractors to build the payload.
Whereas on the launch side the commercially competitive provider could save them money relative to both contractor and internal build.
But no one actually believes the Federal government could build a spy satellite better than Lockheed, right? General Dynamics or Raytheon or whoever the competitive companies used to be couldn't do it, right?
That's the core "state capacity" argument, isn't it?
I mean, they're just people with skills and capital equipment, why shouldn't the Federal government be as good or better than a private company?
If the private company has private customers and it isn't all under government secrecy, then there are all sorts of reasons - basically, there are probably competitors, and if there aren't, then it's almost certainly because they've worked out how to do something very hard that no-one else can match (e.g. SpaceX dominates the launch market because they have managed to vertically land an orbital-class rocket so they can sell launches for a fraction of what everyone else charges; someday, someone else will match this and SpaceX will have real competition).
But if what they are doing is something that either isn't done in the private sector (like building a bridge) or something that the government won't allow to be done in the private sector (most military manufacturing), then it doesn't really work like that. There's only one possible customer. There are only a handful of suppliers (because if you don't get the contract, then there's no legal commercial use for the expertise, and even if the contracts are shared out a bit, there are only so many possible contracts). So the best case is a small number of competitors with all of their dealings behind a veil of secrecy - which would make a cartel very easy to hide. Those are not dynamics that lead to lots of innovation, nor are they ones where there are competitive constraints on pricing or profit margins.
I'm not proposing that the Federal Government could beat the best of the private sector. If the NSA decided to make their own GPUs for decrypting traffic rather than just buying AMD nVidia silicon, I'd say they were insane. But I think they definitely can compete with the worst bits of the private sector. Direct management control may be superior than the sorts of weak competitive incentives (and strong incentives to price gouge) that big chunks of the contractor market have.
"I mean, they're just people with skills and capital equipment, why shouldn't the Federal government be as good or better than a private company?"
I think this gets down to the very core of the discussion. If the key advantage to private companies doing something is they exist in a competitive market, then it makes total sense that the government could do it just as well in markets that aren't competitive.
But there is a additional complexity that the government (as it exists now) is bound by many, many rules that a private company is not. And there is a reasonable argument to be made that the advantage to having a private contractor do something is that if they hire bad engineers, they can fire them relatively quickly and easily compared those same engineers being government employees.
In some ways however, we have created and are continuing to create the worst of both worlds. Where the government goes the private companies, but then swamps them in a massive number of rules which then bind them as much if not worse than the government itself. (Cost+ contracting is one of the worst).
It seems to me that the entire concept here is that we need to change the rules on how the government does things so that it is not bound by many, many rules that a private company is not.
In the UK, we use "nationalised corporations" - private companies whose sole shareholder is the government, which are not subject to civil service rules, but just the normal legal restrictions on any employer.
I agree that it would be great to try that model with some of these, but I'm not sure that there is anything in the US similar to that now. The closest I can think of is the US Postal Service, which I think shows some of the difficulties involved given the amount of political influence/intervention that happens there.
"So the best case is a small number of competitors with all of their dealings behind a veil of secrecy - which would make a cartel very easy to hide. Those are not dynamics that lead to lots of innovation, nor are they ones where there are competitive constraints on pricing or profit margins."
There used to be many defense contractors bidding for things like fighter jet contracts. Many of them had commercial aviation arms that served to help the company. The fact that they've pretty much all merged or been bought out indicates it's not that easy. Certainly you'd never expect the government to be able to outcompete Space X at this point, right?
What has happened in that case is that modern military aircraft (and aircraft engines) are so different from modern commercial aircraft that there is almost no useful crossover expertise. The design engineers for the B-52 could and did also work on the 707 for Boeing in the 1950s and on the 747 in the 1960s.
Even by the 1970s, the crossover between say the DC-9 (airliner) and the F-15 (fighter) from McDonnell Douglas was far less.
Boeing more or less gave up on military aviation in the 1970s/1980s, apart from military aircraft converted from airliners (e.g. AWACS, Air Force One, etc) and its separate helicopter division (there's still a lot of civilian/military crossover in helos). It did get back in when it bought McDonnell Douglas, but the current military aviation arm of Boeing is one that came over from MDD and even now decades later has little crossover with the Boeing jetliner people.
The only other commercial aviation company to reach the jet age was Lockheed (the TriStar in the 1970s), and Lockheed Martin's aviation arm is exclusively military.
All the other contractors either never had commercial aviation arms, or abandoned commercial aviation with piston engines.
Not today but in 10 years they obviously could. The federal government has more money and can offer higher pay. It could offer to buy Space X. If the government made a commitment to internalize this function then Space X would have little option _but_ to sell considering they are now guaranteed to lose their primary (only?) customer.
The number of employees working for the US federal government has been pretty much flat since the 1960's. Not the percentage of Americans working for the Feds, the absolute number of people, even though the country's population has more than doubled. As Matt points out this doesn't lead to more efficiency. You either hire out contractors, who cost more (and the explosive growth of northern Virginia during the Bush administration can attest to that) or agencies are understaffed, like the IRS for years. It makes a nice talking point for those who see federal policy as nothing more than an abstraction. For everything and everyone else, it doesn't work.
That's because conservatives do not engage with in what areas they want the government to be smaller. I do not doubt that in every Department of X there are several Office for Y that could be eliminated if we did a cost benefit analysis of their output, but cutting the annual appropriation of the Department of X or firing some arbitrary number of employees of the Department of X. But one suspects that is not what the politicians representing those "many conservatives" and maybe not even many conservatives want.
>This article just doesn’t engage with the reality that many conservatives want the government to do less<
I'm not sure the article fails to engage with conservative preference on this so much as strongly implies said preference is bad (for the country). But sure, if conservatives over the long term win more elections than liberals, it's true we're probably not going to see our state capacity improve.
So much of government work is contracted out that it's perfectly possible to have a larger bureaucracy and a smaller government. If a contractor is paid through a government contract, that's the government "doing something" even if the person isn't a federal employee. If you cut a contract that pays for 500 contractors to do something and then hire 300 federal employees then government is doing less (and spending less) with a larger bureaucracy.
As a genuine question do conservatives tend to want the government to do less or collect fewer taxes? My guess would be both, but I do think there's an argument to be made for a compromise position here.
Investing in state capacity is supposed to let things be done more efficiently. Cheaper F-35s would let the government spend less and therefore tax less.
I could basically copy and paste my whole "We have bad cops because we have bad laws." Shtick here. Same deal with the bureaucracy. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that there's probably some half, or close to it, of federal civilian employees that could be fired with little or no cost, mostly because we hire bad, underpaid people to enact vague and ill-conceived laws. This article does a good job getting to a lot of the reasons why, though I'm sure I'd find a lot more government functions than Matt would where I'd ask "What if we just don't have this?" and be satisfied that the answer is just don't. That doesn't at all imply that Vivek isn't a moron or that doing so randomly wouldn't be a catastrophe.
