Leading up to the November election, the one issue voters cared about most was the cost of living. For Republican voters, immigration was a close second.
Concerns about government inefficiency did not even make the list. Months into the new administration, however, one of its top priorities is improving government efficiency, and its basic approach is to reduce the size of government through mass layoffs. The assumption seems to be that the government can operate just as efficiently with fewer employees.
But what if that assumption is wrong? What if our government is inefficient not because it has too many employees, but has too many employees because it is so inefficient?
All of us interact with the government at different levels, and all of us know the feeling of being caught in a maze of dead ends.
Years ago, my company tried to purchase one-tenth of an acre of land from the New York State Thruway Authority to put up a sign. The parcel was completely landlocked, and the authority no longer needed it.
When we asked the authority how long it would take to buy the land, they said five years, which we found hard to imagine. It took over six.
From start to finish, we found the process unbelievably frustrating. But we didn’t come away wishing the authority had fewer employees. We came away angry that the state legislature, which established the authority and sets rules for its operation, takes no interest in how it actually works.
For the federal government, Congress sets the rules. Congress may include specific rules for the executive branch to follow in carrying out its legislation, or it may delegate large areas of rule-making to the agencies themselves.
Either way, the number and complexity of agency rules are key factors in determining how many people government agencies employ and whether they can efficiently deliver results. Moreover, new regulations are often layered on top of old ones without any thought of how they will work together.
Another factor in making government work is the strength or weakness of its information systems. In “Recoding America,” Jennifer Pahlka examines why high-minded policies so often fail to deliver on their goals.
Sometimes, bad results are front-page news, such as the crash of healthcare.gov when people tried to enroll in health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. More often, however, government systems deliver results in ways that are slow, confusing and frustrating, both for employees providing services and for people trying to use them.
Part of the problem, again, is “layers of policy, regulation, procedure and process that have accrued over decades,” making any technology hard to use. But Pahlka found overlaps in technology as well, with some systems dating back to the 1980s.
Comparing new technologies to layers of paint, she writes that each new addition “depends on everything that came before it, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies.” Over time, the layers become so complex and brittle that the paint finally cracks.
For people offering tech support to the federal government, overhauling this patchwork of systems would be a good place to start. After decades of deferred maintenance, however, fixing it will not save money in the short term.
Improvements will be costly, time-consuming, and will require hanging on to the few employees who still know how everything works, rather than offering blanket early retirement incentives and imposing mass layoffs.
A serious effort to make government work better would begin with these two steps: peeling back layers of complex regulations and updating the technologies needed to deliver better results.
Cutting jobs without taking these steps first won’t create efficiencies. Instead, it will leave fewer people in place to do the same amount of work. Furthermore, sudden cuts to ongoing programs and capital projects create their own type of waste by disrupting supply chains, investment decisions and hiring commitments.
Devoting so much energy to layoffs and funding cuts also takes attention away from the issues that helped decide the 2024 election in the first place.
On immigration, the administration can take credit for the large drop in illegal crossings at the southern border. But on other issues, including employment-based immigration and the fate of more than 11 million people already living illegally in the U.S., public opinion is far more divided, and these problems cannot be fixed by executive orders alone because responsibility for immigration laws rests with Congress, not the executive branch.
Relying solely on executive orders will leave the administration liable to claims that it is both overreaching its authority and, in a grim sort of protection scheme, shielding Republican members of Congress from voting on difficult issues.
The prospects for curbing inflation are no better. Tariffs, tax cuts, reduced immigrant labor and pressures on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low all work against the promise to keep inflation in check.
Recognizing the trade-offs, a frustrated President Trump said in March that he “couldn’t care less” about higher car prices. Voters who were concerned about inflation last November may not agree.
Howard Konar is co-owner of a family real estate development company in Rochester, New York and author of “Common Ground, An Alternative to Partisan Politics.“
