Queuing theory shows it's actually much worse than doubling the time, because a task doesn't just take the time it needs for someone to work on it, it also takes the time it needs for someone to be free to work on it. Basically once the amount of tasks slightly exceeds the number of bureaucrats, the expected time taken shoots off to infinity. To solve that, one needs excess bureaucrats.
> admissions 20 per hour, discharges 19 per hour, result misery.
This isn't really a result about queueing. If the amount of work to be done exceeds the amount of work you're able to do, then work is going to remain undone. How you organize the work will never make any difference. What you're losing the time to isn't queueing, it's incapacity.
Note that in your parent comment:
> once the amount of tasks slightly exceeds the number of bureaucrats, the expected time taken shoots off to infinity
this is a queueing result; what's necessary is that tasks outnumber bureaucrats, not that the time required to complete the tasks exceeds your available bureaucrat-hours.
The mathematical study of queuing definitely includes statements the time taken by tasks, without which it would be difficult to do any calculations about queue length. The fact that a queue will grow to infinity if the arrival rate exceeds the processing rate is an elementary result that you will find in most introductory queuing theory texts.
It's so elementary that actual elementary school students have no trouble giving a rigorous proof. You don't even need a queueing concept. If nothing ever queues, you get exactly the same result, although the identity of which work gets done may change.
The point we want people to grasp does involve queues, and is not intuitive: there is a discontinuity at arrival rate=processing rate, in queue length or waiting time. since waiting time is infinite at arrival rate>processing rate, it must tend to infinity as arrival rate tends to processing rate. This is important as it means that 100% utilisation is a bad goal. But it's a goal that is often aimed for in the name of efficiency.
The 'Micawber principle' is trivial as stated, but it allows people for whom talk of infinities and discontinuities would be offputting,to generate the correct intuition naturally. expenditure being too close to income is bad, (the original Micawber principle), so too is arrival rate approaching processing rate ("result misery").
> The point we want people to grasp does involve queues
Sure. But the point you keep talking about doesn't. There's no relation. Your annual expenditures don't change whether you pay for things before getting them *or afterward*.
> This is important as it means that 100% utilisation is a bad goal. But it's a goal that is often aimed for in the name of efficiency.
I don't think this is true anywhere except political rhetoric.
I think they are trying to say that even if the intake is less than the nominal capacity queues still grow non linearly as you approach 100% utilisation if the system has dependent events and randomness in process time.
A toy example:
A worker feeds product into a machine. The machine can't work unless fed product (dependent events). The machine can process 1 a minute and the human doing the loading averages loading 1 a minute but the exact time varies, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes 90 (random process time)
When the worker is slow, the machine has nothing to do, so capacity is lost. The worker may feed the next products faster than average but the machine can't work faster to make up the lost time.
In one sense the machine and the worker really can process one product per minute. In another sense when you account for the lost capacity above they can't and the closer you get to trying to operate at 1/min the more the queue will build up.
The market will respond by not trying to approve as many drugs (because the wait isn't worth it). Which will prevent unifinte queues, but also the survival of thousands of patients.
This is it! People get sick, people go on holidays, a new programme is introduced which means a flood of new applicants to deal with -you need some slack in the system to handle it.
If you've calculated "on the volume of current work, we only need N admin staff in this office", then you're up the creek without a paddle when the number becomes "N - 1 or more", or the volume of work increases. Files *do* pile up on desks because the one person in the office dealing with this is out and there is no-one free to take over, due to the New Efficiency Drive which meant that when the experienced people retired, no new hires were taken on and trained in.
Yes, this is very good. I am merely married to a bureaucrat (but one who worked at OIRA, the beating heart of American bureaucracy!)
A few things I'd note:
- the first Trump admin already did the "2 for 1" approach to regulation https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2018/01/trumps-regulation-czar-touts-success-of-two-for-one-executive-order/ -- this was painful at the time, and there was lots of cheating/use of technicalities to keep things from grinding to a halt. Last I heard people were floating "10 for 1" for this incoming administration. This is consistent with the hyperbolic nature of DOGE pronouncements, too--it's all likely to come down to earth, but not guaranteed to since there are a lot of insane tyros about to be put in power.
