It is hard to disagree with the stated maxim<\/a> behind Elon Musk\u2019s newly established U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): to \u201cmaximize governmental efficiency and productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In this fable of \u201cgood\u201d vs. \u201cevil,\u201d the \u201cgood\u201d forces of efficiency must chainsaw their way through the administrative state and the rules and processes that its \u201cevil\u201d bureaucrats hide behind. Even the political voices opposing Musk\u2019s efficiency drive explicitly<\/a> accept<\/a> the goal, arguing that DOGE\u2019s actions (for instance, firing inspectors general) are the wrong way<\/em> to improve efficiency. On the centrality of \u201cefficiency,\u201d there is bipartisan support, even in these polarized times.<\/p>\n But could it be that the problem lies in our collective acceptance of \u201cefficiency\u201d as the core value proposition of the state, to be unquestioningly maximized at every turn? The state is far more than a public goods cousin of Amazon.com, and the quest for efficiency above all else constitutes a collective forgetting of what government is or can be.<\/p>\n To say that efficiency is not everything<\/em> is not to suggest that it is undesirable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n From endless paperwork queues to demands for bribes and shoddy quality of basic services, state inefficiency imposes great costs to citizens, with the most vulnerable paying the greatest price. Greater efficiency saves collective time and money. But the singular focus on an \u201cefficient state\u201d is not just potentially counterproductive\u2014it is also a dangerous and slippery slope toward authoritarianism.<\/p>\n To make efficiency the overarching goal of government in fact undermines its performance. For more than two decades, we have studied the administrative state in contexts as diverse as India, Thailand, Liberia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our scholarship highlights that when efficiency becomes the primary goal, performance generally falls. The state works best when its actors\u2014the \u201cunelected\u201d bureaucrats that have become DOGE\u2019s primary target<\/a>\u2014are empowered with discretion and autonomy, and when they are held accountable by a shared sense of mission. Successful delivery of state services requires judgment from humans who are capable of balancing the multiple competing needs of service delivery.<\/p>\n This is not a challenge just in the United States; across the globe, efficiency is often the ruse used to pursue a much deeper project of democratic erosion. Only by allowing ourselves to question the efficacy of efficiency can we possibly have means to interrogate what we are sacrificing on its altar. Perhaps one critical way to defend democracy is to question this assumption and to reframe our debates on the state and its mode of delivery.<\/p>\n The value that we place on efficiency as the goal of the modern administrative state traces its history to at least the 1960s, as documented by sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman\u2019s 2022 book<\/a> Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy<\/em>.<\/p>\n The policy approach of an \u201ceconomic style of reasoning,\u201d as Berman terms it, is anchored in market principles: choice, competition, cost effectiveness, incentive compatibility. Under this logic, \u00a0efficiency is presented as a politically neutral holy grail that governments ought to pursue.<\/p>\n A 1923 motivational poster by a Chicago printer, meant to be hung in factories and offices, capitalizes on the era\u2019s fascination with enhancing efficiency.Robert Beebe\/Buyenlarge\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But governments did so to a fault. Berman traces the evolution of this the economic style of reasoning to the 1960s and show how over the decades, efficiency became fetishized as the only goal of government, often displacing considerations of equity and democracy.<\/p>\n Berman focuses her inquiry on the United States, but this mode of reasoning about and within the state has a much wider resonance. It certainly characterized India\u2019s approach as the policy elite embraced globalization and liberalized from the early 1990s onwards. The policy logic was\u2014as it is in so many countries\u2014that adopting the tools of \u201cscientific management,\u201d or in public administration terms \u201cnew public management,\u201d we will control our way to success.<\/p>\n By monitoring and measuring everything that we can, the thinking went, we will improve the state, driving toward key performance indicators (KPIs) and realizing efficiencies. This manifests in different forms, such as the consequences of \u201cteaching to the test\u201d in response to the United States\u2019 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, or in biometric attendance systems introduced in India designed to ensure public servants show up but which do little to control what happens once they do.<\/p>\n In the contemporary moment, these ideas have converged with the possibilities offered by technology to create a new hypercharged, technology-infused vision of utopia that has shaped the DOGE view of the world. Musk and his ilk seem to imagine that the holy grail of efficiency can be reached even more effectively through the algorithms that automate processes.\u00a0Just as Google serves search results, the government can deliver to citizens what they want and need, with no troubling humans slowing things down and leaving a trail of fraud and waste. One cannot make the wrong decision if there is no decision at all.<\/p>\n The fable is not without its logic; however, it has two serious problems. First, it is an approach that can very rarely work for government. It doesn\u2019t work because\u2014and this is the second critical problem\u2014efficiency is the wrong goal.<\/p>\n It would be wonderful if we could monitor and measure all the important things that states do, turning all services into garbage collection or vaccine administration\u2014relatively rare cases where what can be observed and KPI\u2019d is, in fact, a pretty good summary of what we want the workers to do. Perhaps in these cases, we do need fewer supervisors, and data systems may be able to substitute for traditional levels of hierarchy. Perhaps there are other functions of the state\u2014for instance, tax administration\u2014where technology can drive automation.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, much of what the administrative state does falls outside these two categories, and it requires empowered humans exercising judgment to do well.<\/p>\n DOGE-catalyzed cuts<\/a> at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>, National Nuclear Security Administration<\/a>, Federal Emergency Management Agency<\/a>, and Department of Veterans\u2019 Affairs<\/a> are penny-wise and pound-foolish.