As I’ve argued in a few different posts, “DOGE” — the grandiosely and absurdly titled “Department of Government Efficiency” — is merely an advisory panel which is probably best understood as a kind of memelord performance art. But there’s one part of this spectacle worth adding to — one separate conversation that is worth having off to the side of this effort while we’re in the midst of rightly trashing it.
Here goes.
Things take far too long to do. Things take too long to build. I saw a statistic recently that New York City used to open multiple new subway stops every year. We’ve opened like two in this century. This wasn’t new to me. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for years. And there are countless examples in your part of the country as well. Some of this is tied to the fact that today we’re more concerned with workers not getting killed on the job or dumping oceans of harmful chemicals into the ground. But it’s not all that. Not even most. There are people who have this as their hobbyhorse and they at least have broad theories of the problem — not so much over-regulation, though there’s that too, but regulatory regimes that give opponents too much power to slow things down, industry regulatory capture, etc. This is adjacent to the broader topic of housing shortages and YIMBY politics. Not the same but related.
This post isn’t meant to flesh out all those policy questions. I bring it up because there are a bunch of ways government more broadly could and really needs to work better. If you’re the party of government, you actually have the biggest interest in getting it to work well. Because in a lot of ways that’s your product.
But the point is that you can’t cede the efficiency and reform brand to people whose real aim in cutting people’s Medicaid and Social Security. Because that’s pretty much where we are at the end of 2024. You’ve got a couple guys who are mostly ignoramuses about what government does, what it’s supposed to do, who relies on it and more and they’re just coming in with what’s mostly the libertarian bullshit they heard from their pals in Silicon Valley. It’s not even like handing the keys over to the Heritage Foundation. Those guys have been thinking about how to do this for decades.
There’s no big takeaway here other than the fact that there are things government should be organized to do better, quicker and more efficiently. (My big thing is standing up transportation infrastructure. But there are other examples.) Every right-minded person should be at war with the DOGE clown show while keeping that fact in mind, front and center.
