1. Local bureaucracy is even more godawful than federal because local civil services are a) critically understaffed b) completely unable to find expertise and therefore are inept c) run by special interests d) run as patronage e) some combination of the above. This is one of the reasons I advocate municipal consolidation to allow for a larger pool of recruits.
2. An even scarier set of words is "there is no government and I'm here to kill you"
3. The USA is stuck in a vicious cycle of bad bureaucracy = people restrict bureaucrats and pay them less = bureaucrats do a bad job =...
4. The joke about nonprofits is "we aren't in the business of profit but we certainly aren't in the business of loss"
5. Many people who work at nonprofits are zealots/people with mental disorders that compel them to antisocial behavior (looking at you, SF Coalition on Homelessness/Fraudenbach). Building state capacity by hiring nonpartisan bureaucrats would allow cities to defund these organizations that do little but enrich themselves, pollute the discourse with their presence and commit antisocial acts. Driving their staff into unemployment might be bad for Xitter but it's good for almost everything else (also teach people that being an activist is bad mmkay).
6. The best model for bureaucracy is Singapore- bureaucrats are paid very well there to attract talent and there's a genuine sense of doing your time in the private sector and then giving back to the nation.
7. Some government agencies run on goddamn COBOL and FORTRAN. This is an utter disgrace and heads need to publicly roll.
8. The GOP's deregulatory crusade tends to be focused on removing the barriers to powerful incumbents committing abuse rather than improving economic efficiency.
9. Not quite bureaucrats but adjacent: government transit agencies like SEPTA or Metra are run by political appointees instead of bureaucrats. In the case of the MTA, politicians can force out competent leaders for disagreement.
What's wrong with keeping old software around, as long as it still works? As the saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it. (I miss my WordPerfect...)
The "as long as it works" part gets complicated. Those old software systems often do need to be updated as regulations or operations change. If you're using very old software, it's not uncommon for no one in the organization to know how it works any longer or be able to change it, and it may be hard to hire for those skills. The alternative is being at the mercy of a big consulting company, who will typically over-charge you for terrible work. Of course, creating a new piece of software is a crazy process for a government agency as well. I haven't read it yet, but Recoding America is supposed to be a good book on issues with state capacity in software.
Some of those old mainframe systems are still alive and kicking. Books and records and payment systems on the banking system (including SWIFT) still relies (in part) on mainframe type tech at many banks.
The issue is that back in the early 1990s as database and client/server applications and internet tech became ubiquitous, the big banks all spent billions to replace or crack open those old mainframe systems and databases. Because there was a competitive need. To offer electronic/online trading and access one needs to link to customer identifier (post Dodd Frank all common), post to customer records, check credit limits, feed to trading blotters and risk reporting a systems, access market data, etc Lots of those process in the background were old systems (even our trading blotter at one major bank was COBOL-based as late as the early 90’s). We had to adapt or die. And all of that tech spending has to be paid for by cuts elsewhere - there was no free money.
There is zero competitive pressure in government. They don’t go out of business if they don’t change how they do things. In fact, there is only downside to changing things as you might screw it up (and also your fiefdom of clerks and paper pushers would get smaller).
The DoD has an accounting department for payroll that covers close to 3m people. It's run on an old mainframe but they also print everything out to move the records around. It's expensive and failure prone.
So they tried to buy a new system. Spent $1B on it, in fact. And it didn't work.
Back to the old system. Your pay is messed up? It rarely takes more than a few months to get it right.
Love most of your points - except the part about underpaid. Overall - excellent.
The biggest overriding issue is that bureaucracy is process focused, not objective or output- oriented and that there is zero upside (in terms of promotion, power, salary) for an ambitious person within trying to improve output or efficiency or even reform processes.
Most improvement in the private sector comes from a very few people driving change.
There are metrics defining success... but they change. I work in healthcare which is probably the most bureaucratic sector that the public deals with. They changed metrics with the ACA and patient satisfaction/perception of care was one metric that was certainly a cat chasing their tail. We are here to save lives, not help you relive your Disney experience.
I think you have never worked in a bureaucracy. There certainly are barriers to innovation and fewer direct incentives to innovation, but people mostly wish they could do their jobs more efficiently and focus on important things. Often, they run into the problem that bureaucratic systems are often designed by people who either hate all regulations or want nothing unpopular to ever happen. Add in an overwhelming desire for “fairness” and “due process,” and you end up with systems that literally cannot work fast.
Well, honestly that is due to an older industrial system... the seniority system that is perpetuated by most union agreements. I can see their point but at the same time, feel that those old systems do throw sand in the gears of progress.