At the end of the day, I find my self coming back to my endless frustration with the center left:
Why oh why can't we just have the technocratic rigor without all the technocratic paternalism?
There was a Megan McArdle piece years ago which I can't seem to find where she talked a bit about this. One of the challenges of the US is that the history of public employment has been shaped by immigration, federalism, and having the bones of an old democracy in the body of a younger, much more multicultural one than anywhere comparable. There's probably no specific, single answer to 'why is it like this' but the result is that our brick and mortar state just doesn't run as well.
Of course I was overseas a few weeks ago and passing through Switzerland on a layover and watched as a bored Swiss border agent non chalantly caused tens or more people to miss their flights as she took as long as possible to question people, and no one bothered to open a single of the 10 or so other checkpoonts.
My "favorite" part of Vivek's "plan" is that he clearly doesn't understand how randomness works - in the real world randomness involves clusters. So let's say he pulled a Thanos and snapped away half the civil service (assuming SSNs are distributed randomly which they're probably close enough) firing based off odd last digit would create a situation where whole work groups are wiped out while others are barely touched -and, you know, sucks for the country if firing half the air traffic controllers means O'Hare suddenly lost 75% of its air traffic controllers. Ah well, never the less.
To be fair, I don't think he's broken 5% so not sure if I would describe that as traction. As Matt alludes too he gets more media than deserved they want a story.
Haha, I literally wrote this on Philadelphia’s subreddit yesterday after someone was talking about having done contracting work on a city initiative that never went anywhere:
“No offense meant, but one of the city’s biggest problems is the reliance on outside consultants with poor incentives for “expertise” in many fields.
Even when they’re actually providing expertise, it’s often poorly priced and subject to lots of political constraints (what consultant wants to piss off their paycheck?) in a way that in-house career civil servants would be protected from.
And as often as not they’re not really providing expertise, simply grifting as much money as possible from a project, with little consequence because the whole industry from civil engineering to environmental consultancy to public opinion to urban planning all works that way.“
"government contractors arguably have an obligation to their shareholders to rip the public off."
Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time in the private sector. Sure, there are bad actors who do try to rip the public off, but in my experience, most businesses treat the government like a customer. If they want more business, they don't mistreat their customers.
A bigger problem is that many businesses won't work for governments because of the excessive rules that make it difficult to be profitable.
I have spent my entire career in or adjacent to public-sector infrastructure project delivery.
The entire consulting engineering firm ecosystem is a shambles of rent-seeking and milking every project for every cent. There are basically no exceptions.
Matt nailed it: if the sector also provides services to private sector clients or customers it’s likely to have pricing and quality that are tethered to reality.
If all it does is government work, that’s just not true at all.
In most of my experiences with TPCs (third party contractors), the actual schmucks working at our facilities are usually committed and responsible, but the same cannot be said for their leadership (who above a certain level are presumably incentivized either by profit-sharing bonuses or at least have the company's profits factored into their performance assessments and/or promotion considerations). I've worked with some of our GTMs (government technical monitors), who have numerous fascinating/hilarious/sad stories about all of the various ways that our contractors try to overbill/underdeliver to Uncle Sam.
I do wonder in general how far down in a corporation do you see any awareness or interest in what the share value of that company is. My guess is, not too far. I suspect that what Matt is talking about here has a wan and pale influence on what actually happens.
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.
You have to appreciate the genius of Ramaswamy. Out of all the conceivable methods of randomization he could've chosen, he goes for the one that's an arbitrary number GENERATED BY FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS.
Day 1: President Ramaswamy announces plan to lay off all federal employees with an odd final digit.
Day 2: Social Security Administration announces rollout of new 10-digit SSN, beginning with federal employees. The 10th digit will be determined by doubling the 9th.
It's like Mr. Burns stating his Social Security number: "Naught naught naught, Naught naught, Naught naught naught...two. Damned Roosevelt!"
Gad damn that's a good joke
It gets even better when you know that Mr. Burns is a hardcore Republican, and old enough to be an anti-New Deal Republican in real time at that.
And the "naughts" reinforce Burns' trend of always using the outdated/less common terminology any time there is an option - like how he answers the phone "ahoy hoy" or calls helicopters "auto-gyros"
No time to talk...I have to get that letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam...and the 4:30 auto gyro is spooling up.
Is it via aeromail?
"You there, fill it up with petroleum distillate! And revulcanize my tires, post haste!"
Burns will gladly donate his Social Security earnings to that local orphanage...
...when pigs fly.
"It's just a little airborne! It's still good, it's still good!"
Person experiencing “existential crisis because tenth digit how has two digits” here.
You can just do módulo ten of the doubling. Ta da! You’ve succeeded in everyone having an even tenth digit!
Converting all existing SSNs to a base-19 system would be part of the process.
That will backfire, because then Ramaswamy will claim that when he said "odd numbers," he meant odd like funny, peculiar. Weirdo numbers, like numerals invented for use in an unfamiliar non-base-10 counting system. The goal all along was just to make sure nobody in federal employ was going around sporting numbers like that.
Then we would have both Is and 1s in the number and we cause y2k style fuckery with the data entry errors
We could just skip over I, like seating charts on big airplanes do.
Day 3: President Ramaswamy signs an executive order proclaiming that henceforth the numbers 2 and 6 shall be considered odd and 0 is half odd- if your SSN ends in 0 due to the change from SSA, you work half hours and get half pay.
Day 500: Entire federal workforce replaced with undocumented immigrants, in a bilateral disarmament agreement ending the ceaseless escalation of attempts at firing or retaining government employees through mathematical manipulation of Social Security numbers.
And President Ramaswamy spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Number of Social Security. Then shalt thou count to nine digits, no more, no less. Nine shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be Nine. Ten shalt thou not count, neither count thou eight, excepting that thou then proceed to Nine. Eleven is right out. Once the number nine, being the ninth number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Number of Social Security towards My odd number detector, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.”
Lol. I had to math this.
Genius.
Or make the final digit an alphabetic character and do a universal change.
I would ask this question more broadly: why do business types (and I suppose Wall Street in general) think laying off a bunch of people will increase productivity? I'm at mid-career at this point and these layoffs happen at my company every 2-3 years like clockwork, which is probably the average across the industry. So then everyone has to spend a bunch of time figuring out what the new organization will look like, evaluating people for their jobs, doling out severance packages, dealing with the increased attrition that happens when good employees start looking elsewhere, dealing with the lower morale (and then lower productivity) from the remaining employees... and in the end you probably lose ~4-6 months every time you do this, and pretty obviously never increase productivity.