- decreasing regulatory page count is an ok metric I suppose, but in addition to clearing out unused cruft (that lottery reg was probably not doing much harm) and some justifiable wins about saloon doors, I would be very curious to see how much of this got done by aligning Idaho regs with external standards by reference. It's a lot shorter to say "use this trade association's safety code" than to write it all out! At past jobs I have spent time analyzing state legislative output and though I don't mean to knock Idaho, I think it's fair to say that small states' government is often surprisingly threadbare. Many are part-time, and it's totally normal for legislators to have to share staff https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_a_full-time_legislature. All this is to say that what Idaho's doing might be good or bad, but I suspect it's something others have thought of, and might well only be practical because of how small the state is.
- a surprising number of those legislatively mandated reports don't get written on time (or at all). It's something Congress throws into laws left and right, and agencies sometimes decide to accept the risk of their boss getting yelled at at an oversight hearing when there isn't enough time to get everything done.
- more work has been done to avoid unnecessary thrash than you might imagine--"economically significant" regulations receive higher levels of scrutiny, for instance
- it's not just nuisance lawsuits: advocacy groups have been doing their part to make rulemaking worse by encouraging the public to spam dockets with thousands of nearly-identical comments about hot button issues. bureaucrats are typically required to review and respond to every substantive comment in the course of the process. they can ignore the junk, but just sorting through it takes time--and of course a lot of it isn't "junk" per se but is prosaic and obvious, but still must be accounted for.
Regarding page count, I rewrote a procedural manual for my job not long ago. I *easily* could have made it 50% shorter... by using more jargon and less clear language, cutting out explanations and examples, and ignoring rare edge cases. I don't think that would made it better! But it would satisfy the demands of idiots that want to cut page counts in half.
Grinding things to a halt is the point, though. Our government has been mandated to do too many things -- more things than we can afford. Something will give. The only choice we have is in exactly what breaks and when it breaks. We have a choice now, but if we wait much longer, we won't have a choice. What cannot go on, will not go on.
I object to saying we can't afford it - it's not like the EPA or the FDA have massive slices of the budget. The FDA's budget is $7.2 billion - which isn't nothing, but it's about 0.1% of the budget. We absolutely could scrape up another $7 billion if we decided we wanted the FDA to get stuff done twice as fast, we just don't have the political will because the Republicans are obsessed with "starving the beast."
Heck, Trump's tax plan is expected to add 3 *trillion* dollars to the deficit over 10 years - how is it possible that we can afford that, but we can't afford a few billion a year to make the bureaucracy function smoothly?
The "twice as fast" is tricky for the FDA, though. They passed the Covid vaccines fast, now some people are arguing those same vaccines are killing healthy young people by inducing cardiac complications and that these dangerous vaccines were rushed through too fast without proper checking. There is some evidence of the mRNA vaccines being implicated:
We need to spend less. That means having fewer laws and less enforcement. That means fewer people, but it also means less harm to the people. It's not realistic to think that everything the government does is helpful. Plenty of examples of special-interest legislation.
Special interests legislation simply means "two factions compromised." There isn't any other kind of legislation. Regulations exist because they serve the interests of one or more factions of the public. Cutting regulation simply means choosing which factions get screwed.
"It gives the example of repealing a regulation about what kind of doors pharmacies can have."
I just get the feeling that this was downstream of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and that pharmacies were required to have wheelchair accessible doors, which meant that there had to be a new regulation put in place about "your door must be of this type". I also wonder if there was a lawsuit or some sort of activist campaign, because generally that is what causes such specific regulations to be passed.
A lot of bureaucratic inertia is caused by badly written regulations which are left up to interpretation *plus* ambulance chasing law firms being all too willing to go "Did the local council refuse to rebuild your entire house because you are entitled to have the door frames expanded by 0.5 cm? Call us for legal advice now, you may be entitled to compensation!" advertising.
This means that bureaucrats are *very* hesitant to make decisions which are not backed up in triplicate by CYA, as if you make a decision which grants something, this will cost money and moreover set a precedent for others to claim the same, which means the Department is unhappy with you. But if you decide to refuse the thing, there is the possibility of a lawsuit which may well go against you, create a precedent for others to claim the same, and cost even more what with damages and fees, which means the Department is unhappy with you.
I have seen people absolutely trying to game the system re: the width of doors being too small to let a wheelchair through, so that's why I have my suspicions about that particular piece of legislation.
Oh, the ADA is definitely gamed. You take an unscrupulous attorney, and a cooperative disabled person, and go looking for any business with any ADA violation. The disabled person attempts to enter and claims that their rights were denied by the business. Then the attorney sues them and immediately offers to settle for thousands of dollars.
It could be any business even if the disabled person would otherwise have no reason to enter.