You certainly have some interesting characters here, though I still remember your Twitter before you did all the chain blocking. THAT was wild.
I know people compare your blog to Matt's, but Matt's comment section usually reaches triple-digits before the West Coast wakes up. He can't manage more commenters. Yours is still small enough that you can moderate by hand, though you may want to decide upon a level of engagement where it's necessary to change.
It always feels a bit like the early Internet here, before the normies all logged on. Like a digital version of the Mos Eisley Cantina filled (but not TOO filled) with people from various cultures and subcultures passing through.
Which team? This is the kind of low value comment that I could do without (and given the opportunity cost, will skip reading comments altogether when they are out of hand).
Seconded. I rarely look at comments here and (like this time) usually regret it. Especially with nobody to assist in moderation, an admission fee for the comments would go a long way
I think this is a lot of wishful thinking. We all have stories about government. My college girlfriend when to work for the SEC in 2006 and they had a couch for naps in the ladies room, I worked on a building with USACE that was horribly mismanaged and led to millions of dollars in claims, and a friend walked in on a government manager masturbating and he refused to stop so he had to be given a private office. A friend was lit on fire at work and not only did the arsonist keep his job until after his conviction, the government workers union showed up to say that she deserved it. Another friend worked a second job at his government planning job and no one cared.
When people say that they want government to be managed like a business, they don't actually mean that... what they mean is that they want the barest approximation of responsibility from the public sector. Because right now there is none. Its the only place in the economy where you can refuse to do your job and not be fired, or not know how and escape any consequences.
If you refuse to engage with these issues... no increase in capacity will happen. But you will spend more money and cause more turbulence for the private sector as they expand their capacity to interfere.
I'm pretty sure no one here is in favor of this kind of behavior. Addressing it is part of increasing state capacity, in addition to actually hiring and retaining people with the skills to effectively run government tasks. There are also plenty of people in government who actually do their jobs.
The problem is that some of them are, in fact, doing things at work.
Government regulators aren't there to accomplish things. They are there to prevent things from happening. That's the service they offer. If they prevent bad things from happening, that's good, but more often they just prevent anything from happening.
It can take a decade to get two government agencies to decide which of them will regulate you. If you add staff you aren't going to get those decisions faster, you're going to get another ream of paper out of it.
If Noah wants government to work better why don't they take a small government agency, like a state DMV or the DOD payroll system and make it work well first, and then we can build from there?
Now this sounds like conservative dogma. Please don't strawman. We're talking about civil servants in general, not just regulators. For instance, it would be great if defense procurement actually worked well and didn't result in handouts to contractors. It would be great if transportation projects were completed faster and at higher quality. On the regulatory note, it would be great if building could happen faster by being regulated by civil servants rather than an anarchic, lawsuit-driven process like NEPA.
Federal employees mostly do two things, they regulate and they distribute money. There are some activities where they work directly doing things, but they are they minority.
How would you make defense procurement work well? There are hundreds of thousands of DoD employees providing oversight for millions of contractors. Would you bring shipyards back in house? Use WG or GS employees to make tanks? Have USACE and NAVFAC design buildings and management the construction process directly?
NEPA is only one of the roadblocks to large projects. In some cases it isn't even the biggest one.
It depends. I know people working for government agencies (not US) and they have a bonus system where you can get up to one months salary as a bonus for extraordinary achievements. However the budget for this is limited so only around one third of the people employed can get this bonus.
I mean that definitely happens, but I'm not sure wether it just happens in government agencies or everywhere else too. I could imagine that wasting your time outside of government agencies just has to be better disguised, because the consequences of being discovered are more severe.
A salient issue with local/state/federal governance is the coming competency crisis wherein additional layers of incompetent hires in government leads to the enshittification of the nation.
Great post. But as a former bureaucrat and current consultant on infrastructure, I want to clarify that it’s even worse than you describe. NEPA and its offspring don’t just kick in when the NIMBYs get ready to sue. There is a s*** ton of paperwork required before even the most banal project (say, restoring an almost 100-year-old bridge to a state of good repair, or slightly extending a light-rail transit system) can begin. It’s very, very expensive madness.
I would like to take my experience in this realm and use it in a more edifying context, but I haven’t yet figured out what that is.
When I think of government bureaucracy, and perhaps specifically your example of the IRS, I think we need less manpower and more straightforward automation.
I don't mean fancy AI. I mean that simple things should just be automatic.
There is no reason for instance that most people shouldn't have no-file taxes in America.
But perhaps people from across the political compass would fight that .. efficiency.
