America is in trouble. A fresh horror flashes across our devices every hour of every day. We are dizzy and lost. Recently, I watched my 21 month old slowly spin in a circle until he stumbled, almost whacking his head on the steel undergirding of the dining table. Like my kid, America might still catch itself in time. We may feel nauseated and seasick for a time. I do. Eventually though, equilibrium can be regained.
The thing that one must not do in situations like this is panic. That is not to say we shouldn’t be alarmed. Alarm is good and healthy. Panic, on the other hand, is unprincipled and unfocused. When the alarm bells ring, we should calmly exit the burning building, gather our resources, and prepare to drench the problem with buckets of wisdom. We must also remember that although we had to temporarily flee, it’s still our building – never perfect, always racist, but worth the cost of pest abatement and renovation. Plus, where are we going to move, anyway? The Riviera of the Middle East?
This week, Jennifer Pahlka wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled, “This Is How Democrats Can Counter Elon Musk,” with her own proposal for how we douse the flames. In her piece, Pahlka points out some of the mind-boggling ways that governmental bureaucracy resists change, and how Democrats have been put in a position to defend these inefficiencies. She pushes for reform of the system, and advances a wildly uncatchy term for it: “deproceduralization.” I don’t see the need for a new word, especially one as unmarketable as hers, but I do (mostly) support her core argument – that the government should “...move faster, be bolder and get stuff done.”
What puzzles me about her approach is the way Pahlka teases out the broken processes and procedures as separate from the dedicated workers behind their metal desks. In her view, it is the rules and regulations that are gunking up the gears, not the people who are assigned to administer them. I only halfway agree. I’ve had a hell of time correcting my misspelled last name with the Social Security Administration, locking horns in a decades-long administrative standoff. I can personally attest that those government workers are not the hardworking, industrious bunch that she thinks they are – simply waiting to be freed from their shackles of red tape of rules and regulations.
In contrast, Pahlka accuses Elon Musk of pointing the finger of inefficiency solely at “lazy bureaucrats." While I agree with her about Musk’s wrongheadedness, I see both their arguments as maintaining a pernicious status quo. She wants to “deproceduralize” the government so that the busy bees in their offices can get busy. Musk wants to fire bureaucrats so that the ones that are left are the busiest of bees. They both want the same thing. Both of these tactics place a value on speed and busyness while not actually addressing the thing that kills motivation, and drives down true efficiency – a lack of purpose.
Purpose is what frames our world, creates our culture, and affects how we feel. A process can be fast but inefficient. A person can be inefficient and ineffective. Many companies operate in wicked, efficient ways. I fear that Pahlka, with her background in tech, and Musk, with his tech empire, are of the same fundamental mindset. Both heavily lean into the technocrat’s slavish worship of working faster and faster and faster – the accelerating spiral of the “move fast, break things,” mentality.
I am a huge fan of things that work properly. I imagine, unless you are a car mechanic in need of business, you are too. I become apoplectic with rage whenever I deal with the Federal government, with its circular paperwork, labyrinthine web pages, and obtusely unhelpful “help” lines. In practical terms we do need to eliminate internal procedures that are archaic, redundant, and just plain stupid. We also need to fire the belligerently inept. These two tactics alone won’t fix our government, though.
We cannot continue to view our government’s functions through the capitalist, technocratic lens of output, without refocusing the culture of the bureaucracy. Without a clear sense of purpose and vision, we can make our civil servants work faster, and more efficiently, and reduce red tape…. but to what end? The government’s job is not to maximize profit, or to iterate on prototypes. “Move fast, break things” is the motto of a “disrupter,” not a reformer. The disrupter wishes to “get stuff done” at any cost. The reformer asks: “What stuff’? Who for?”
It’s okay that we’re still reeling, but let’s not rush to crown efficiency as the end game without pausing asking ourselves “what for?” Let’s take a deep breath, let the dizziness pass, and start putting out the fire.
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Thank you for articulating this so beautifully! There has to be a better way to change government without the shock and awe of massive, thoughtless budget slashes and breaking infrastructure without a more intentional solution.