My impression has always been that the benefit is paying lower total salaries, which I suppose makes the quarterly reports look better but doesn't actually get closer to making products we're trying to make. But hearing Ramaswamy and other Rs talk about bloated government and hold up these sorts of business practices as a model makes me think that they actually believe rank-and-file workers don't really do anything.
It’s your last point.
You can look at increasing productivity in two ways - bringing in more dollars for the same cost, or bringing in the same amount of dollars for lower cost.
The first one is hard because you actually need a vision for new products, space in the market to win, etc. The second one is actually pretty easy because it is true that in many companies there are some number of people who don’t actually do much that is critical.
I don’t think Wall Street believes layoffs make the remaining workers better. But saving a tens of millions of dollars in costs truly does increase profitability.
It's true on paper, but terrible for business culture as a whole to put shareholder interests over everything else.
Well of course, but that’s pretty much the definition of business culture.
As an aside this is why I always roll my eyes at those “toxic workplace” stories that seem to come out every few months about places ranging from the Ellen Degeneres show to Away (the luggage manufacturer) —all workplaces are toxic! All ownership/management will put their own interests before employees! Why are we surprised?!
This complaint doesn't make sense to me. Putting your interest first does not equal toxic. When you buy something from a store, do you put their interest before yours? If you don't, is that toxic?
The point of employment is a mutually beneficial commercial relationship where you provide something of value to them and they pay you (money, benefits, etc.) for it. I want the company I work for to succeed because its good for me, but I'm not there for their interests, I'm there for mine. My assumption is they feel/act the same way.
I understand that claim, in an Econ 101 way, but I think the fact that we think this way about business relations is actually a big part of the problem. If you look at the most successful cooperative human enterprises (both business and non-business), they actually DON'T operate with each player trying to maximize personal gain in a framework of non-aligned interests. Rather, they involve people engaging in a certain amount of altruistic behavior because they share a set of interests beyond simply, "I want the company to make enough money to pay me."
Just as an anecdotal example, my grandfather was an engineer and flight controller at NASA during the Apollo days. He didn't want NASA to succeed in order to pay him. He wanted the rockets to fly because he genuinely wanted the rockets to fly, and he wanted the astronauts to make it to the moon and back because he was genuinely interested in that as an outcome.
You could argue (and I would) that this is still an activity with a payoff, and it's the kind of payoff that businesses would like (which is why you can find a whole shelf of books about building "corporate culture" at your bookstore). But it is very hard to quantify and thus often gets short shrift relative to the dollars-and-cents visible value of layoffs that are directly toxic to the culture.
This is not a new problem, and I think it's a very hard one to solve, but models do exist, although I think it is fair to say that the record is pretty mixed. Historically, some businesses attempted to solve it with corporate paternalism. I think you could also describe the labor relations structure in German industry as one attempt at a better solution. But I don't think the pure parallel-interests model you describe is sufficient to deal with the concerns raised above.
I think game theory helps provide the appropriate explanation for this. My employer and I are not in an one off game where each of us is trying to maximize the gain on a specific transaction. We're repeat players where there is significant give and take, and most importantly an understanding that them providing me with more than minimal respect gains them more than minimal effort.
As for the story of your grandfather and NASA, I think its absolutely fantastic that some people are able to find careers in something they have a deep passion about. But I think we need to recognize that the vast majority of jobs aren't like that. Few people are passionate about collecting trash, installing drywall, or doing TPS reports. Something I've viewed with suspicion is this increasing attempt by companies to get their employees to "bring their passion to their work" instead of just wanting excellent work and paying people well. Far to often it ends up with people bringing their politics to work and that's just misery for everyone - and I'm a political junkie!
The best solution for all of this in my opinion is a healthy labor market, where there are plenty of workers but there isn't enormous slack either. Needing/wanting to find a new job shouldn't be a matter of desperation, but neither should the market be so tight that people can get away with being crappy just because there isn't anyone else.
I'm not sure I understand the "all workplaces are toxic." I currently work in a very non-toxic place. But perhaps I am making your argument. I am reluctant to leave even though my pay is low for my industry because the environment is so good.
Yeah ok clearly not all. But most! Most companies treat their employees poorly or with disdain, many bosses create unpleasant team environments, lots of work is not enjoyable.
Like literally people have been complaining about work for as long as work has existed. So why does it make news when it turns out someone famous or some high flying entrepreneur is a bad boss? That should be our default expectation!
Genuinely think this is partly attributable to the cult of Jack Welch. There is obviously never going to be one reason why trends like this occurs but Jack Welch truly was the celebrity CEO of the 80s along with Lee Iacocca.
And Welch’s “just automatically cut 10% of the workforce” became a north star. Obviously most companies didn’t literally follow this model (though many prominent companies do). But I think the ethos was hugely influential. Heck I suspect it’s a part of why Musk fire a bajillion people at Twitter (sorry X).
Point being, layoffs being immediate reaction to any setback became a kind of norm.
Cutting staff has a tendency to juice stock numbers, which is how corporate executives are often judged. Agree it can be "pound foolish" for a lot of companies in the long run.
Also how they're often *paid*.
Because human beings are creatures of inertia, and most of us operate far below our potential level. Taking away resources forces uncomfortable change which often leads to innovation. It’s better to build a culture of trust and innovation from the start, but we largely suck at it as a society hence this.
Well sure, that's the B school logic... I've just never seen this work in practice. I work in an industry of highly educated professionals who are (mostly) well motivated. When the trust factor goes out the window, that motivation disappears, and so does the innovation.
Not saying this is necessarily the case with government agencies, but you know, conservatives used to talk about valuing work and getting people steady jobs, and now they talk about laying people off. I sure as hell don't want the people pushing for this to be running my country.
I see this over and over in the private sector. Organizations naturally hire too much, low-value work and bureaucracy expands, and it's in no one's interest to cut staff.
Then there's a financially-driven layoff round, and management *has* to cut the fat.
It terrifies me that government never has this forcing mechanism. I don't doubt that the federal workforce is massively, massively overstaffed in some areas (while being understaffed in others that never received the budget to expand with organically-growing workloads, like the IRS.)
The part that no one seems to be talking about is how different a 3.9% unemployment rate is from pretty much forever. I feel like when the unemployment rate was higher the government was the employer of last resort - in more a make-work capacity. Now would be the best time to clean some of this up.
It's a shame that Scott Adams went cuckoo for cocoa puffs because it would be nice if we could still cite his deep insights into company culture.
Yeah, I'm in a moment of crisis and crater of trust and motivation, where I realize that I must tell my employees what is the new policy, but I cannot insubordinately tell them how sure I am that other teams will just choose to not follow the new policy and that we should feel free to ignore it. No matter what option I choose, this further erodes any sort of political capital I have with my team and outside of it.