The reason we don't have no-file taxes isn't because of the IRS but because Republicans deliberately want folks to suffer when dealing with the government so forced everyone to file tax returns.
It's a problem when one of the major parties deliberately wants the American government to function worse.
If you want to understand something, follow the money. There are businesses that make money facilitating tax returns; go to no-file, and you put them out of business. Self-interest is a much clearer explanation that some people you don’t like being evil.
The last GOP tax cut bill dramatically increased the standard deduction and got rid of or capped multiple itemized deductions. It dramatically increased the number of people who do not itemize their taxes.
It is certainly true that in the case of tax filing conservatives and tax filing companies want, to keep it complicated.
But I can give you one from the other side. I think it is clear that one reason we don't have more online education is that liberals and teachers want education to be a teacher's employment program.
This is absolutely not the bureaucracy defending itself, this is entrenched corporate interests in the tax return business who lobby Congress to keep extracting rents.
The IRS efforts are mostly automated for W-2 wage earners--which is most filers. But take a look at a corporate return or a large partnership--that’s where the resources are required.
It can’t be no file because people have to disclose income to the government and there is no way to do that without yearly tax filings or dramatic changes to the tax code requiring preregistration of businesses, etc. Which would be fine with me, but libertarians would blow a gasket if you had to let the IRS know that you started a car wash business on the side before your yearly tax filing was even due.
Great post. Reminded me about your post on innovation policy. The CDC apparently spent most of its time on “research,” intramural and thru grants to nonprofits like universities. So, I’m wondering whether, for lack of state capacity, the same critique applies to how the government supports innovation? We have universities, with their own agenda, focused primarily on publication prestige. Does the government have the capacity to monitor how universities are spending grant money? Patents are like an unfunded (negative) mandate, handled through an expensive and judicialized process.
LMAO, Noah is waaay funnier than Ghostbusters. .gov needs more worthless beureucrats?!? I thought they already cornered the market. He should go work at the post office or the dmv...
One important factor you missed was the political campaign fundraising incentives. Government contractors are now a huge source of campaign contributions. It’s going to be very hard for Congress and the executive branch to reverse the reliance on contractors when all the economic incentives in the political system favor the status quo.
The lack of state capacity has knock on effects for judicial capacity (which is a subset). We need more judges (and beat cops and detectives and jailers).
Sure, and my comment wasn’t implying that judges are bad at their jobs (though there’s articles about how case management can be made more efficient with technology). Rather, the point was that having more judges would lead to less case backlogs and swifter justice.
Then tell them to stop doing this kind of stuff. They are going after mom and pops who move overseas. Oftentimes they are US Veterans who move to places they fought (Vietnam is popular with this set) and at othet times people who left Eastern Europe during the cold war. Poland is filled with Americans on a US Pension.
Moore concerns the tax liability of Charles and Kathleen Moore who, inspired by their friend’s mission to empower subsistence farmers in India, made a modest investment nearly two decades ago in a small social enterprise in Bangalore in exchange for approximately 11% of the stock of an Indian corporation. According to the record, the Indian corporation reinvested its earnings, the Moores never received any distributions on their investment and the Moores (under pre-2017 law) never incurred any tax liability on their investment. As a result of Section 965, however, the Moores were deemed to have earned income from their investment and were taxed accordingly. For the Moores, that meant a $15,000 tax bill.
Not sure someone who has worked attempting to manage the bureaucracy in DC would suggest this.
And I am not talking about partisan true believers and activists coming into a place like the FTC or EPA or DOJ or SEC- that can be quite fun (for the activists). Fairly destructive for the country. I am talking about less activist areas like VA, Foggy Bottom, IRS, SSA. You literally cannot sack anyone and they need not work.
Spoken like someone that has never worked in those organizations. I’m sorry that fear of being fired is all that motivates you, but the vast majority of people working in those organizations are hard working. Many are accomplished professionals with high levels of education and accomplishment; they understand the importance and value of what they do, even if you don’t.
Spoken like someone who has never had a real job with real accountability.
I don’t have anything against government in particular - some European bureaucracies can be quite effective.
One branch of my family has been active in Dem inner city machine politics- mayors, police chiefs, fire marshalls, etc. Another has contributed many employees to State, the Pentagon and other related agencies. The latter have consistently said that the worst part of any career is coming back home from an overseas assignment to work with the DC drones.
I am very familiar with American government- unfortunately. I have also worked closely with friends who are government officials in Germany, Skandis, etc. The difference is immense. American government is a wasting disease.
