Department Of Government Efficiency: An Oxymoron Come To Life

How would one go about this Department of Government Efficiency, notwithstanding it is a nonsense term? Were I elected King for a Day-which is not likely but work with me here-I would begin with the challenge of reforming government spending beyond the obvious fraud, waste and abuse.

Before I even start, I’m obligated to point out that as an optimistic pessimist, anyone who would put those terms in such close proximity-Government Efficiency-is suspect from jump street. Only someone who has not served a day in government in their life could coin such a Pollyanna title.

To achieve efficiency at improving any process in any field of endeavor, you have to identify the key elements and their relationship to outcomes of the “system.” For the government that means identifying the components of government spending and getting the pieces and parts under control.

Control has a different meaning and context to many. One of the best contexts in which to view it is through understanding a wonderful book called The Character of Harms: Operational Challenges In Control by Malcolm K. Sparrow of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sparrow uses a plethora of examples as case studies that demonstrate that in the final analysis you are most often better off identifying the bad things that are happening in situations within “the system” and mitigating or eliminating those “harms” to achieve better outcomes.

The government is more inclined to just revamp the entire process, or to add band aids over time without addressing key “harms,” often resulting in more problems, less efficiency and worse outcomes.

A quick example would be attacking the problem of the inability of congress to pass a budget in time for execution on 1 Oct-the start of the government fiscal year. Congress has only accomplished this “feat”-tongue in cheek, as this function and action is at the top of their job description-one time in the last three decades. How could you bring some measure of control over this problem to ensure that it happens?

Putting laws, rules and regulations in place has not improved the process, as evidenced by the results. One of the truisms offered up in Sparrow’s book is that it is hard to fix a problem that is not acknowledged as such. With no disincentive to congress-no ramifications-it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

What if congress didn’t get paid if there was no budget in place on 1 Oct? Hmmm, that would represent a good control. But congress would have to pass that in law, so…

Congress could of course fix this problem themselves through discipline, compromise and meeting deadlines. But if that was a solution you would think we would have seen a few more budgets passed on time over the last fifty years.

I’m not speaking for everyone but when I think about government efficiency I think about money and programs. Programs are funded by money, which derives from or flows from budgets approved by agency heads and departments and funded-programmed-authorized by congress.

I don’t want to get bogged down in this cul-de-sac with a nerdy discussion about this topic, but there are a number of actions that need to be taken to get ahold of this topic of the Department of Government Efficiency, with the first priority being the mission statement.

Under the Army “KISS” principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid,) the mission is to “find government inefficiency and eliminate it.” The Army Test Officer in me wants to go off on a tangent to define inefficiency, but much like in Sparrow’s book, case studies and exemplars are the best way to highlight the “harms” that merit attention.

I don’t think this is an example where taking care of the small things will take care of the big things. In my experience government inefficiency is widespread, unchecked and a function of the program and budget process which many point to as a strength of our system: really

Aided and abetted by amateurs involved in all facets of the system, the result of an untrained work force, undermined by the government promotion process where you have leaders with no inherent skill in leading the changes they dictate, hindered by a lack of continuity on programs.

There are dozens of issues to address floating just below the waterline-I can think of scads-scores-a plethora of issues.

In the time available to taking position, Elon Musk (one of the smartest people I met in this life so far) and Vivek Ramaswami need to stand up a very government like process improvement effort, call it the Department of Government Efficiency Integrated Product Team (DOGE (not a fan of this acronym) IPT.))

Musk is the genius-philosopher-vision-idea guy, Vivek is the driver of the team leads, and the train driver has to be some type of former military operations officer type who can drive schedules, milestones and administer butt whippings.

The issues to look at drive the talent search for the team leads. Off the top of my head there might be policy, process, programs, case studies, best/worst practices, impediments, vision 2030, Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M,) and report production.

The outcome of an IPT is an action document-a deliverable-that a boss approves that gets executed: it is not just a shelf-ware report that makes everyone feel good as they return to their day jobs. In the 50 or so IPTs I participated in and especially the ones I led, I preferred to call the deliverable an “Integrated Program Plan” which has a key component or deliverable called the POA&M that will have the boss’ signature on it.

I’ve written about some of the more notable efforts over the years where the government bureaucracy that your boss leads might not be too keen when it comes to implementation of the POAM.

The worst case I personally experienced was an experiment that came out of a community Measurement and Signature Intelligence IPT. The effort was a teaming project with Sandia Laboratory driven by a hypothesis that we could revolutionize the way our agency produced radar products by storing formatted coherent data and allow customers to use “recipes” against those data stores to produce the products needed: we would only store the sensed data.

The concept was loosely modeled on modern hardware store paint sales. The store does not stock 10K cans of paint in all the colors of the rainbow waiting for your order. They have different grades of base paint-white-and they mix in concentrates to produce your order on the spot (and use a densitometer to get the color correct.)

We proved the hypothesis in 2003-2004, wrote the program implementation documents, fought for funding for several years and finally received funding in 2007. Our mission partner implemented the capability that same year.

Our acquisition directorate responsible for implementing the capability had “higher priorities” and spent the money on other things. I had moved on, but several years later when I returned, I pressed to have the capability implemented and our new director-who had funded the effort in 2007 while at USDI-funded it (again.)

We were still trying to implement the capability as I retired in 2017. Never underestimate the capability of people in the government to stand in the way of progress in areas where they already have program capability that an innovation will disrupt.

Which is one of the major problems with the program and budget system/process that I will get into in the next article.

Something the public has been exposed to in spades in this century is the lack of accountability in the US government. In my above example the director who funded the project should have called the responsible dullards in and demanded accountability for the capability that she had now funded twice.

I originally planned to buttress my argument with some numbers and recommendations for cuts/efficiencies but will get to that in the next article.

Max Dribbler

14 November 2024

Maxdribbler77@gmail.com

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