department of what now?
voices from the beehive, part 4
“A progressive case for DOGE”. It’s the sort of title that has you reaching for your revolver, admittedly. But Geoff Mulgan is actually, in my opinion, one of the better think tank types out there (he’s also one of the few people in British public life who admits to having been influenced by Stafford Beer), and this is not actually a bad essay – rather than pretending that there’s anything to be saved from the Musk debacle, it’s a quite clever set of precepts and checklist items for anyone who really wants to think about how to save money from public services, rather than just flapping their gums about waste and cancelling the free coffee.
However, I have objections! This is another in the Friday series detailing bees in my bonnet about various issues, and “Public sector bodies must always be conscious of efficiency because resources which are wasted through inefficient processes are a reduction in what can be achieved” is a particularly fuzzy and buzzy one. As always, disagree with me if you like but don’t expect me to change my mind – these are not opinions or arguments, they’re bees.
As I’ve said before, the problem with “government efficiency” isn’t that it’s a bad idea per se, it’s that almost always, the cost of doing something is so much less important than the thing that’s getting done. And yet, I have never in my life seen anyone trying to “fully benefit” the things that they are always “fully costing”. Somebody should set up a Department of Government Effectiveness; there are all too many areas of public policy where the cost/benefit ratio is not a number, because the benefits never arrived.
(I would also like to see more recognition that you can’t actually save costs by being “conservative” about benefit ratios. The Elizabeth Line in London is used by more than twice as many people as expected, for example. For some reason, this is not being treated as a massive embarrassment , nearly as bad as a 100% cost overrun. Even though it probably points to serious errors in the forecasting process which might have delayed or cancelled extraordinary amounts of necessary investment).
Because the benefits are much more important than the costs, and because effectiveness is so much more important than efficiency, I’m sceptical about efficiency drives, even in the best possible case (which I think Mulgan pretty closely describes). You ought to be really, really sure that you’re cutting a useless function, or that centralising procurement is going to deliver the same goods and services at lower cost with no interruption to service. Most of the time, taking a 10% chance of failure in order to save 10% of the project costs is a bad tradeoff.
People do "fully benefit" things all the time - a good example is the totally bullshit brief concocted to argue for a new royal yacht [or really, embarrass Tony Blair] back in 1996 which did things like totting up all the supposed exports and investments resulting from supposed events aboard the supposed yacht even though the real, non-supposed yacht had been used for this purpose for 2 (two) weeks of the 1980s. Even though it didn't work, this drivel was still circulating in 2023 and wasting people's time.
Another example from a different corner of the political spectrum is the habit of loading up any proposal with concocted second- or third-order benefits, so moving the bus stop comes with a £-number for the benefits to the NHS from greater active travel [i.e. it's further to walk] or to schools from exercise [i.e. it's further to walk so the kids are more shagged out and therefore less unruly or at least slower getting out of the way of the chalk].
As I was saying in another place, one reason why it would be great to have better estimates of simple first order things like "how many passengers will take the train" is that it would reduce the incentive to claim that any project must be the solution to all possible issues.
What's often left out in the business-scented discussions of efficiency in general is that it isn't a global property- it's inherently relative to a particular resource and output, and in the case of government the worthwhile output is actually something like 'resilience' or 'access in emergencies' that fundamentally entails excess capacity.
And fundamentally the efficiency hawks feel comfortable making these strafing runs at public institutions but would never dream of, say, taking a swipe at the ten-ply toilet paper and executive k-hole suite at the publicly traded companies that make up their portfolio. A small part of that reticence might even be sensible- capable organizations aren't capable because they put knockoff sodas in the vending machines, it's because they do their jobs. Now if only that logic could be extended to public services that have been bleed as a conservative moral imperative for forty years...