The only real accountability it that which you hold yourself to; anything else is the accountability of a whipped dog. And, FYI, I’ve worked a little more in the private sector than for government. There are stars in both and duds in both. People are people and the myth of the private sector superiority is just that. Government won WWII, invented electronic computers, atomic energy, the internet and put a man on the moon. Pretty good for a bunch of drones.
Sure there are good people everywhere and drones everywhere (we are probably 80 percent drones). There are also things called incentives and objectives. Change happens in the private sector because good people are incented to take risks to better achieve objectives or create new products.
The US bureaucracy is about process. There are (of course) people who do their job well “as defined”. They don’t realize that that real job is to change everything and improve output and increase services while reducing staff.
The private sector’s job is profit. Full stop. That profit can be from monopolies, abusing externalities, lying or even killing. Government balances that--their job isn’t pure profit (If only it were. If I could get 1% of 1% of what I bring in...). The measures used for the private sector are not applicable, government isn’t supposed to turn a profit. Since Reagan (who still runs the country from beyond the grave) destroyed the idea of good government, and Congress looks at corporate America as their primary constituent, good government has been crippled as a check on the excesses of the private sector. Government has been made less efficient through outsourcing, but that seems to be OK because that involves large payments to corporations. As Noah points out, state capacity has been crippled over the last 40+ years, largely because many people (you included apparently) don’t understand the purpose and importance of good government. We often elect people to run the government that insist government can’t do anything worthwhile--and then they prove it by destroying that very ability.
You don’t know what good government is. Move to a real country for a decade and then come back with some ideas. Throwing more money at the American systems would be a colossal waste. You sound like a drug addict making excuses.
Deregulate aviation, trucking and telecommunications; open the internet and space to commerce; pass the Americans With Disabilities Act; fund mRNA vaccines ...
Read the book “Apollo: the race to the moon” by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. NASA is a renamed NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) whose purpose was to maintain air superiority and during World War II, NACA was described as "The Force Behind Our Air Supremacy". And JFKs goal to reach the moon was to demonstrate military strength over the USSR. NASA hasn’t launched anyone to space in decades, they need SpaceX for that.
No need for the snarky language, you are both right, given that there is a real trade-off here. Yes, federal agency staff tend to be well-educated, smart, and motivated, and yes, federal agencies are less open to efficiency and innovation than the private sector. Do you disagree?
Few thoughts:
1. Local bureaucracy is even more godawful than federal because local civil services are a) critically understaffed b) completely unable to find expertise and therefore are inept c) run by special interests d) run as patronage e) some combination of the above. This is one of the reasons I advocate municipal consolidation to allow for a larger pool of recruits.
2. An even scarier set of words is "there is no government and I'm here to kill you"
3. The USA is stuck in a vicious cycle of bad bureaucracy = people restrict bureaucrats and pay them less = bureaucrats do a bad job =...
4. The joke about nonprofits is "we aren't in the business of profit but we certainly aren't in the business of loss"
5. Many people who work at nonprofits are zealots/people with mental disorders that compel them to antisocial behavior (looking at you, SF Coalition on Homelessness/Fraudenbach). Building state capacity by hiring nonpartisan bureaucrats would allow cities to defund these organizations that do little but enrich themselves, pollute the discourse with their presence and commit antisocial acts. Driving their staff into unemployment might be bad for Xitter but it's good for almost everything else (also teach people that being an activist is bad mmkay).
6. The best model for bureaucracy is Singapore- bureaucrats are paid very well there to attract talent and there's a genuine sense of doing your time in the private sector and then giving back to the nation.
7. Some government agencies run on goddamn COBOL and FORTRAN. This is an utter disgrace and heads need to publicly roll.
8. The GOP's deregulatory crusade tends to be focused on removing the barriers to powerful incumbents committing abuse rather than improving economic efficiency.
9. Not quite bureaucrats but adjacent: government transit agencies like SEPTA or Metra are run by political appointees instead of bureaucrats. In the case of the MTA, politicians can force out competent leaders for disagreement.
What's wrong with keeping old software around, as long as it still works? As the saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it. (I miss my WordPerfect...)
The "as long as it works" part gets complicated. Those old software systems often do need to be updated as regulations or operations change. If you're using very old software, it's not uncommon for no one in the organization to know how it works any longer or be able to change it, and it may be hard to hire for those skills. The alternative is being at the mercy of a big consulting company, who will typically over-charge you for terrible work. Of course, creating a new piece of software is a crazy process for a government agency as well. I haven't read it yet, but Recoding America is supposed to be a good book on issues with state capacity in software.
The Bicameral Economy: 95% of workers cannot exist in an unstable work environment
We should codify the two economies so that it becomes clearer which is which. And to avoid competition between members of different economies.
