Transcript for Department of Consequences
The Department of Government Efficiency sounds like the title of a sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One can imagine John Cleese trying to navigate such an absurdly named bureaucracy that is anything but. If that reference eludes you, think of Saturday Night Live, except funny and performed by people who sound like Sherlock Holmes pretending to be British.
President-elect Donald has ordained Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to form a private organization, presumably under the authority of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, to investigate government mismanagement and recommend structural and operating improvements to the Office of the Chief Executive, similar to Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission in 1982, with a goal of reducing federal spending by two trillion dollars per year.
While this is an admirable pursuit, the approach reveals a naivete about the realities of entrenched bureaucracy. Making recommendations about how to improve government are likely to have an effect similar to Reagan’s Grace Commission. That Commission made almost three thousand recommendations for improvements, but the doubling of the national debt during the Reagan Administration indicates that the Commission’s findings went unheeded.
It is a law of nature that an organism will perform the least amount of effort for the maximum amount of reward. A Cheetah runs an average of forty miles per hour to catch prey, but it does this once every three days only. It spends the rest of its time laying about and blaming Joe Biden for the high cost of gasoline.
Employees are much a like a Cheetah, except for the running forty miles an hour part. The majority of employees do just enough work to avoid the consequences of underperformance. The difference between private sector and public sector employees is the penalty for failure. In the private sector, the ultimate penalty for failure to perform is termination of employment.
On paper, public employees are also subject to termination for failure to perform. However, termination of a public employee requires adherence to a strict protocol by the employee’s supervisor who is also – you guessed it – doing the least amount of effort for the maximum reward.
The supervisor’s calculus that terminating one underperforming employee and replacing them with another underperforming employee realizes no reward is depressingly accurate.
The performance difference between private and public sector employees is manifested by the Department of Consequences. There are consequences to underperforming in the private sector – and every employee has a story about how they have suffered those consequences – either because they themselves underperformed or because the company for whom they worked underperformed, resulting in the elimination of work or jobs.
During the last twenty years, the Department of Defense has lost track of more than two trillion dollars – and that a conservative estimate. What are the consequences for misplacing the GDP of Brazil? Imagine telling the two hundred and twelve million people of Brazil that all of their work for an entire year has been misplaced and no one can find it? – And by the way, it’s nobody’s fault, really.
Has the DoD been forced to declare bankruptcy? Has any Secretary of Defense been dismissed or censured for failure to maintain his fiduciary responsibilities? Has even one person been held to account for the loss of transactional integrity?
Of the three million people who are employed by the federal government, how many employees, in a position of fiscal responsibility, have been terminated for failure to steward public funds?
The Executive Branch does not hold its own employees responsible for fiscal conservancy, and Congress lacks the willpower to strip the Executive Branch of its bloated and underperforming gaggle of folks living on the public dole and providing little to no value for their salaries.
The blame is not laid at the feet of the rank-and-file folks who perform janitorial services, answer telephones, or perform the incredibly rewarding job of violating people’s civil rights at the nation’s airports. The problem rests with the so-called leadership of the entrenched bureaucracy who have built comfortable lives on the backs of taxpayers without ever worrying about providing value or suffering pay reductions, downsizing, and being fired without cause.
It is easy to blame the odoriferous carcass of the executive branch for excessive spending, but where do they get the money? Your elected representatives. No money is allocated for spending without originating first in the House of Representatives and finally passing both the House and the Senate. The Executive Branch simply spends the money it is given. So whose fault is that?
What consequences do members of Congress endure for gratuitous and wasteful overspending? They get re-elected! And if they didn’t get re-elected, they would be replaced by someone else who approves gratuitous and wasteful spending.
This leads us to the greatest fallacy of the Department of Government Efficiency. Congress is not going to stop authorizing the executive branch to spend money because that’s how they continue their petty and pointless careers on the backs of the taxpayers.
And that has consequences for us all.