It's very bad!
I feel for you. FWIW I have always appreciated honestly from above in such situations. Even if you have to do (or ignore) the stupid thing, I find the acknowledgement that it is, in fact, stupid to be somehow comforting.
I don't particularly mind implementing policies that I don't agree with. What makes you feel like a chump is spending your time, *and directing your employees to spend their time*, working on your team-specific implementation when you know other teams will fucking blow it off.
I wrote a longer reply to this that I guess Substack ate, which was probably just as well given how much of it consisted of throat-clearing "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but..." type of language.
But the basic gist was that it's not so much that people think layoffs will improve productivity within a certain pre-drawn circle of assets and operations aimed at exploiting those assets. (I.e., a "company" you've acquired.) It's that business/Wall Street types see themselves as adding value by drawing different circles. E.g., exploiting the assets of the company you've purchased in a higher-value way only possible because of a different asset you own. Meanwhile, you're slashing the operations devoted to doing legacy stuff with the legacy asset, which you now only care about as a hedge against your synergistic idea not working out.
I think the best idea would be higher pay in exchange for higher accountability. The Republicans are of course wrong that we could eliminate huge swathes of the federal workforce without creating serious problems. The result of that would be worse government, which they can then cynically point to when they make the case for even less of it.
However I did a short stint early in my career as a federal employee of a somewhat overlooked institution. This was almost 20 years ago now but it had serious problems. Hiring was way more focused on demographics than competence. After a year or so probationary period people became virtually unfire-able. People below management level had union protection which made performance management even more difficult, and at times so cumbersome people simply wouldn't do it. The result was a lot of people there more because they checked some demographic box doing poor work on projects of questionable utility and with a serious attitude of entitlement. The contractors weren't always great but at least you could fire them (I actually started as one). Ultimately the experience was so bizarre and disheartening i left for a law career.
This is of course only one side of the story. There were also a lot of selfless people who worked their butts off as hard as anyone in the private sector, typically for less pay and in much more thankless conditions. But the fact remains that the civil service rules need serious reform. Hard as it is for the left of center to accept we also need to just stop caring so much about 'equity.' Color blindness and non-discrimination yes, but not obsessing over percentages of race and sex. The path to the kind of good government program we want is with high standards and high professionalism and accountability. It then becomes effective and starts to make the case for itself.
The number one hiring problem isn’t DEI it’s military preferences. Anyone who has worked for the government recently can tell you this. The expansion of direct hire and an increase in GS compensation is much needed.
The organization I worked for lost some many hires because of the slow, bureaucratic process. Many we extended offers to had already found another job. Most people can't wait six months for a hiring decision and onboarding.
A friend is going through this at the moment. There's a relatively senior position in government she was excited about. It's been at least six months she applied. They still haven't announced the results.
I grew up in the DC area and have a lot of friends who stuck around there. It's absolutely wild how long the hiring process takes for GS jobs and how many people just find something else in the meantime.
Ironically, veterans preference basically counteracts the effects of DEI on hiring, although I don't think it's widely discussed (https://theconversation.com/us-civil-services-preference-for-hiring-military-vets-comes-at-a-hidden-cost-78078). Strongly agree with your other points.
Maybe so. Like I said, this was quite a while ago, and at the height of the Iraq war so recent vets were all being stop lost or otherwise occupied. It was also before anyone had ever heard the term DEI. Still, the main issue seemed to be hiring for reasons other than competence for the job then not being able to do anything about poor performers once they were in the door. The natural thing to do was supplement with contractors, which then creates its own set of issues.
100% this. And exactly as you experienced, low accountability not only results in poor performance from some, but a devastating blow to motivation to others.
One question I have for you: say there were no constraints on firing at all, and more discretion in rewarding employees with raises, etc. how much do you think that would have fixed the issues you saw?
I’m very persuadable, but from seeing the inner workings of large private organizations, I think there is still an element of bureaucratic malaise that takes root in large private organizations. You get issues around politically popular (here I mean organizational politics) directors or VPs or their equivalents, that nonetheless are ineffective in delivering for the organization. And those problems in private company’s can self perpetuate for a while, but are usually eventually solved because eventually someone becomes financially accountable for the results.
In principle I’m for a bigger, more effective government. But I have (what I think is) a healthy fear of how effective government can be in the limit.
I think that's true. I am also not sure if it's a magic bullet or if there is one but hard to see any reform succeeding without including, at minimum, the ability to performance manage. There is a larger cultural issue we have in the US about government work as a jobs program as opposed to delivery of public services that is admittedly a much harder nut to crack.
Agree that the conservative view of who "works for the government" also seems like a bunch of DEI administrations and obscure office workers keeping you from driving a big truck.
In reality Vivke's plan would mean things like your uncle learning from the the VA that "We regret to inform you appointment with an oncologist is now delayed for 24 to 36 months, please do not call this number again as it will no longer be answered. Thank you."
I mean this genuinely and not as some bank shot critique: I’d like to see you tackle more specifically how we can perpetually reinvigorate government functions and put more specifics behind your thesis of needing to spend more money. To be clear I think you are right, but I think your idea is highly contingent on good execution of how that money is spent at many different levels of government by many different actors (eg see the transit spending you have been rightly critical of). In other words, I think you have left the hard part I’ll-defined.
After all, it’s really not just the direct personnel spending, but the extent to which those personnel are efficient stewards of non-personnel spending (again, see transit spending). One of my favorite takes that you have is “managing people is hard, actually.” And your experiences at Vox surely seemed to have shown you how difficult it can be to mold culture and orient people toward achieving common goals even at a small organization. After all, you left Vox to write this newsletter (I’m glad you did!). But I don’t believe (and I don’t think you do either) a disillusioned park ranger’s recourse should be to go buy some land and start their own park.
I agree Ramaswamys idea is nuts. But I think it resonates with some in part because I think tearing it down (to the inevitably let someone else build it back up later) is in effect what happens (in a less chaotic way) in most other major organizations. Having been around management of large private organizations, I get it: even in the private organizations, if management finds their isn’t the cultural or political will or vision or appetite or alignment to do the hard tactical work of fixing an organizational issue, sometimes you just nuke the whole thing and start over.
So, if you got to control congress and the executive branch for four years, what principles/systems/processes/etc (beyond cloning yourself and personally twisting the arm of each and every federal employee) would you change to deploy the money in a way that achieved positive results?
I think this Noah Smith essay had some good ideas along this line: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
Francis Fukuyama tackles some of this in his book Political Order and Political Decay, which includes the federal Park Service as one case study in excellence and eventual decay.
One takeaway from the book is that any kind of civil service reform is likely going to be an extremely long process and it is hard for me to imagine how the US as it stands today has the political will and attention span for an effort like that.