Gave you a heart for Word Perfect. Sooooo much better than MS Word.
Some of those old mainframe systems are still alive and kicking. Books and records and payment systems on the banking system (including SWIFT) still relies (in part) on mainframe type tech at many banks.
The issue is that back in the early 1990s as database and client/server applications and internet tech became ubiquitous, the big banks all spent billions to replace or crack open those old mainframe systems and databases. Because there was a competitive need. To offer electronic/online trading and access one needs to link to customer identifier (post Dodd Frank all common), post to customer records, check credit limits, feed to trading blotters and risk reporting a systems, access market data, etc Lots of those process in the background were old systems (even our trading blotter at one major bank was COBOL-based as late as the early 90’s). We had to adapt or die. And all of that tech spending has to be paid for by cuts elsewhere - there was no free money.
There is zero competitive pressure in government. They don’t go out of business if they don’t change how they do things. In fact, there is only downside to changing things as you might screw it up (and also your fiefdom of clerks and paper pushers would get smaller).
The DoD has an accounting department for payroll that covers close to 3m people. It's run on an old mainframe but they also print everything out to move the records around. It's expensive and failure prone.
So they tried to buy a new system. Spent $1B on it, in fact. And it didn't work.
Back to the old system. Your pay is messed up? It rarely takes more than a few months to get it right.
Love most of your points - except the part about underpaid. Overall - excellent.
The biggest overriding issue is that bureaucracy is process focused, not objective or output- oriented and that there is zero upside (in terms of promotion, power, salary) for an ambitious person within trying to improve output or efficiency or even reform processes.
Most improvement in the private sector comes from a very few people driving change.
And no metrics defining success as there is rarely a good definition of success in the first place.
There are metrics defining success... but they change. I work in healthcare which is probably the most bureaucratic sector that the public deals with. They changed metrics with the ACA and patient satisfaction/perception of care was one metric that was certainly a cat chasing their tail. We are here to save lives, not help you relive your Disney experience.
I think you have never worked in a bureaucracy. There certainly are barriers to innovation and fewer direct incentives to innovation, but people mostly wish they could do their jobs more efficiently and focus on important things. Often, they run into the problem that bureaucratic systems are often designed by people who either hate all regulations or want nothing unpopular to ever happen. Add in an overwhelming desire for “fairness” and “due process,” and you end up with systems that literally cannot work fast.
Doesn’t everyone hate fairness and due process?
Well, honestly that is due to an older industrial system... the seniority system that is perpetuated by most union agreements. I can see their point but at the same time, feel that those old systems do throw sand in the gears of progress.
Please tell me Xitter is pronounced exactly how I am hoping it's pronounced.
Xi pronounced the same as Xi Jinping, so it sounds like where many people use it, and others think it is going.
I hear they're finally going to rename "tweets" to something more appropriate. I vote for "dumps" ;)
Xits works for me.
Dumps or piles
If I could upvote your Point 5 10 times, I would.
Noah, you really need to limit comments to paid subs if you don’t want to read nutjobs here. Slow Boring does it and it’s all the better for it.
I do that when the topic is particularly controversial... 😉
You certainly have some interesting characters here, though I still remember your Twitter before you did all the chain blocking. THAT was wild.
I know people compare your blog to Matt's, but Matt's comment section usually reaches triple-digits before the West Coast wakes up. He can't manage more commenters. Yours is still small enough that you can moderate by hand, though you may want to decide upon a level of engagement where it's necessary to change.
It always feels a bit like the early Internet here, before the normies all logged on. Like a digital version of the Mos Eisley Cantina filled (but not TOO filled) with people from various cultures and subcultures passing through.
I'm a paid sub and a nut job. Now what?
Same here
Why not hear what the other side has to say?
Why do people who disagree with you scare you so much?
He apparently thinks anyone not agreeing with him is a nut job, and why should he listen to nut jobs?
p.s., I tried out the Slow Boring substack for a week, but dropped it because of all the nut jobs in the comments..
Baby it’s cold outside.
You guys ever wonder if you’re the bad guys?
Haven’t seen a single commenter who isn’t on your team, halfway through the thread, btw.
Which team? This is the kind of low value comment that I could do without (and given the opportunity cost, will skip reading comments altogether when they are out of hand).
Your comment, by comparison, is extremely valuable.
Seconded. I rarely look at comments here and (like this time) usually regret it. Especially with nobody to assist in moderation, an admission fee for the comments would go a long way
I’ve had my issues with SB moderation but I’d prefer somewhat capricious moderation vs reading brain vomit.
Unrelated: this is your place to unload about the Shakman decrees.
