public:cb_mirror:why_government_efficiency_fails_txt_blogposts_29424
To view this on the COS website, click here why-government-efficiency-fails
Why Government Efficiency Fails
Imagine if the DMV ran your life.
| Imagine if the DMV ran your life. Best case scenario, everything moves at a soul-crushing crawl. Worst case scenario, every petty tyrant in town lines up for a job. And everything still moves at a soul-crushing crawl. That, my friends, is exactly why the government was never meant to control our lives. Federal officials have been yapping about making the government more “efficient” for decades. In truth, everyone knows that Washington is more inefficient than a committee trying to decide where to go for lunch — with 500 pages of guidelines and a comment period. Two days later, they’re still debating whether they should go at noon or arrive a bit early to beat the lunch rush. Nevertheless, obligatory nods to efficiency have been a staple of the presidency for over a century. William Howard Taft appointed the Commission on Economy and Efficiency. “[I]n many cases,” he told Congress, “two persons are paid for doing work that could easily be done by one.” His message, in which he meticulously documented how much money the government could save by slashing unnecessary jobs, reads like Elon Musk fan fiction. Under Woodrow Wilson, the Bureau of Efficiency established “a standard system of efficiency ratings.” Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee determined the need for modernizing the federal government to equip it to “do promptly and efficiently what is expected of it by the American people.” “If we have faith in our republican form of government, and in the ideals upon which it has rested for 150 years, we must devote ourselves energetically and courageously to the task of making that government efficient,” FDR encouraged. “In striving together to make our Government more efficient, you and I are taking up in our generation the battle to preserve that freedom of self-government which our forefathers fought to establish and hand down to us.” Ronald Reagan, despite differing strongly with Roosevelt on many issues, echoed strikingly similar sentiments. His Grace Commission, designed to reduce government spending, foreshadowed DOGE in that it was run by the private sector. “Be bold,” the president instructed members of the commission. “We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.” Six years later, Reagan issued Executive Order 12625 “in order to coordinate and enhance governmental efforts to promote integrity and efficiency and to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in Federal programs.” Reagan’s proposals may have encountered limited success, but the idea of applying business-sector practices to the federal government intrigued a future administration. Bill Clinton’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government, spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore, aimed to make government “work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about.” Given this long history, one might reasonably expect the federal government to at least have made some progress toward greater efficiency. Instead, they have moved in the opposite direction. Why? Although many reformers have genuinely supported increased efficiency, their efforts frequently coincided with efforts to expand the power of the federal government. In many cases, calls for reform appear to have functioned as a means of justifying greater federal involvement in the daily lives of citizens. For example, the Brownlow Committee’s five-point plan for improving efficiency included terms such as “expand,” “strengthen,” and “extend.” These words imply growth and centralization, which stand in tension with the concept of streamlined or limited governance. This reveals a fundamental contradiction between the stated aim of efficiency and the actual direction of reform. As government power increases, so too does its cumbersome complexity. Picture the DMV analogy. They struggle with just one job — imagine if they managed twenty. Imagine if Flash the sloth from Zooptopia was responsible for housing, agriculture, and veterans affairs. We’d never get anything done — at least not in this lifetime. Any meaningful conversation about government efficiency must address the issue of federal overreach. Over the past century, the meteoric rise of the federal leviathan has turned Washington, DC, into a bloated, dysfunctional center of power. To restore accountability and effectiveness, the federal government must be reined in and returned to its constitutional limits. Without this fundamental reform, every attempt at improving efficiency is bound to fail. Our Founders fought a war to keep overbearing tyrants out of our lives. With an Article V convention, we can ensure that such a system of unchecked government control is never again permitted to rise in America. Sign the petition below to get started! # | PETITION_WIDGET{petition_tag:comms_blog_NA_05/01/2025_whygovernmentefficiencyfails05012025;coalition_id:;anedot_url:} | # |
| Page Metadata | |
| Login Required to view? | No |
| Created: | 2025-05-01 16:50 GMT |
| Updated: | 2025-05-08 07:00 GMT |
| Published: | 2025-05-01 16:00 GMT |
| Converted: | 2025-11-11 12:05 GMT |
| Change Author: | Jakob Fay |
| Credit Author: | |
public/cb_mirror/why_government_efficiency_fails_txt_blogposts_29424.txt · Last modified: 2025/11/11 12:05 by 127.0.0.1