Getting rid of the "spoils system" and building up the current civil service system was a long process from 1830-1930.
Getting to actually good bureaucracy is likely another century long endeavour.
At the federal level, I agree with this 100%. At the state/local level, I would offer one cautionary note, which is that many agencies simply don't do certain things -- big software procurements, design and construction of major capital projects, etc. -- frequently enough to justify having permanent staff that specialize in those things. So outside consultants can be a better approach, and hopefully they can bring experience to bear from other agencies so that the wheel isn't being reinvented.
Now, does that argue for consolidation of local agencies into regional or state agencies? Maybe! But local politicians tend to like having local control. Perhaps having higher-level agencies with specialized capacity that lower-level ones can contract with for these major infrequent efforts, as I think others have discussed here...
Great point, and I would answer “yes” to your question in the second para. But how to do that politically? I don’t know. During the pandemic I lived in a small midwestern town and served on the planning commission and some other local boards. Lack of capacity was a *huge* problem, but a previous sensible effort to consolidate the government and services of this town with an adjacent jurisdiction failed. As someone told me, “the thing you have to understand is that these people all hate each other.”
I do apologise to people about the family flag. :)
Hahahaha yeah that makes sense! But this was actually western MI "lakeshore" region (Saugatuck etc). Weird combination of gay-friendly and naked racism. *Lots* of Gadsden flags there too. There was a house in the township that displayed toy gorillas hanging from nooses on their trees.
WaPo has been doing some reporting on Holland, MI (near where I was); apparently the crazies have taken over the previously sensible and civic-minded Republican party there. So glad I'm out...
Yes. But sadly no great rye bread!
Regarding the design and construction of major capital projects - who does that *more* often than the federal government? If the government is the entity that does it most often, then it makes sense for them to employ the people that do it, even if you have to create it as a floating agency that does all the design and construction work for all the branches of government.
As far as design and construction management, I would be interested in that. At least you would get away from "consultants managing consultants" as mentioned. But I assume you would still want private contractors pouring the actual concrete.
I don't know much about the General Services Administration (GSA) -- is the sense that they are broadly achieving the goal of effectively handling supplies, transportation, office space, etc., for federal agencies, rather than expecting each agency to have that expertise in house?
GSA works with the physical workspaces. Supplies and transportation are in-agency, but office space, common areas (elevators, lobbies) are GSA's to worry about
I'm puzzling over these examples a little bit. The federal government should just buy computers, because there's a strong private market for computers. The government shouldn't farm out bridge building, because there's no private market for bridges. But the federal government *shouldn't* farm out daycare, despite there being a strong private market for daycare?
My guess is that due to Baumol's cost disease reasons, just injecting a bunch of money directly into the childcare industry would only just continue to cause the prices to skyrocket, something people are already pissed off enough about. What I think the alternatives would be would be for, as Matt says, to directly run and operate the childcare at a loss (like we do with public schools), or, as Jeff Rigsby says in a parallel reply, give a child allowance and give parents the choice as to whether spend to that on hiring childcare, or to work less hours in lieu of spending them with children. I prefer the latter solution on both the merits, and the politics given the potential culture war aspects that could come into play.
Yeah, that was a little confusing.
If you want to support families with children, *and* all parents want to work outside the home, then a Swedish-style network of state-run daycare centers is likely to be fairer and more efficient than paying private contractors to offer daycare.
In reality lots of parents would appreciate financial help from the federal government but don't necessarily want it to come in the form of free daycare. They'd prefer cash child benefits that give them the flexibility to work part-time, or for one parent to drop out of the labor force when the kids are young. (Or to put their kids in daycare and pay for it, which they'd still be free to do with the money. It just wouldn't be the sole option.)
This issue is separate from the point Matt was trying to make, so perhaps it wasn't the best example. Family support policies are an area where people want to make individual choices, but in areas where individual choice isn't possible (buying fighter jets, building bridges) you probably do want more direct provision of goods and services by the state.
Oops, Swedish daycare isn't free. But it's subsidized and parents pay on a sliding scale, which still means government benefits are being given to households that choose the two-income option and withheld from the ones who prefer stay-at-home parenting:
https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/childcare-sweden
Yeah, I've evolved my views over the years to reach the conclusion that it's just better in many cases to give people cash and let them make their own decisions.
In international development programming, giving money to poor people seems to be more beneficial than any type of subsidized service except health care.
But there's an identifiable reason for the health care exception: people with no medical training aren't qualified to decide what kind of treatment they should buy. And some kinds of treatment, like vaccination, produce positive externalities.
In-kind provision of aid is fine as long as you can demonstrate a market failure. But for daycare (and more importantly, low-income housing) there's no good argument for that.
It's weird that anyone ever misses this. People love their children and want to spend time with them. People are all different, so the amount of time varies.
Daycare could be treated like schools or like hospitals - there are probably cases for either method, if we were thinking in the abstract about a system that is already running. But I think his point is that if you want to drastically *increase* the number of daycare centers, it’s probably going to be easier to build them directly.
I think that a problem the article didn’t address is the time tax, and the tendency for all welfare to be hidden and obfuscated. If the federal government wrote checks to families with children, people would complain of abuse. So we hide those payments behind as many layers of bureaucracy as possible so that we can say we’re only helping the “good ones.” And then every interaction with the federal government becomes a massive headache, and people start to see the wisdom of firing all the bureaucrats.
Also, there is a market for construction, it's just not a private market. Why does the private part matter? And doesn't the amount of construction you want vary over time in a way that means you can't predict the staff size you want?
Yeah. And the government does farm out bridge building, road-building, etc. All those things are accomplished with contracts with private companies.
It was a separate complaint about how legislation gets written which lacks important not-quite-details about how you actually do a thing.
I worked as a contractor for a defense agency for many years, and I while I think some of your points here are well-taken, I do think that a huge problem with much of the federal workforce is how insanely difficult and almost impossible it is to fire federal employees, regardless of how incompetent or even actively problematic they are. It is often a multi-year process to have somebody fired for cause, involving tens or hundreds of hours of documentation and then, no matter how well-documented the case is, it almost always still results in a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Having someone removed because they're bad at their job is, in practice, essentially impossible. Many times, I observed offices get rid of the deadweight on their staff by promoting those people, as it was the only way to get them out of their hair. This resulted in a culture where the good motivated people almost all burned out and quit to go into contracting or the private sector, and the bad incompetent people stuck around, got promoted by default, and ended up running entire divisions.
I don't think what I observed was unusual for federal (or state) agencies, as born out by my many friends and colleagues working throughout federal government agencies. So while I disagree with Ramaswamy that random firings would do any good, I do think that a crucial part of making the federal government more effective has to be overhauling labor practices to make it easier to get rid of the deadweight. Obviously, that's a super hard problem, especially with extremely powerful federal labor unions, but without it I can't see much value in ramping up federal hiring.