I think this is a lot of wishful thinking. We all have stories about government. My college girlfriend when to work for the SEC in 2006 and they had a couch for naps in the ladies room, I worked on a building with USACE that was horribly mismanaged and led to millions of dollars in claims, and a friend walked in on a government manager masturbating and he refused to stop so he had to be given a private office. A friend was lit on fire at work and not only did the arsonist keep his job until after his conviction, the government workers union showed up to say that she deserved it. Another friend worked a second job at his government planning job and no one cared.
When people say that they want government to be managed like a business, they don't actually mean that... what they mean is that they want the barest approximation of responsibility from the public sector. Because right now there is none. Its the only place in the economy where you can refuse to do your job and not be fired, or not know how and escape any consequences.
If you refuse to engage with these issues... no increase in capacity will happen. But you will spend more money and cause more turbulence for the private sector as they expand their capacity to interfere.
I'm pretty sure no one here is in favor of this kind of behavior. Addressing it is part of increasing state capacity, in addition to actually hiring and retaining people with the skills to effectively run government tasks. There are also plenty of people in government who actually do their jobs.
So what's the plan to get people to do their jobs? And do them well?
Because throwing money at it isn't going to work.
Right now if you expand the bureaucracy all you're going to do is grind the economy to a halt.
I suppose I'd say make it easier to fire them.
In the meantime, if 90% of people are doing their jobs, hiring a few more isn't going to grind anything to a halt.
The problem is that some of them are, in fact, doing things at work.
Government regulators aren't there to accomplish things. They are there to prevent things from happening. That's the service they offer. If they prevent bad things from happening, that's good, but more often they just prevent anything from happening.
It can take a decade to get two government agencies to decide which of them will regulate you. If you add staff you aren't going to get those decisions faster, you're going to get another ream of paper out of it.
If Noah wants government to work better why don't they take a small government agency, like a state DMV or the DOD payroll system and make it work well first, and then we can build from there?
Now this sounds like conservative dogma. Please don't strawman. We're talking about civil servants in general, not just regulators. For instance, it would be great if defense procurement actually worked well and didn't result in handouts to contractors. It would be great if transportation projects were completed faster and at higher quality. On the regulatory note, it would be great if building could happen faster by being regulated by civil servants rather than an anarchic, lawsuit-driven process like NEPA.
Federal employees mostly do two things, they regulate and they distribute money. There are some activities where they work directly doing things, but they are they minority.
How would you make defense procurement work well? There are hundreds of thousands of DoD employees providing oversight for millions of contractors. Would you bring shipyards back in house? Use WG or GS employees to make tanks? Have USACE and NAVFAC design buildings and management the construction process directly?
NEPA is only one of the roadblocks to large projects. In some cases it isn't even the biggest one.
It depends. I know people working for government agencies (not US) and they have a bonus system where you can get up to one months salary as a bonus for extraordinary achievements. However the budget for this is limited so only around one third of the people employed can get this bonus.
I think it's telling that we don't even try to do something like that here.
What's wrong with a napping couch at work? Short naps during the day help a lot of people be more efficient, just ask literally any WFH employee 😉
Oh, yeah, they called teleworking "tell them I'm working."
And remember, it's not like the SEC in 2006 was on the verge of completely missing the financial crisis or something.
It depends. I saw a lot of people wasting a lot of time on payroll when I worked in government
I mean that definitely happens, but I'm not sure wether it just happens in government agencies or everywhere else too. I could imagine that wasting your time outside of government agencies just has to be better disguised, because the consequences of being discovered are more severe.
And many more were a waste of payroll
A salient issue with local/state/federal governance is the coming competency crisis wherein additional layers of incompetent hires in government leads to the enshittification of the nation.
The military. See https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-america-is-out-of-ammunition
The schools. See https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-says-students-dont-need-to-prove-mastery-of-reading-writing-or-math-to-graduate-citing-harm-to-students-of-color.html
Emergency response. See https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/video/2023/08/24/anger-grows-fema-workers-stay-luxury-hotels-amid-maui-wildfires-disaster/
The Democrats. Too many to cite. Open border, reckless spending, crime, regime corruption, anti-semitism, racism, decelerationists.
The GOP. Feckless, weak, rudderless, leaderless, paralyzed despite an imploding Democrat party infected by the woke mind virus.
Before we reinvigorate the bureaucracy, shouldn’t we re-establish principles?
https://open.substack.com/pub/joelelorentzen/p/declaration-of-dependence?r=1p5p1m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"shouldn’t we re-establish principles?"
Good one!
