DOGE has made it both impossible not to talk about government reform, and impossible to talk about it. The topic is everywhere, but the subject is now entirely eclipsed on the left by the horror of who has been assigned the task and the need to decry DOGE as a bad faith effort. Elon wants to launch his rockets without government interference, Vivek wants to gut the civil service, both want to cater to cronies. I am being told on the socials that anyone engaging in discussion of how to shape this effort or what good it could potentially bring is enabling the ambitions of an autocracy. The problem itself, barely legible to Dems before DOGE, is off the table again.
But we do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it’s time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work.
I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?
Take the issue of respect for the law. Put aside the headline grabbing issues for a second and live in the mundane world of implementation in government. If you’ve spent the past ten years trying to make, say, better online services for veterans, or clearer ways to understand your Medicare benefits, or even better ways to support warfighters, you’ve sat in countless -– and I mean countless — meetings where you’ve been told that something you were trying to do was illegal. Was it? Now, instead of launching your new web form or doing the user research your team needed to do, you spend weeks researching why you are now branded as dangerously lawless, only to find that either a) it was absolutely not illegal but 25 years ago someone wrote a memo that has since been interpreted as advising against this thing, b) no one had heard of the thing you were trying to do (the cloud, user research, A/B testing) and didn’t understand what you were talking about so had simply asserted it was illegal out of fear, c) there was an actual provision in law somewhere that did seem to address this and interpreting it required understanding both the actual intent of the law and the operational mechanics of the thing you were trying to do, which actually matched up pretty well or d) (and this one is uncommon) that the basic, common sense thing you were trying to do was actually illegal, which was clearly the result of a misunderstanding by policymakers or the people who draft legislation and policy on their behalf, and if they understood how their words had been operationalized, they’d be horrified. It is absolutely possible to both respect the rule of law, considering the democratic process and the peaceful transfer of power sacred, and have developed an aversion to the fetishization of law that perverts its intent. The majority of public servants I know have well earned this right.
Lambert here: While attractively contrarian, I don’t think this 2024 opinion has stood the test of time. Surely, for example, putting NUMIDENT on your thumb drive is not just a bad idea, but against the law1?
DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo and yes, the people in my community are watching. While our eyes are on potential abuses, they are also on the durability of the wall generally, and with deeply mixed emotions. It must be said: the wall is a problem. It is a problem for people who value the rule of law. It is a problem for people who care about an effective, responsive government. Elon in particular has what Ezra Klein correctly ascribed to Trump, which is lack of inhibition. Normal people like me get scared and ashamed when we’re told we’re doing something illegal. Elon does not. I wish it were different, but perhaps the job of breaking the wall has ended up with someone who is suited to doing it.
It’s really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter. On the one hand, I do still believe that the first order problem is simply lack of attention by people with power. If politics and policy take their fair share of your oxygen, there’s really just very little left for the implementation.
But it’s not as if mere attention would solve the problem. There are entrenched interests for the status quo. It’s easy to imagine these as exclusively or even mostly commercial interests, but if that were true, why would it take three years to issue guidance as anodyne as the hiring memo the Biden Administration put out this summer?
As I talked about in my book, outsiders (and certainly the right) imagine dangerously concentrated power in the executive branch, and seek to limit it. The reality is shockingly diffuse power.
We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully…. Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.
NOTES
1 Research needed!
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