I think the meat of this article is largely sensible, but whether or not we need a larger bureaucracy is dependent on whether or not people want a bigger or smaller government. This article just doesn’t engage with the reality that many conservatives want the government to do less, and if that’s the case the bureaucracy should be smaller (maybe better paid and better staffed in some regards, but still overall smaller).
>This article just doesn’t engage with the reality that many conservatives want the government to do less
It actually was addressed. Conservatives want 'smaller government', but aren't able to get to specifics of what should be smaller.
I thought they want to get rid of the Departments of Commerce, Education, and "oops" (2011 flashback...)
I think overlooking the fact that Matt addressed your point in this article. The amount spent on labor in the Federal Government is quite small all things considered. Even if for the sake of argument we agree NEPA and EPA should be eliminated, the amount of money saved by the Federal government would be quite small.
But the main cost of environmental review as implemented is not the paychecks of federal bureaucrats, it's the money spent on doing environmental impact studies, reviewing the studies for compliance, battling legal challenges that want to block construction for generic NIMBY reasons but find an avenue of attack through the procedural requirements of environmental review, etc.
The cost of compliance, litigation, and the opportunity cost of deterred construction and development can be much larger than the payroll of the (relatively small) federal agency that has oversight over some of these requirements.
That may all be true. I've been pretty onboard with Matt's multiple posts noting that CEQA and environmental review in general have been weaponized by wealthier homeowners to block even modest new developments or infrastructure. I'm definitely on board with the idea that regulation should at least be amended. For example, I'm quite happy with moves that Gavin Newsome and the CA state legislature have made to try to basically force localities to actually build more housing in part by pre-empting environmental review.
I think you guys are maybe missing the point Matt was trying to make. There's a economic and heck philosophical argument as to what role government should play in a variety of different spheres; is it government's job to provide healthcare, how much environmental regulation is appropriate, is small government by its very nature better for society. I suspect we can have a pretty good and fruitful debate on these things.
But Matt is trying to say something else I think. One of the most important anecdotes I've ever heard was at a 2009 town hall, a man supposedly got up to argue with his Congressman about the ACA negotiations and said "Keep government out of my Medicare". Like "chef's kiss" encapsulation of the dynamics at play in regards to cutting spending. Because something Matt noted on other posts but I don't think emphasized here enough is that for all of voters talk about hating big government, once you get to nitty gritty details regarding programs to cut that appetite falls away quickly. Writers at Reason, GOP staffers and commentators on this substack may sincerely believing in big spending cuts to things like social security or Medicare, but vast majority of American public is not; including large chunk of GOP voters. As Matt has noted a number of times, Trump's promise to not cut entitlements is an underrated part of why he won in 2016 (and also clearly didn't hurt him in the primary).
Point is Vivek's pretty absurd "let's fire everyone with a particular social security number" gambit is actually just the the most absurd iteration of an idea that GOP has put out for years that you can massively cut spending (and therefore put money in your pocket) by getting rid of "useless bureaucrats". I'm sure you've heard many many times some politician (by the way, while more associated with GOP, plenty of Dems have parroted this stuff too) say we can cut spending by getting rid of "waste, fraud and abuse". It's just this line trotted out there because those politicians can read the same polling we do and know this is a way of sounding vaguely against spending without actually doing anything.
But beyond that, I think Matt is making possibly even more important point; it's not all that clear that firing bureaucrats would actually save you money. In fact, quite the opposite. He made passing reference to this in the post but has noted many times in the past. The way we contract out infrastructure spending is almost certainly a huge part of why infrastructure costs are wildly out of control. There's a lot of reason to believe that hiring more bureaucrats and higher salaries to actually build our nations train tunnels and highways is very likely to lead to LESS government spending as infrastructure projects may actually be built somewhat on time and somewhat near budget.
That last paragraph makes a point that I think is the key to this entire piece. I did a worked example of this in another comment about the NRO.
One reason I chose a military/space example (NRO and spy satellite design and vertical v horizontal integration) was because I think the transport/infrastructure arguments have been exercised so many times that it's useful to bring in different ones.
But there are definitely plenty of very solid transport infrastructure stories, lots of military procurement stories, and I'm sure many more examples across all of government.
Good point in the last paragraph; I agree on your read.
BTW I commented above in the wrong place -- that comment about the costs of environmental review was meant as a reply to Sam upthread.
Federal environmental review applies only in a fairly limited but important set of circumstances (you take federal dollars or need a federal permit.) Private market commercial or housing construction is largely untouched by NEPA unless you accidentally stumble into a clean water act issue.
But the spillover effects would be quite large in the former case.
The costs of NEPA fall almost entirely outside the government, in the form of almost any private sector entity jabbing to hire environmental consultancies and lawyers, and the opportunity cost of all the stuff which doesn’t get done at all.
The EPA outside NEPA has a much more sensible regulatory model for most things.
To "Conservatives want 'smaller government', but aren't able to get to specifics of what should be smaller." you suggested "NEPA". To which I say:
The NEPA isn't government! That's the problem, and fixing it requires *bigger* government.
Under NEPA, you can't start a business because your neighbors (who are private citizens) will sue that you didn't file enough forms first. Which is fine, if they could only sue if you wanted to (say) dump mercury in the drinking water supply; but they can sue whether or not your business actually pollutes. The NEPA tax is onerous because you can't escape it with a good idea.
The best proposal for replacing NEPA is ministerial approval: a government employee checks whether your new project will (say) dump mercury in the drinking water; if it doesn't, they stamp your forms and no one can sue you for purchasing backhoes. But that's *more* bureaucrats, not fewer.
Talk to congress, not bureaucrats.
The per capita startup rate in the US is four times as high as the second highest nation: https://www.startupblink.com/blog/top-20-countries-by-total-startup-output-in-2023/#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20maintains%20its,the%20total%20startup%20output%20rankings.
"whether or not we need a larger bureaucracy is dependent on whether or not people want a bigger or smaller government"
Within the bounds of the size-of-government conversations that most people have (sure: people who want to abolish the professional Army and revert to a militia, or who want to abolish Social Security or something are different, but the vast majority of conservatives aren't on that sort of extreme), no, it really isn't.
If you want government to do things more competently, then it will need to bring more people in-house and contract-out less. That means increasing the size of the "bureaucracy" and reducing the size of the contracting corps.