Adding, comments like these getting into the machinery of government and organizations. :)
Great post. But as a former bureaucrat and current consultant on infrastructure, I want to clarify that it’s even worse than you describe. NEPA and its offspring don’t just kick in when the NIMBYs get ready to sue. There is a s*** ton of paperwork required before even the most banal project (say, restoring an almost 100-year-old bridge to a state of good repair, or slightly extending a light-rail transit system) can begin. It’s very, very expensive madness.
I would like to take my experience in this realm and use it in a more edifying context, but I haven’t yet figured out what that is.
When I think of government bureaucracy, and perhaps specifically your example of the IRS, I think we need less manpower and more straightforward automation.
I don't mean fancy AI. I mean that simple things should just be automatic.
There is no reason for instance that most people shouldn't have no-file taxes in America.
But perhaps people from across the political compass would fight that .. efficiency.
The reason we don't have no-file taxes isn't because of the IRS but because Republicans deliberately want folks to suffer when dealing with the government so forced everyone to file tax returns.
It's a problem when one of the major parties deliberately wants the American government to function worse.
If you want to understand something, follow the money. There are businesses that make money facilitating tax returns; go to no-file, and you put them out of business. Self-interest is a much clearer explanation that some people you don’t like being evil.
Also, Grover Norquist wants taxpayers to have the mads.
It's both. The tax return companies and GOP are in an unholy alliance.
The last GOP tax cut bill dramatically increased the standard deduction and got rid of or capped multiple itemized deductions. It dramatically increased the number of people who do not itemize their taxes.
It’s also because of Intuit and HR Block lobbyists.
It is certainly true that in the case of tax filing conservatives and tax filing companies want, to keep it complicated.
But I can give you one from the other side. I think it is clear that one reason we don't have more online education is that liberals and teachers want education to be a teacher's employment program.
This is absolutely not the bureaucracy defending itself, this is entrenched corporate interests in the tax return business who lobby Congress to keep extracting rents.
The IRS efforts are mostly automated for W-2 wage earners--which is most filers. But take a look at a corporate return or a large partnership--that’s where the resources are required.
It can’t be no file because people have to disclose income to the government and there is no way to do that without yearly tax filings or dramatic changes to the tax code requiring preregistration of businesses, etc. Which would be fine with me, but libertarians would blow a gasket if you had to let the IRS know that you started a car wash business on the side before your yearly tax filing was even due.
Government employee here...the amount of money we pay contractors to do routine things is absolutely obscene.
Great post. Reminded me about your post on innovation policy. The CDC apparently spent most of its time on “research,” intramural and thru grants to nonprofits like universities. So, I’m wondering whether, for lack of state capacity, the same critique applies to how the government supports innovation? We have universities, with their own agenda, focused primarily on publication prestige. Does the government have the capacity to monitor how universities are spending grant money? Patents are like an unfunded (negative) mandate, handled through an expensive and judicialized process.
LMAO, Noah is waaay funnier than Ghostbusters. .gov needs more worthless beureucrats?!? I thought they already cornered the market. He should go work at the post office or the dmv...
One important factor you missed was the political campaign fundraising incentives. Government contractors are now a huge source of campaign contributions. It’s going to be very hard for Congress and the executive branch to reverse the reliance on contractors when all the economic incentives in the political system favor the status quo.
never thought i'd "like" a column saying make the bureaucracy bigger, but this was a great (albeit somewhat depressing) piece
The lack of state capacity has knock on effects for judicial capacity (which is a subset). We need more judges (and beat cops and detectives and jailers).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/growing-backlog-of-court-cases-delays-justice-for-crime-victims-and-the-accused/
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/events/us-immigration-courts-crisis
Judges are funny. They’re bureaucrats, too, but it’s tricky to apply production metrics to them. Often they have some sort of tenure.
Sure, and my comment wasn’t implying that judges are bad at their jobs (though there’s articles about how case management can be made more efficient with technology). Rather, the point was that having more judges would lead to less case backlogs and swifter justice.
https://www.permits.performance.gov/fpisc-content/permitting-council-announces-first-ever-critical-minerals-mining-project-gain-fast-41
Biden just bombed NEPA and Nimby for this Fast Track critical mine in my lovely Southern Arizona.
Enviro me approves.
