efficiency is a foolish way to talk about government
making the case for public benefit
As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to hack away at the United States federal government, I am shocked by how much the people running the government seem to well, hate the government. In fact, the general consensus among the leadership of the Trump Administration seems to be that it would be best if the government didn’t exist.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the two leading players in this drama, have not minced words here. Musk has referred to the government as a “weed” and argued that “we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people — democracy.”1 Trump has been proposing to run the country like a business since 2015, and appointed Jared Kushner to make the government more efficient as the head of the “White House Office of American Innovation” during his last presidency. Kushner was less effective than Musk, but the narrative has always been the same: the government is bloated, inefficient, and not accountable to the United States public.
None of this should be a surprise, as Trump and Musk are in lockstep with a vocal conservative movement more broadly. Project 2025, the conservative governing agenda developed by The Heritage Foundation, uses similar and even more aggressive language calling for the dismantling of the federal government. Today, its website calls for a program to “take down the Deep State”, “Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation”, and “Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress”.2 It also claims that the Trump Administration has enacted two-thirds of its policy proposals.
As you may recall, Project 2025 was widely publicized during the 2024 presidential campaign. While not all voters believed Trump would enact these policies, we all knew it was a risk. And yet, Americans elected him anyway. That is what little faith Americans have in the government’s ability to act in the public interest.
Americans have long been experiencing a crisis of faith in the federal government. Inflation, chronic underemployment, soaring housing costs, expensive foreign wars, and widening inequality are pushing people to question whether the government plays a positive role in their lives. It certainly doesn’t help that media conglomerates owned by billionaires who want to avoid any sort of global accountability are ceaselessly attacking the government on TV and online, but let’s take these beliefs at face value for a moment. According to Pew Research Center, Americans’ trust in the federal government has been stuck at record low levels for the past 20 years. In 2022, only 20% of Americans say they trust Washington to do the right thing, down from a high of 77% in the pre-Watergate 1960s.
To me, this illustrates a clear problem that any presidential administration must reckon with: how do you govern when a supermajority of your constituents do not have faith in your ability to do so? Trump and The Heritage Foundation have chosen the cowardly path: align yourself with the naysayers and do not govern at all. In doing so, you may gain some short-term wins when you slash the budget, but you trigger a negative feedback loop: recklessly slashing budgets fundamentally interrupts the ability of the government to provide services, which drives down satisfaction with the government’s performance and raises calls for more cuts.
What’s much harder is to actually try to govern effectively in a low-trust environment. Clearly the Democrats don’t have the answer, as they continue to play the straight man, pitching themselves as the party of reason, The Establishment. If 80% of Americans have been saying “burn the house down” for 20 years, it is challenging to argue that the house should be saved.
Yet if we agree that DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach to reform is irresponsible and disastrous, we are left with the question of what a responsible reform agenda can look like. The first step is to change the language from efficiency to public benefit, which is actually the realm of government. While businesses are designed to maximize revenue, the government is seeking “socially optimal” outcomes (to borrow a term from the late, great Donald Shoup). As a result, the government is doing lots of things that no business would do but we still believe have immense benefit for the American public, like operating the National Parks system, funding the fire department, and building the Interstate highway system. These things are not necessarily money-makers, but they create value in the form of recreation space and natural beauty, emergency response, and mobility.
So I propose a focus on programs that maximize public benefit, as opposed to those that are most efficient. Of course, defining social optimization is much more fraught than showing that profits are up - even more so in a moment where political divides run so deep. However, in the past several years, bread and butter issues have come to the fore as relatively non-partisan, and in my opinion, an opportunity to cut through the noise. Addressing housing costs, the price of consumer goods, and job creation and clearly communicating the links between government programs and public benefit may offer a path to a governing coalition based on good governance (as opposed to just less governance).
Sounds simple right? Not quite. In my opinion, the American public is quite conservative and many issues that I think are important are not broadly considered to have public benefit. For example, in a 2024 Pew Research Survey asking Americans to indicate whether policies should be a priority for the President and Congress, only 36% ranked “Dealing with climate change” as a top priority. This made it the 18th most important issue of the 20 options presented in the survey. Meanwhile, “Strengthening Economy” was a top priority for 73% of respondents and the highest ranked issue of the 20 options presented.
In my personal opinion, this sucks. I think that a justice-oriented approach to dealing with climate change is the only issue any of us should care about and I’m furious that Americans don’t care. But to some extent, electoral politics is about winning, not about being right. In that light, I think a political party struggling to build a governing coalition in an environment where the efficacy of the government is being so deeply questioned needs to focus on the issues that have broadest appeal. In the meantime, it is up to us, as citizens and activists, to show the country the importance of these issues and the role the federal government must play in resolving them, to keep pushing them into the realm of national politics.
Bennett
City Speak #43
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/elon-musk-calls-for-the-u-s-to-delete-entire-agencies-from-federal-government
https://www.project2025.org/