To pick an example of something that most people think the US Government should be doing: certain spy satellites have to be "vertically integrated" onto rockets.* The only US company that makes rockets that can be vertically integrated is ULA and so they have the NRO over a barrel. The most sensible move for the NRO would be to redesign their satellites so they can be horizontally integrated and then they can have SpaceX and ULA bid against each other for the launches and get the prices back down to something reasonable. But they don't actually make their own satellites (they're mostly Lockheed) and just getting a price for that change is costing millions of dollars - actually making the change will obviously cost billions. If they made the satellites in-house, then they could just get the in-house satellite engineers to redesign them. But they don't have in-house satellite engineers and (because they would not be uniformed guardians†, but civilian employees of NRO) those engineers would be "government bureaucrats".
If the NRO saved a bunch of money by building their own satellites instead of getting Lockheed to do it for them, but hired people directly, then there would still be the same number of people working on building NRO spy satellites, they'd just be working for the government, not NRO. That's not a bigger government, but it is a larger bureaucracy. I appreciate that engineers sat in front of CAD designing a satellite, or manual workers in factory metal-bashing to build that satellite aren't exactly what most people think of when they say "government bureaucrats", but that's a lot of the point here: the things the government does should be done by "bureaucrats", ie people employed by the government and not by contractors employed by private companies. Buying an off-the-shelf product or service that is also bought in the private sector is different.
Whether a US spy satellite is made by the NRO or USSF or Raytheon or Lockheed or whoever is not a size-of-government question. The government isn't smaller or cheaper because someone else is making the spy satellites.
* Rockets are manufactured on their sides and then are raised to vertical, usually by a crane or a tower; most payloads, including all commercial satellites, are "horizontally integrated", ie they put the satellite in while the rocket is on its side and it gets lifted up with the rocket. Some spy satellites are too fragile to survive this and the rocket has to be lifted up first and then the satellite is slid into the rocket while the rocket is standing up; this is called "vertical integration".
† Uniformed members of Space Force are guardians, in the way that the Army is soldiers, the Navy sailors and the Air Force airmen (and the Marines are marines).
Based on my favored “bridge design” example I’d guess government is 10-30% larger in budget terms for being reliant on outside contractors to build the payload.
Whereas on the launch side the commercially competitive provider could save them money relative to both contractor and internal build.
Liked for depth. Super interesting.
But no one actually believes the Federal government could build a spy satellite better than Lockheed, right? General Dynamics or Raytheon or whoever the competitive companies used to be couldn't do it, right?
That's the core "state capacity" argument, isn't it?
I mean, they're just people with skills and capital equipment, why shouldn't the Federal government be as good or better than a private company?
If the private company has private customers and it isn't all under government secrecy, then there are all sorts of reasons - basically, there are probably competitors, and if there aren't, then it's almost certainly because they've worked out how to do something very hard that no-one else can match (e.g. SpaceX dominates the launch market because they have managed to vertically land an orbital-class rocket so they can sell launches for a fraction of what everyone else charges; someday, someone else will match this and SpaceX will have real competition).
But if what they are doing is something that either isn't done in the private sector (like building a bridge) or something that the government won't allow to be done in the private sector (most military manufacturing), then it doesn't really work like that. There's only one possible customer. There are only a handful of suppliers (because if you don't get the contract, then there's no legal commercial use for the expertise, and even if the contracts are shared out a bit, there are only so many possible contracts). So the best case is a small number of competitors with all of their dealings behind a veil of secrecy - which would make a cartel very easy to hide. Those are not dynamics that lead to lots of innovation, nor are they ones where there are competitive constraints on pricing or profit margins.
I'm not proposing that the Federal Government could beat the best of the private sector. If the NSA decided to make their own GPUs for decrypting traffic rather than just buying AMD nVidia silicon, I'd say they were insane. But I think they definitely can compete with the worst bits of the private sector. Direct management control may be superior than the sorts of weak competitive incentives (and strong incentives to price gouge) that big chunks of the contractor market have.
"I mean, they're just people with skills and capital equipment, why shouldn't the Federal government be as good or better than a private company?"
I think this gets down to the very core of the discussion. If the key advantage to private companies doing something is they exist in a competitive market, then it makes total sense that the government could do it just as well in markets that aren't competitive.
But there is a additional complexity that the government (as it exists now) is bound by many, many rules that a private company is not. And there is a reasonable argument to be made that the advantage to having a private contractor do something is that if they hire bad engineers, they can fire them relatively quickly and easily compared those same engineers being government employees.
In some ways however, we have created and are continuing to create the worst of both worlds. Where the government goes the private companies, but then swamps them in a massive number of rules which then bind them as much if not worse than the government itself. (Cost+ contracting is one of the worst).
It seems to me that the entire concept here is that we need to change the rules on how the government does things so that it is not bound by many, many rules that a private company is not.
In the UK, we use "nationalised corporations" - private companies whose sole shareholder is the government, which are not subject to civil service rules, but just the normal legal restrictions on any employer.
I agree that it would be great to try that model with some of these, but I'm not sure that there is anything in the US similar to that now. The closest I can think of is the US Postal Service, which I think shows some of the difficulties involved given the amount of political influence/intervention that happens there.
"So the best case is a small number of competitors with all of their dealings behind a veil of secrecy - which would make a cartel very easy to hide. Those are not dynamics that lead to lots of innovation, nor are they ones where there are competitive constraints on pricing or profit margins."
There used to be many defense contractors bidding for things like fighter jet contracts. Many of them had commercial aviation arms that served to help the company. The fact that they've pretty much all merged or been bought out indicates it's not that easy. Certainly you'd never expect the government to be able to outcompete Space X at this point, right?
What has happened in that case is that modern military aircraft (and aircraft engines) are so different from modern commercial aircraft that there is almost no useful crossover expertise. The design engineers for the B-52 could and did also work on the 707 for Boeing in the 1950s and on the 747 in the 1960s.
Even by the 1970s, the crossover between say the DC-9 (airliner) and the F-15 (fighter) from McDonnell Douglas was far less.
Boeing more or less gave up on military aviation in the 1970s/1980s, apart from military aircraft converted from airliners (e.g. AWACS, Air Force One, etc) and its separate helicopter division (there's still a lot of civilian/military crossover in helos). It did get back in when it bought McDonnell Douglas, but the current military aviation arm of Boeing is one that came over from MDD and even now decades later has little crossover with the Boeing jetliner people.
The only other commercial aviation company to reach the jet age was Lockheed (the TriStar in the 1970s), and Lockheed Martin's aviation arm is exclusively military.
All the other contractors either never had commercial aviation arms, or abandoned commercial aviation with piston engines.
Not today but in 10 years they obviously could. The federal government has more money and can offer higher pay. It could offer to buy Space X. If the government made a commitment to internalize this function then Space X would have little option _but_ to sell considering they are now guaranteed to lose their primary (only?) customer.
Why?
That they can’t build a better rocket than SpaceX I buy because it effectively serves private-sector customers.
But no civilian outfit buys satellites from Lockheed, just like no civilian outfit goes to Booz Allen Hamilton for IT needs.