Never going to be any lack of unscrupulous lawyers, either. If Vivek turned his sights on the legal profession, he'd probably have near-unanimous public support, but he went to law school himself, didn't he? 😀
Also associated with not transgressing social limits, which is why he put aside his wife Sita for rumours among the people as to her being unchaste when captured by Ravanna.
One time in history when a king really should have gone "Stuff you, I'm the king, I am above the law, and if you don't like it then lump it, peasants". Ah, well!
Too lazy to hunt the citation, but the Niskanen Center had a piece where a fellow pointed out that the raw number of federal employees had not grown much in the past 60 years. Growth has come from contractors bureaucrats hire, not bureaucrats per se.
So if anything we have been experimenting with the Vivek’s proposal already. Grow the scope and scale of the federal government without growing its headcount or capacity to deal with congress’ shirking of legislative responsibility to clarify statutes, and see what happens. Seems to be bad things to me!
Anyone with experience/knowledge of transit + infrastructure knows that it’s a fundamental mistake to hire consultants instead of just growing the bureaucracy to match needed expertise…
Instead of just hiring a core group of competent engineers, the NYC transit agency just outsources to consultants, who then hire contractors. No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost. Every party to the infrastructure work *but transit users* benefits from wasteful spending. So New York builds for 5-10x the cost of the Swedes
"Anyone with experience/knowledge of transit + infrastructure knows that it’s a fundamental mistake to hire consultants instead of just growing the bureaucracy..."
Not true if you are the owner of the outside consultant group being hired. \S
"No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost"
It's worse than that -- people are incentivized to inflate costs. I've worked on government funded research projects and from a manager's perspective it is worse to underspend the grant than to fail to meet the original goals. You're punished for being more efficient than you originally planned for.
Though I partially agree with you, I'll try to give the other side of the argument. I manage some government contracts, and when my management tells me to make sure all the money gets spent, part of what they really mean is "money is very tight, don't ask for more than you're going to use, because if you don't need it we can use it somewhere else."
Underspending is frowned upon because budget people at every level share this concern. Inflating the cost at the last minute to make sure you spend everything is a particularly underhanded and wasteful solution to keep from getting dressed down by the boss; the preferred solution is to make a good estimate before the project starts. Unfortunately it's very hard to carve out flexibility for something like a research project where costs are inherently unpredictable. The system demands a budget in advance, and demands you follow it.
That's not really my experience. There is concern that it "looks bad" if you don't spend everything because it means you can't properly estimate your work and costs, and that will reflect poorly when your next proposal is being reviewed. Or, even worse, for ongoing stuff your budget might get cut in the future.
I would agree the grant sin my world are all "spend all the money or you are a bad performer", they NEVER want money back. There is some minor pressure for cost reasonableness, but only on the front end. On the back end they just want all the money gone and to know that you vague accomplished what the plan was.
Yep, clawback. That's why at the end of the financial year, if there's anything left in the budget, you are encouraged to spend! spend! spend! since not alone will the excess be taken back, but next year your budget will be reduced.
And if next year you have extra unforeseen expenditure? Too bad, you managed to be too efficient for your own good. So better to buy stuff you don't need now (because you're not allowed to keep the saved amount on hand to cover anything else or for next year) rather than lose the money going forward.
It's one of those "looks good on paper" ideas that works out terribly in practice.
Obviously YMMV depending on the domain, but sometimes it’s not even that the contractor is particularly bad or inefficient. It’s that the government ends up spending almost as much effort “overseeing” the contractor (and the entire contract bid and award process) as they would if they just did the work themselves.
The bit I took from Edward Snowden's book about NSA contractors probably applies to bureaucrats in general.
There's rules on how many employees NSA can have and how much they can pay them, because these are federal employees. So what do you do when there's more work than employees, and you also want to keep your best people but can't pay them market rate?
After a stint as a proper NSA-employed agent, you let them switch to becoming contractors and hire them back at a higher rate. That's why Snowden was officially working for Booz Allen Hamilton, in a NSA facility with the same job and security clearance as before.
I guess they hire consultants when some regulation stops them from growing the bureaucracy or paying the internal experts as much as they'd like?
Yes, this is a very underrated factor: I'd be more keen to stop them hiring management consultants and contractors at vastly inflated wages than to arbitrarily cut headcount (especially if you're not cutting the actual legal risk or bureaucratic requirements first).
That's the problem with the top-down approach by politicians and government ministers versus the on-the-ground view of the people tasked with implementing the shiny new policies.
