“Concentration is the key to economic results,” wrote business guru Peter Drucker. “The secret to doing anything well is concentration,” an unnamed coworker once told Florence King. And the foremost commentator of the Nineteenth Century, Herbert Spencer, wrote this:
In the very nature of things an agency employed for two purposes must fulfil both imperfectly; partly because while fulfilling the one it cannot be fulfilling the other, and partly, because its adaptation to both ends implies incomplete fitness for either. As has been well said a propos of this point, “A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas-company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill, and teach the children ill.”
[From The Man Versus the State]
While the activities of the newborn Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) have commanded a great deal of press attention, little has gone to this aspect of its discoveries: government agencies aren’t just wasting money; they’re throwing it around without any connection to their ostensible purpose for existing. In some cases it’s not clear that that ostensible purpose is being served at all.
Among the verities of my former occupation, this one ranks at the top:
A government agency is a tool. It exists to serve the public in some fashion. If it has a single purpose – and if it’s confined to serving that purpose and no other – it has a chance of doing what it’s intended to do. But if it attempts to serve two or more purposes, that chance dwindles close to zero. Split attention is inattention.
It’s possible that a substantial portion of the waste DoGE has uncovered to this point is because of split attention. The man at the top of an organization cannot control very much even in the best of circumstances. When circumstances are not the best – i.e., when he must track several lines of effort that are at best related to one another – he has very little control. Those under him can get away with whatever they please. In the private sector, such an organization will become chaotic and wasteful. In the government sector, it becomes a fountain for corruption, graft, and fraud.
Even were such an agency staffed solely by men as pure of heart as Galahad, it would have approximately no chance of fulfilling its original mission… whether or not those who chartered it sincerely intended that mission to be fulfilled!
Concerning DoGE, CBD at Ace of Spades HQ has written this:
The goal of course is to cut waste, and shift toward actual needed functions, performed by minimally competent employees. As obvious as that sounds, that will be a tremendous change in the federal government, and it will lead the way in returning America to a more rational view of employment.
Go to work every day and do your job well. That’s not so complicated!
If all goes as planned, the federal government will be a smaller, more nimble, more efficient, and less expensive thing.
Impeccable sentiments, aren’t they? But there’s a qualification to be imposed: what ought the government to be doing? We don’t want it doing what it’s not authorized to do, no matter how efficiently.
And here I shall close, lest I begin to repeat myself.
2 comments
A good example of this would be the Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company.
But you see, government no longer has anything to do with governance; it has, particularly on the federal level become a vehicle for enriching a certain class or group of people i.e., those on the inside, at the expense of, well, pretty much everyone else. As to those remaining shreds of actual governance, such as protecting the national borders, providing for a common defense, regulating commerce between constituent states and conducting foreign policy, it makes occasional feigned and inefective (often counterproductive) stabs at the process. But when it comes to government’s primary purpose, it excels! The number of federal employees (I almost typed “workers”, silly me) grows exponentially and the administrative state adds to its numbers and influence equally exponentially. As the numbers of such federally-involved people increases, it consumes greater amounts of money from those on the outside, because it produces nothing of value itself; it is a consumptive process exclusively, a true “zero sum game”. As to this function, viz., the draining of the private sector’s productivity, the federal government has demonstrated a high degree of effectiveness. Once one recognizes this, all becomes clear. Is it any wonder that those on the inside scream bloody murder when anyone on the outsides raises an objection to the process?