I offer no apologies to Erasmus1 for an ironic twist on his ironic twists. Ambiguous, infinite reflexiveness is kewl!
The unsanctioned "Department of Government Efficiency" has been on a rampage of late2, because "efficiency" is a necessary universal objective that only a business orientation can achieve — and that "government" (and, in particular, the Deep State) can never achieve. There's a tiny, tiny problem with this pathway, though: Almost by definition, planning for crises is not efficient precisely because there is neither certainty nor sufficiently precise (and accurate!) predictability of the time, place, and context of a crisis.
Consider, for the moment, an objectively-clear crisis: Hurrican Katrina.3 If one actually looks even cursorily at the four years leading up to the devastation in New Orleans and the bungled response thereto, one sees increasing emphasis on efficiency… primarily so that any "savings" could be plowed into responding to another (manufactured? not-objectively-clear? resulting-from-the-response-as-much-as-the-putative-cause?) crisis.4 No plan survives contact with the enemy — or reality — because neither one actively cooperates with the plan.
More disturbingly, consider the particular rampage noted a couple paragraphs above. There might be a microefficiency possible through a fresh-eyes oversight of payment systems. Assume, hypothetically, that the deterrent effect of knowing that the DOGE5 Is Watching will automatically cut all fraud to zero. (Yeah, right.) Has anyone considered the costs of any of:
- Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from internal misuse, like some staffer at DOGE using the payment data to track down his ex… or estranged daughter?
- Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from external attack, like hackers choosing to attack off-the-shelf software now being stored on dubiously-secured computers in Alexandria? Or, more to the point, hostile foreign governments doing so?
- Distinguishing between the fact of a payment and the reason(s) for that particular payment — an effort (if actually undertaken) that inherently requires correlation of individual payments with specific, private, oft-protected-by-other-law personal information?
- Actual enforcement efforts against any discrepancies actually discerned (whether or not factually/ethically verified)?
I didn't think so; and even that comparison assumes (with no warrant, let alone relationship to reality) complete success.
Beginning down the path of internalizing negative externalities6 — necessary to determine the efficiency of a system even more than the efficiency of a particular incidence — further exposes the real problem. DOGE is attempting to count the number of angels (or, in this instance, devils7) on the head of a pin not by assuming just the existence of the angels and devils, but by assuming that they are necessarily — and accurately — countable through the magic of modern accounting. It further flies in the face of a critical lesson of both the events of military history and the theory of conflict resolution. "All teeth and no tail" is a losing strategy precisely because it presumes that the world is a chessboard, that no pawn ever repels the actual assault of a knight, that the terrain is known and fixed and unchallenging, that the simplest case is always an accurate model of the real world — and that no one ever responds to a demand to surrender with "Nuts!," but instead accedes to the "inevitable." But it's only "inevitable" to those making the same set of a priori assumptions, and slavishly following the same path of reasoning, as those making the demand.
Mu5k's Schlieffen Plan to remake the government as smaller and more efficient is little more than an attempt to convert the slogan "greater efficiency is always good!" into reality. Instead of considering the facts, or the law/other methods of reasoning, railing against "government inefficiency" is merely pounding on the table8 — or, perhaps, the on-screen keyboard in 140-character soundbites that couldn't even complete this sentence, or include the footnote. And the footnote(s) is/are part of the point: The "inefficiency meme" is at best a postulate that has not been proven.
- Desidarius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509, this trans. 1876); see also Anthony Grafton's helpful context-setting foreword to the Princeton University Press edition (PDF) which, nonetheless, glosses over a critical aspect of the work: That it also functions as a pre-Enlightenment criticism of the argument from authority, and in particular transferrence of authority between fields of expertise. Directly confronting this problem would need to wait a couple centuries more…
- Keep in mind that it's still during the government/business day in DC as I'm writing this. There is a nonzero chance that something even more outrageous, or at least even more remarkable, will have occurred between its writing and whenever you read this.
- This concerns the fact and context of the response, not its competence. It wasn't a heck of a job, by any means. It's also important to remember that the management-level response failures came from those appointed to "supervise" the Deep State by the political masters, not the Deep State itself — and included a substantial proportion of "successful" businessmen (dubious genderization entirely intentional) brought in to make things more efficient.
- It would be rather churlish for me to point out that the sum total of all such "savings" didn't make much of a dent in the cost of that earlier crisis (PDF) … and even that is just the immediate cost, as the human and consequential costs have yet to be acknowledged (let alone quantified). Consider where you're reading this: "Churlish" is probably the most-civil thing you should expect.
- I propose giving the publicly-known leader a floppy hat and status as a spokesbacterium, carefully neglecting conflicts of interest, monomaniacal focus on twigs and not trees, not-well-hidden agendas, and attempts to deflect attention from nonmonetary (indeed, inherently inefficient) intentional side effects. Just like a disturbing nominative ancestor. Wait, you don't really think I'd suggest ridicule of a government official in a blawg piece that explicitly invokes satire, do you? Or that such ridicule just might be merited?
- See, e.g. Prof David Zilberman, chapter 4 of course texts for Spring 2006 (PDF), and it's worth noting that this is from an introductory-level course.
- "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) (quoted at Britannica.com).
- Cf., e.g., Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936) (convenient direct quotation).