Efficiency in the 21st century

“Efficiency” has an actual meaning. It refers to obtaining more result with the same resources, the same results for fewer resources, or, best of all, more results for fewer resources, aka, more-with-less. It does not refer to making policy choices that please a particular partisan perspective. While language evolves, sometimes in displeasing ways (“irregardless”) and sometimes just weirdly (“yea” -> “yay”), deliberate use of a word to obfuscate what one intends is harmful.

The next new administration proposes yet another attempt to make the government “efficient.” In the early days of the 20^th century, these attempts were to improve governments through “economy” and “efficiency.” The first term is now obsolete, but the second has been the holy grail of government reformers for more than a century. Making the government more efficient is often associated with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which the reformers propose to eliminate so that the government can do “more-with-less.” In reality, ideologs intend sweeping policy changes so the government will do less-with-less by shrinking or abandoning programs with which they disagree. Perhaps a brief review of the recent history of efficiency reform will help.

The 1905-1909 Keep Commission (which was an extension of the 1893-1895 Dockery-Cockerell Commission) led indirectly to the creation of the 1916 – 1933 United States Bureau of Efficiency. This bureau was Congress’s response to President Taft’s effort to capture the control of agency budget submissions to Congress, which Congress promptly prohibited. Taft’s purpose, following a Keep Commission recommendation, was to hold down on the size of agency budget requests by gaining presidential control of them. The underlying accusation was that legislators were more interested in their parochial concerns than the national interest. Only an officer responsible for the whole jurisdiction would be interested in the national interest. The same story played out in miniature, at the state and local levels of government all over the country, shifting power from legislatures to governors and from city councils to unelected city managers.

When the Bureau of Efficiency failed to rein in government spending, Congress conceded that it could not control its own urges to spend money (although the actual immediate source of seemingly uncontrolled expenditure was the Great War), so they passed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Earlier efforts failed because President Woodrow Wilson mistakenly thought the law would weaken the president; little did he know that it was the beginning of the process that created our now imperial president. The Budget and Accounting Act founded the two most powerful non-cabinet federal agencies, the Bureau of the Budget, now known as the Office of Management and Budget, and the Government Accounting Office, now known as the Government Accountability Office.

The original mission of both BoB and GAO was to controlling government spending, with BoB nickel-and-diming every agency’s budget request and GAO taking a second swipe using a process known as the preaudit. Following the Brownlow Commission (1937) and the second Hoover Commission (1953-1955) BoB was moved to the Executive Office of the President and became focused on presidential policy making. During World War II, or possibly before (accounts differ), GAO abandoned preaudits. The account that puts this change during WWII asserts that the authorities (not specified) realized that if war acquisitions continued to be subject to preaudit, we would lose the war. (Notably, it appears that DOGE appears to now intend to reestablish preaudits.)

After Hoover II, there was a relatively brief pause at the federal level, but the experts in public administration carried on the movement through an intense focus on public productivity throughout the 60s and into the 70s. “Productivity” is another code word for more-with-less.

In the Nixon administration, the Ash Council (1969) finished the move of BoB by renaming it the Office of Management and Budget, increasing the emphasis on the management role. Combined with the productivity movement this change shifted the efficiency to the role of the managers. As typical with these commissions, the Ash Council recommended consolidation and relocation of federal agencies. This reform commission is otherwise so unremarkable that it doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry.

The Reagan administration’s attempt at shrinking the federal government was known as the Grace Commission (1982-1984), officially, the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control. Its report included the claim that 1/3 of income tax was wasted, which suggests enormous inefficiency, but actually reflects partisan policy debate over the function of the federal government. The assertion is also suspect because the federal government doesn’t specifically spend income tax. It spends all revenues not in trust funds, and it borrows to make up any shortfalls.

The Clinton administration offered the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) (1993-1998) (also known as the National Performance Review), which was headed by Al Gore. This commission borrowed “Reinventing Government” from a book by David Osborne and Ted Gabler, which might be thought of as Neoliberalism for Dummies. For total transparency, my first significant publication, “Reinventing the Proverbs of Government,” was a critique of Reinventing Government as an incoherent collection of adages that have little value. Part of the promise of NPR was to make government “work better” and “cost less.” More-with-less, again.

Here in the 21^st century, the Bush Administration did not form a commission, but it did implement a scorecard labeled Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which may have led to some management improvements in some agencies but was viewed with suspicion by some as yet another partisan device masquerading as an efficiency program.

The Obama administration offered the Simpson-Bowles Commission whose primary recommendation was to privatize Social Security. Obama, another supposedly Democratic president, briefly toyed with trying to do this, which would have effectively been an abandonment of the Democratic Party’s most successful contribution the well-being of the broad scope of underprivileged Americans in the history of the country.

Now comes the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE. Based on public declarations and early actions, DOGE’s intended function appears to openly do less-with-less by abolishing significant public programs. This is yet another use of the word “efficiency” to label partisan disagreements over governmental function as a matter of inefficient government. Programs that are subject to partisan disagreement are not inefficient. They reflect the fundamental characteristic of democracy, that various values are represented in governmental programs. Our voting population is almost evenly divided, there is no evidence that the population as a whole wants to “reform” government by sweeping away the programs valued by half.

If 130 years of efficiency programs have not squeezed out every ounce of inefficiency in government, then they aren’t really focused on efficiency. It is time to give up this magical thinking.