Then tell them to stop doing this kind of stuff. They are going after mom and pops who move overseas. Oftentimes they are US Veterans who move to places they fought (Vietnam is popular with this set) and at othet times people who left Eastern Europe during the cold war. Poland is filled with Americans on a US Pension.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2022/12/11/the-irs-versus-the-clumsy-taxpayer/?sh=70b1ddb93d7a
https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/perspectives-events/blogs/2023/06/moore-money-moore-problems
Moore concerns the tax liability of Charles and Kathleen Moore who, inspired by their friend’s mission to empower subsistence farmers in India, made a modest investment nearly two decades ago in a small social enterprise in Bangalore in exchange for approximately 11% of the stock of an Indian corporation. According to the record, the Indian corporation reinvested its earnings, the Moores never received any distributions on their investment and the Moores (under pre-2017 law) never incurred any tax liability on their investment. As a result of Section 965, however, the Moores were deemed to have earned income from their investment and were taxed accordingly. For the Moores, that meant a $15,000 tax bill.
Not sure someone who has worked attempting to manage the bureaucracy in DC would suggest this.
And I am not talking about partisan true believers and activists coming into a place like the FTC or EPA or DOJ or SEC- that can be quite fun (for the activists). Fairly destructive for the country. I am talking about less activist areas like VA, Foggy Bottom, IRS, SSA. You literally cannot sack anyone and they need not work.
Spoken like someone that has never worked in those organizations. I’m sorry that fear of being fired is all that motivates you, but the vast majority of people working in those organizations are hard working. Many are accomplished professionals with high levels of education and accomplishment; they understand the importance and value of what they do, even if you don’t.
Spoken like someone who has never had a real job with real accountability.
I don’t have anything against government in particular - some European bureaucracies can be quite effective.
One branch of my family has been active in Dem inner city machine politics- mayors, police chiefs, fire marshalls, etc. Another has contributed many employees to State, the Pentagon and other related agencies. The latter have consistently said that the worst part of any career is coming back home from an overseas assignment to work with the DC drones.
I am very familiar with American government- unfortunately. I have also worked closely with friends who are government officials in Germany, Skandis, etc. The difference is immense. American government is a wasting disease.
The only real accountability it that which you hold yourself to; anything else is the accountability of a whipped dog. And, FYI, I’ve worked a little more in the private sector than for government. There are stars in both and duds in both. People are people and the myth of the private sector superiority is just that. Government won WWII, invented electronic computers, atomic energy, the internet and put a man on the moon. Pretty good for a bunch of drones.
Sure there are good people everywhere and drones everywhere (we are probably 80 percent drones). There are also things called incentives and objectives. Change happens in the private sector because good people are incented to take risks to better achieve objectives or create new products.
The US bureaucracy is about process. There are (of course) people who do their job well “as defined”. They don’t realize that that real job is to change everything and improve output and increase services while reducing staff.
The private sector’s job is profit. Full stop. That profit can be from monopolies, abusing externalities, lying or even killing. Government balances that--their job isn’t pure profit (If only it were. If I could get 1% of 1% of what I bring in...). The measures used for the private sector are not applicable, government isn’t supposed to turn a profit. Since Reagan (who still runs the country from beyond the grave) destroyed the idea of good government, and Congress looks at corporate America as their primary constituent, good government has been crippled as a check on the excesses of the private sector. Government has been made less efficient through outsourcing, but that seems to be OK because that involves large payments to corporations. As Noah points out, state capacity has been crippled over the last 40+ years, largely because many people (you included apparently) don’t understand the purpose and importance of good government. We often elect people to run the government that insist government can’t do anything worthwhile--and then they prove it by destroying that very ability.
You don’t know what good government is. Move to a real country for a decade and then come back with some ideas. Throwing more money at the American systems would be a colossal waste. You sound like a drug addict making excuses.
Profit by killing? The government has a monopoly on the use of force.
What did government do in the last 50 years?
Deregulate aviation, trucking and telecommunications; open the internet and space to commerce; pass the Americans With Disabilities Act; fund mRNA vaccines ...
So it does best by getting out of the way, and spending money.
That was a government in a time far, far away.
All of those inventions were by the military not bureaucrats, as was the Apollo program and Manhattan project
The military is the MOST bureaucratic of all government institutions. And NASA isn’t the military.
Read the book “Apollo: the race to the moon” by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. NASA is a renamed NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) whose purpose was to maintain air superiority and during World War II, NACA was described as "The Force Behind Our Air Supremacy". And JFKs goal to reach the moon was to demonstrate military strength over the USSR. NASA hasn’t launched anyone to space in decades, they need SpaceX for that.
"American government is a wasting disease"
Is wasting disease that bad??
No need for the snarky language, you are both right, given that there is a real trade-off here. Yes, federal agency staff tend to be well-educated, smart, and motivated, and yes, federal agencies are less open to efficiency and innovation than the private sector. Do you disagree?
Appeal to credentials, sounds about right. If you get out masters at the online college, you’ll finally be worthy, right?