Not to mention that some of those aforesaid politicians and ministers have nice cosy relationships with the outside consultants, be it "they donate to my election campaign" or "my brother-in-law's cousin runs this".
"outsources to consultants, who then hire contractors. No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost."
You should see the saga of the Irish new children's hospital. This has been going on for decades at this point, and it's *still* not ready yet, and the fancy contractors who won the contract are still "yeah it's gonna be late and over-budget even more":
"The Chief Officer of the NPHDB, David Gunning, reported in July 2023 to the Oireachtas Committee on Health that the costs of merely building the hospital, excluding the costs of commissioning it for use, were now expected to approach €2.2 billion due to further overruns. Only 27 of the 3,000 rooms had been completed, and the expected building completion date had been revised to May 2024. By October 2023, that date had been revised again to late October 2024, and it was emphasised that the last date of the building phase would be the first date of an "operational commissioning phase", so the hospital would not actually open before April 2025. The government confirmed in February 2024 that the total sanctioned budget had now reached €2.24 billion, and that this would now be the "maximum allocation", with no further funding to be put towards the project. By May 2024, the date for "substantial completion" of building had been revised to February 2025, with a further six months before becoming operational. By October 2024, the completion date had again been revised to June 2025."
Bear in mind, they initially lumbered into action on this in 2006. Building didn't start until 2016.
A beautiful stew of "government has no frickin' clue what it wants; changes its mind about location several times; entities already on-site take lawsuits against putting new building on that site; lots of consultants, lots of reports, no action for years; finally decide they'll build it on this site, plus two satellite sites (already a change from "one all-purpose centre"); contractors start building and then Covid lockdown hits in 2020; now it's "yeah it'll be open in January February June well sometime" and the budget has spiralled from €650 million to €2 billion and that's probably not going to be the final cost".
That's not even counting "and when it's open, half the wards will be shut due to staffing limitations" which is what I anticipate to happen. Saw it with our own local regional hospital; fancy new cardiac ward got built after massive fund-raising effort, then - was closed for ages because there wasn't the funding in the budget to staff it. Thankfully, that has been sorted out now, but I'm going to believe in the shiny new promises when I see them fulfilled.
Yeah, a new building means a politician gets their name on it. Money for staff, or even cleaning the building? Not sexy, no publicity (unless it's bad publicity for spending too much), cut it.
Most of the military forces in the world are like that too. Lots of money for new tanks and planes, nothing for maintaining the ones they have.
You need consultants because often they are the only people who know what they are doing. The DEI hires in the bureaucracy can't actually get anything done, so you bring in the consultants to actually do the heavy lifting.
I agree a better system would be to pay those consultants less and actually make them federal employees, but many of them couldn't get jobs with the federal government because they don't meet the "desired" criteria (veterans/disabled/minorities/etc.).
If you don't think it is DEI related I would love to introduce you to the racial/gender demographics of the consultants versus the staff in the two main departments I know well. Advancement is a real non-starter for white males unless they are super exceptional, so where do they all end up? Consulting making more than the bureaucrats and doing their jobs for them. It is a pattern that is clear as day, but no one ever wants to talk about it. There is a huge brain drain where the top staff tend to leave after 3-5 years and go work at like Deloitte or some other big contractor because there is simply more money to be made and they will actually pay competent people whereas the government will even promote them much less pay them.
I work in a bureaucracy (though not the US federal one).
Headcount is restricted by budget, and which bucket their compensation comes from. It's a lot easier to write a justification for hiring a contractor "for 6 months" to fill a perceived need than to go through the process of hiring an employee. Many of those employees start out temporary as well.
Of course those contractor positions then get extended. Subject to budget, though budgeted money gets moved around to different buckets all the time.
The way a friend of mine in federal government explained it to me, it's hard to hire new people above about a ~$100k salary, and the maximum pay is well below corporate rates. If you need some sort of tech service, you have to hire a contractor from Booz Allen or wherever. Of course, making it easier to hire $250k/year government employees has its own problems.
Assuming the work exists and has to be done, you can hire a 100k employee. Or you can hire a contractor. But you'll pay 200k or so for that contractor.
Why? Well, when the work is done, you can stop paying the contractor. So you have to pay for their retirement/sick days/vacation somehow. Not to mention the contracting agency's cut. And the days the contractor is looking for another contract.
Of course, this assumes you're hiring the contractor for a specific project, as opposed to hiring the contractor because there's a hiring freeze on employees.