<\/p>\n Like the European reliance on natural gas from Russia<\/a> in the 2010s, these supposed \u201cefficiencies\u201d in fact mask deepening vulnerability via decreased ability to exercise informed judgment in responding to the unexpected\u2014be it a nuclear disaster or simply the needs of a veteran whose issues do not fit neatly into an online form. (Jennifer Pahlka documents cases of this sort under the purview of the Department Veterans\u2019 Affairs in her book<\/a> Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better<\/em>.)<\/p>\n In addition to being ineffective at improving performance,\u00a0the singular reification of \u201cefficiency\u201d also fundamentally misrepresents what the state is and how it relates to the citizenry.<\/p>\n The state is not a private firm. Citizens engage the state not as transactional \u201cclients,\u201d but in emotive, affective terms. No one would volunteer to fight in Amazon.com\u2019s army. Firms deliver. States do more than that. In other words, the state is an identity, not just a service provider.<\/p>\n \u201cThe state\u201d is all of us\u2014all of its citizens and residents. Society delegates significant coercive power to the state so that the state can regulate societal demands via an autonomous bureaucracy. In a democracy, institutions of checks and balances, laws, rules, and processes are built in to enable the state to negotiate competing claims as it navigates the citizenry.<\/p>\n The administrative state\u2019s tasks are an outcome of a political bargain that may necessitate \u201cinefficiency\u201d in some situations as the state makes trade-offs: between redistribution and growth, environmental protection and business, or tax cuts and expenditures on welfare.<\/p>\n These are outcomes of democratic bargaining, which is necessary to preserve freedoms and a stable society. When we seek efficiency, we fail to engage this fundamental reason for the state\u2019s existence. We also run the risk of short-term efficiency gains at the cost of social instability and disaffection.<\/p>\n Inevitably, efficiency also becomes the ruse for a much deeper centralization and personalization of politics. While efficiency framings have accompanied a creep toward authoritarianism in many countries, in the United States we are seeing not a creep but rather a veritable sprint.\u00a0 Musk links efficiency with the strategy of making everything \u201csubject to the will of the President,\u201d as he put it<\/a> in a post on X in late February. Dictatorship is efficient in comparison to processes that give power to many people, and thus force the slow work of consensus-building and accommodation. However, without the prerequisites of decision-making, it leads to bad, efficient decisions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Moreover, it is this very work of democracy that ensures that the decisions of government serve the interests of the many, and that encourages diverse groups in society to feel like part of the collective.\u00a0As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote<\/a>, democracy\u2019s strength is not to \u201cgive the people the most skillful\u201d (or efficient) government, but rather to produce<\/a> \u201can all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which never exists without\u201d democracy.<\/p>\n Efficiency as a totalizing framing allows would-be authoritarians to argue that it is not the system of government\u2014but rather they personally\u2014who have provided services to citizens. In the United States, this returns us to the age of machine politics and personalistic rule; more generally, this is what political scientists term \u201cpatrimonialism<\/a>,\u201d a style of governing in which all state functions flow from the personal authority of the leader.<\/p>\n In India, patrimonialism has been effected by using technology for welfare services and branding them as gifts and \u201cguarantees\u201d from the ruling party leader. Technology removes traditional intermediation by local politicians and bureaucrats, enabling in its place a direct, emotive connection with the national political party leaders who can present themselves as the benefactor.<\/p>\n Implicit in this process is a subtle shift in the social contract that positions welfare as the largesse of the benevolent leader rather than a moral obligation of the state to rights-bearing citizens. Democracy is practiced when citizens seek accountability and claim their rights through local state actors. Centralization of power within party leaders upends this. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and today all political leaders from across party lines have adopted<\/a> this basic playbook.<\/p>\n USAID workers collect their personal belongings and leave work in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27.Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n As Berman reminds us, efficiency itself is a choice\u2014one that sometimes competes with democracy. Many societies are rightly frustrated with the status quo at present. But efficiency as a singular focus is not the solution<\/em> to this frustration; it is, rather, a big part of the problem. We have come to the inevitable dead end of trying to deliver state services using a mindset and technology that is well suited to packages, and poorly suited to the state\u2014whose primary purpose is to bind society together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rather than destroy the administrative state, we need to nurture connections between state and citizens. Rather than tighten oversight and compliance for state officials, we need to build a system that allows them to pursue the goals that bring so many to public service: serving the public.<\/p>\n The state is not a Silicon Valley start-up; its demise is not a cost of doing business or a failure to be learned from in the next funding round. We must interrogate the value propositions that brought us here; we must develop alternative pathways to renew and rejuvenate state institutions by forming relationships of trust with citizens that restores citizen faith in the democratic project.<\/p>\n There is much to learn from democracies around the world on how to improve the state through democracy-enabling instruments: Taiwan\u2019s experiments in digital democracy, the United Kingdom\u2019s \u201cmission-led\u201d government, Brazil\u2019s participatory budgeting, and even in India, the use of social audits and right to grievance redressal laws are all examples of improving state performance without compromising democracy for efficiency.<\/p>\n Efficiency is a good thing, but it is not the only good thing. The first step toward better answers is asking what else we care about (such as values of equity, responsiveness, and accountability), and how we can build a state that serves those goals, too.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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