Jennifer Pahlka, a veteran of past government reform efforts, as been closely tracking DOGE and interviewing current and recently departed DOGE employees. Most of those she has talked to have said that they were hired to write code. The idea was not just to cut staff, but to make the staff unnecessary by automating many tasks using in-house software:
There was pretty clearly an agenda not just to cut contracts, but to do so by bringing some software development in house, which is actually very wise — and long overdue. I know of a few teams that have quietly gotten more staff since the start of the Trump term, and are delivering better results by firing poor-performing contractors and writing the software themselves. But those teams are in the minority. For most teams, their contracts have been canceled without much of a plan. Similarly, software (insourced or not) was supposed to replace people, but the people are gone without the software. They cut the workforce without cutting the work.
This rhymes eerily with what happened during the National Performance Review, which most people will recognize as the efforts around Reinventing Government under Al Gore in the 90s. John Kamensky was on Statecraft recently, and when asked about the staff cuts in that era, which mostly resulted not in a smaller workforce overall, but rather a “dark matter version of the federal workforce,” in Santi’s words (the same workers but now off the feds books and onto the contractors’), John responded:
We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.
DOGE has done the same. In cutting the workforce without cutting the work, they, too, ate dessert first. They also don’t seem to have built much software, whether it's to save money, deliver better service, or automate work. Why? The answer, to a reasonable approximation, is that it’s really hard to build software in government, and when the DOGE team figured that out, instead of trying to make it easier, they decided not to bother.
Pahlka is still hopeful that some of the DOGE energy will linger and help drive reform, but I am not. I think the business has made many Republicans leery of anybody shouting "reform," so this misguided, unfinished effort will continue to cause lots of pain for federal employees and annoyance for citizens without helping anybody.
2 comments:
Bog standard thinking from the billionaires to decide to cut labor to save money, without realizing that labor is necessary to get work done.
But of course men who don't have to work for a living are able to convince themselves that you can get the same amount of work done at the same quality and in the same time with fewer people.
"Pahlka is still hopeful that some of the DOGE energy will linger and help drive reform, but I am not."
I certainly hope not. Reducing the number of forms people have to fill out and suchlike is of trivial importance, AFAIC, far behind restoring foreign aid and coming to a clear reckoning on the number of deaths caused by USAID's destruction, and more broadly restoring public functions by public officials at public expense. If it comes down to a stark choice, these principles are more important than efficiency. DOGE wasn't a clumsy attempt at "reform"; it was an attack on government as such.
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