Firing government officials is not necessarily a path to greater efficiency.
Written by Francis Fukuyama
Compiled by: BitpushNews
About the author: Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier-Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spolin Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University and Director of the FSI Mosbacher Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is the author of The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order, and Political Order and Political Decay. ): From the Industrial Revolution to Democratic Globalization).
Francis Fukuyama
Background:
On November 12, local time, US President-elect Trump announced that American entrepreneur Elon Musk and Indian-American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will jointly lead the proposed "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) after he takes office as president, and Musk will fully oversee government spending. Foreign media NBC reported that despite the name, the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) is not a US government agency, and it is not clear how the organization will operate.
Trump issued a statement on social media that day saying that the "Department of Government Efficiency" will "pave the way for dismantling the government bureaucracy, cut unnecessary regulations and wasteful spending, and reorganize federal agencies."
The following is the text:
Dear Elon Musk:
Congratulations to your candidate, Donald Trump, on his resounding victory, and you have contributed greatly to this outcome. I know you have been appointed as the efficiency czar of the new administration, a position that will be very important because the federal bureaucracy really needs an overhaul. However, I have some suggestions on things to keep in mind when taking on this position.
As I'm sure you know, you'll find that working in government is very different from working in the private sector. The main difference is that people in government are extremely constrained by rules. For example, you can't just start firing people on their first day like you can at Twitter. Federal employees are protected by a host of work rules set by Congress. Trump plans to remove those protections by reviving an executive order from his first administration to create a "Schedule F" category that would allow the president to fire any employee at will. But the move would be heavily contested, and it could take months to clear the legal barriers to action.
In any case, firing government officials is not necessarily a path to greater efficiency.
There is a common perception that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and overstaffed. This is not true:
The number of full-time federal employees today is roughly the same as it was in 1969, at about 2.3 million. Even though the government spends more than five times as much now, the size of the workforce has not changed. In fact, we might even say that the government is understaffed, since it has been under pressure to reduce its workforce for decades. For example, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees $1.4 trillion in spending, or one-fifth of the entire federal budget, has only 6,400 full-time employees. These workers must check for Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of health care providers, and ensure that tens of millions of Americans are paid on time. If these staff are cut, fraud and waste in the Medicare system are likely to increase, not decrease. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for caring for the millions of refugees who enter the United States, has just 150 employees. And by increasing the number of employees at the Internal Revenue Service, the government expects to receive an additional $561 billion over the next decade.
The government makes up for its lack of staff by hiring lots of contractors (including your company, SpaceX). It's easier to fire contractors than regular federal employees, but who's going to do the contractors' work? Actually, taking these functions back to the government might save money, since federal employees are paid less, but you'd have to hire more people and the quality of service might suffer.
Deregulation was indeed part of a plan to make government more efficient. It had clear objectives, especially in the construction industry—something you should already know from your experience building factories in the United States.
We have too many permitting rules that slow down or outright block infrastructure projects, such as NEPA requirements for environmental impact statements that are thousands of pages long and take years to write. In addition, federal and state laws allow private lawsuits to enforce environmental laws, which is expensive and time-consuming. This is why it takes nearly a decade to get approval for an offshore wind farm, and why it takes years to build a transmission line to get electricity from Texas to California. So anything that can streamline this process would be welcome. It would be one of the most visible wins of the new administration, with positive impacts on a variety of areas, from affordable housing to climate adaptation. (However, you should recognize that much of the overregulation happens at the state level, which you have no control over. This is, of course, why you moved Tesla from California to Texas.)
However, another type of deregulation is needed if government efficiency is to be improved.
People accuse bureaucracies of over-regulating the private sector, but bureaucracies themselves are over-regulated. Americans have never trusted government, so over the decades a host of rules have been created that bureaucrats must follow. One example is the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which contains hundreds of pages of rules that government officials must follow for everything from procuring F-35 fighter jets to office furniture supplies. Recruiting new employees is also very difficult, as my students often have to wait months to get an interview for a federal government job opening. In addition, there are many diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements that do not necessarily reward real talent, and I believe the Trump administration would be happy to repeal these rules.
Many conservatives believe that government bureaucrats have too much discretion and use it to enact a liberal agenda, thereby escaping democratic control, which is indeed the case in some cases. But the opposite is true: bureaucrats spend too much time following the hundreds of rules set by Congress instead of using their independent judgment to make decisions that benefit citizens. They need to be freed from these constraints and be judged on their performance based on the results they achieve rather than on how risk-averse they are, which is how Silicon Valley and the private sector operate.
Obviously, you can't delegate more power to officials if you believe they lack the training and skills to use it wisely. And here we have another problem, the reluctance of young people to enter federal agencies.
The average age of a government worker is 47; only 7% of the workforce is under 30, while 14% is over 60. Young workers are desperate to fill vacancies in the age of artificial intelligence. But young people are reluctant to work in federal agencies. Complying with complex hiring rules can make finding a job slow and difficult, and saying you work for the government offers little social status.
You can’t get efficiency by firing people in this situation. Government jobs need to be attractive to young, tech-savvy people; they need to be able to move in and out of the federal government flexibly, without being constrained by a government service pay scale that was created 70 years ago for a time when most workers were clerks and typists.
So here's the thing. You can never run a government like a company, but you can do a lot to make it more efficient, the key being to avoid drastic measures like mass layoffs and closing entire agencies.
Remember, Rick Perry, who was appointed by Donald Trump, wanted to shut down the Department of Energy, but he didn't realize that one of the most important functions of the Department of Energy is to manage the national laboratory system, which is responsible for nuclear weapons, energy research, and so on. You also have the problem that Congress has a say in how the government is run. Even if the department is controlled by Republicans, they will have a say in different parts of the country in various states and may not allow you to violate regulations they have previously approved.
We need to cut government regulation of many parts of the private sector, but we also need to deregulate government itself and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to recognize that government is a valid and necessary means to achieve goals, not an enemy that needs to be dismantled.
Sincerely,
Francis Fukuyama