The number of employees working for the US federal government has been pretty much flat since the 1960's. Not the percentage of Americans working for the Feds, the absolute number of people, even though the country's population has more than doubled. As Matt points out this doesn't lead to more efficiency. You either hire out contractors, who cost more (and the explosive growth of northern Virginia during the Bush administration can attest to that) or agencies are understaffed, like the IRS for years. It makes a nice talking point for those who see federal policy as nothing more than an abstraction. For everything and everyone else, it doesn't work.
That's because conservatives do not engage with in what areas they want the government to be smaller. I do not doubt that in every Department of X there are several Office for Y that could be eliminated if we did a cost benefit analysis of their output, but cutting the annual appropriation of the Department of X or firing some arbitrary number of employees of the Department of X. But one suspects that is not what the politicians representing those "many conservatives" and maybe not even many conservatives want.
>This article just doesn’t engage with the reality that many conservatives want the government to do less<
I'm not sure the article fails to engage with conservative preference on this so much as strongly implies said preference is bad (for the country). But sure, if conservatives over the long term win more elections than liberals, it's true we're probably not going to see our state capacity improve.
"...if conservatives over the long term win more elections than liberals, it's true we're probably not going to see our state capacity improve"
You'd probably see it improve in some states, get worse in others, and stay about the same in still others.
The federal government doesn't need to do everything.
>Paying for environmental consultants to take luxury vacations around the world is not "improving state capacity"<
I think the idea is to, you know, *lessen* the dependence on consultants. But maybe we're talking about two different articles.
So much of government work is contracted out that it's perfectly possible to have a larger bureaucracy and a smaller government. If a contractor is paid through a government contract, that's the government "doing something" even if the person isn't a federal employee. If you cut a contract that pays for 500 contractors to do something and then hire 300 federal employees then government is doing less (and spending less) with a larger bureaucracy.
As a genuine question do conservatives tend to want the government to do less or collect fewer taxes? My guess would be both, but I do think there's an argument to be made for a compromise position here.
Investing in state capacity is supposed to let things be done more efficiently. Cheaper F-35s would let the government spend less and therefore tax less.
Both for sure.
This article is too general to be illuminating. Focusing on a particular government task and providing detail and examples would be more useful.
Read Recoding America.
I could basically copy and paste my whole "We have bad cops because we have bad laws." Shtick here. Same deal with the bureaucracy. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that there's probably some half, or close to it, of federal civilian employees that could be fired with little or no cost, mostly because we hire bad, underpaid people to enact vague and ill-conceived laws. This article does a good job getting to a lot of the reasons why, though I'm sure I'd find a lot more government functions than Matt would where I'd ask "What if we just don't have this?" and be satisfied that the answer is just don't. That doesn't at all imply that Vivek isn't a moron or that doing so randomly wouldn't be a catastrophe.
At the end of the day, I find my self coming back to my endless frustration with the center left:
Why oh why can't we just have the technocratic rigor without all the technocratic paternalism?
There was a Megan McArdle piece years ago which I can't seem to find where she talked a bit about this. One of the challenges of the US is that the history of public employment has been shaped by immigration, federalism, and having the bones of an old democracy in the body of a younger, much more multicultural one than anywhere comparable. There's probably no specific, single answer to 'why is it like this' but the result is that our brick and mortar state just doesn't run as well.
Of course I was overseas a few weeks ago and passing through Switzerland on a layover and watched as a bored Swiss border agent non chalantly caused tens or more people to miss their flights as she took as long as possible to question people, and no one bothered to open a single of the 10 or so other checkpoonts.
My "favorite" part of Vivek's "plan" is that he clearly doesn't understand how randomness works - in the real world randomness involves clusters. So let's say he pulled a Thanos and snapped away half the civil service (assuming SSNs are distributed randomly which they're probably close enough) firing based off odd last digit would create a situation where whole work groups are wiped out while others are barely touched -and, you know, sucks for the country if firing half the air traffic controllers means O'Hare suddenly lost 75% of its air traffic controllers. Ah well, never the less.
His bleating was not meant to be taken seriously. It's all posturing and vibes.
Yep, this was one of the first two problems I noticed.
To be fair, I don't think he's broken 5% so not sure if I would describe that as traction. As Matt alludes too he gets more media than deserved they want a story.
Haha, I literally wrote this on Philadelphia’s subreddit yesterday after someone was talking about having done contracting work on a city initiative that never went anywhere:
“No offense meant, but one of the city’s biggest problems is the reliance on outside consultants with poor incentives for “expertise” in many fields.
Even when they’re actually providing expertise, it’s often poorly priced and subject to lots of political constraints (what consultant wants to piss off their paycheck?) in a way that in-house career civil servants would be protected from.
And as often as not they’re not really providing expertise, simply grifting as much money as possible from a project, with little consequence because the whole industry from civil engineering to environmental consultancy to public opinion to urban planning all works that way.“
I can assure people that government employees aren't getting business class tickets covered.
"government contractors arguably have an obligation to their shareholders to rip the public off."
Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time in the private sector. Sure, there are bad actors who do try to rip the public off, but in my experience, most businesses treat the government like a customer. If they want more business, they don't mistreat their customers.
A bigger problem is that many businesses won't work for governments because of the excessive rules that make it difficult to be profitable.
Hahahahaha. Haha. Ha.
(Sigh)
I have spent my entire career in or adjacent to public-sector infrastructure project delivery.
The entire consulting engineering firm ecosystem is a shambles of rent-seeking and milking every project for every cent. There are basically no exceptions.
Matt nailed it: if the sector also provides services to private sector clients or customers it’s likely to have pricing and quality that are tethered to reality.
If all it does is government work, that’s just not true at all.
In most of my experiences with TPCs (third party contractors), the actual schmucks working at our facilities are usually committed and responsible, but the same cannot be said for their leadership (who above a certain level are presumably incentivized either by profit-sharing bonuses or at least have the company's profits factored into their performance assessments and/or promotion considerations). I've worked with some of our GTMs (government technical monitors), who have numerous fascinating/hilarious/sad stories about all of the various ways that our contractors try to overbill/underdeliver to Uncle Sam.
Every single person here could find me if they really wanted to, fuck it, lol.
I do wonder in general how far down in a corporation do you see any awareness or interest in what the share value of that company is. My guess is, not too far. I suspect that what Matt is talking about here has a wan and pale influence on what actually happens.
Bumping the social security age thresholds dwarfs any other potential savings. Macron did a nice test run on that one.
Yep. Rip off the band-aid and lifespan-adjust it based on the the 1937 life expectancy.
I'm joking about actually doing it, but it feels like a reference point we should always be discussing.
By the way it appears life expectancy has grown 16 years since 1937 (ourworldindata).
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.