In my specific area there's a "sunshine" law, where employees above 100k compensation are on a publicly available list. 100k was specified in the law, so as the years go by (almost 30 now) inflation makes the list grow a lot.
People look at 100k and think it's a lot, so they put extra rules around it. I just looked and apparently 100k has lost roughly *half* its value since that law went into effect...
I've been travelling a lot recently, and I've noticed that fines in some countries have their own units that can then be centrally adjusted without needing to change the legislation. Researching a little bit, it seems to be mostly ex-Soviet countries, although I have seen it in Colombia as well.
To me this seems like a no-brainer, at least in a limited fashion, I'd be interested in understanding the drawbacks.
I'm aware that some places have income-based fines as well, but I think that's more of a political question, whereas keeping fines and thresholds inflation-adjusted seems pretty much strictly better than having to double them periodically? The main argument I can think against it is that fines getting eroded creates a sort of automatic sunset clause, but it has the inverse problem for thresholds.
inflation is entirely caused by the government? Or do you mean more that, fundamentally, inflation of significance is. I ask because my understanding of inflation was that it occurs when, society wide, people bid up the price of goods. Thus a federal reserve increase in the money supply causes inflation by increasing ability to spend, but a society wide increase in wealth or looser lending standards do as well.
The US government pays out a $255 death benefit through SS if your spouse dies. It hasn't been adjusted for inflation since the 1940s. Since the law is still on the books, we are still paying bureaucrats to process claims for this 1940s death benefit.
That's the case in Germany. The unit is "Tagessatz", which essentially is a day of your suspected salary for a day. This also has the benefit of automatically adjusting to your income, so that punishment hurts somewhat equally (though losing 10 days as a plumber isn't exactly the same a losing 10 days as Jeff Bezos, even though Jeff Bezos would be paying millions in theory, he would barely notice, whereas the plumber most likely does).
Australia does this too. Fines are written in the legislation as x penalty units, with the monetary value of a penalty unit adjusted each year in response to inflation. Note the exact value of penalty units varies between federal and state and between each state.
The context of the conversation was about Eric Snowden, and why the federal government hires Booz Allen contractors as sys admins in the first place. My friend's answer was that the government salary is uncompetitive, you couldn't get the talent you need.
Almost no one in the federal government at the professional level makes what they would in the private sector. As an extreme example, the Secretary of Defense, for example, makes $246k a year. I don't want to pretend to know what being SecDef entails, but I'm guessing they should make more than a 20-something project manager at a tech company.
Now expand this to the rest of the federal workforce. I'm not sure a lot of entry level engineers are motivated by the prestige of working for government as GS-7s.
I think what happened instead is, you only get people who are already independently wealthy and just want the prestige, at least when it comes to secdef. or at least, the whole system is biased in that direction.
I tend to think that's what's going to happen here if they do ax a bunch of civil servants through relocations, etc. They'll end up having to hire a ton of people back, except now they'll be employees of politically connected contractors and the government will be spending more on them with even less accountability or ability to control the work.
I wouldn't say less accountability, but they do have different incentives. Even contractors who always work full time on government projects are not part of civil service culture and are not aligned with the agency's mission the way federal employees should be (ideally). There are other advantages to using them though, like budget flexibility, scaling up and down rapidly, availability of niche expertise, and (at least in the cases I deal with) lower employee turnover. Whether it's actually cheaper to contract a job out or do it in house is very tough to figure out.
My initial impression is that 'civil service culture' is part of the problem, from my time evaluating fed-funded ngos and their interface with the gov't... but I don't actually know if i have a good reason for thinking this, and it could be pretty localized to my field. I am interested to hear why your impression is the opposite
I'm sure it varies a lot. The people I work with are generally quite capable, and are at least motivated in the sense that they want to achieve the things they're supposed to be working on, rather than just out to further their own careers at their employer's expense. On the other hand, there is a culture of being pretty relaxed and prioritizing work-life balance, rarely working overtime, and being willing to spend lots of time on things like training, seminars, meetings and so forth without worrying too much about it. We work the way we work and things get done when they get done. I think that's a big part of what people complain about with civil service, and although it's nice it does grate sometimes. When I was a contractor it was my manager's job to keep all that stuff away from the engineers and block anything that might distract us from getting real work done. On the whole I prefer the government's way of doing things.
Considering that the contractors do the same work as the bureaucrats, I think this is a difference without meaning. We just aren't on the hook for unionized employees and pensions. Its a tool to side step those requirements, they aren't fundamentally doing different work.
No, they don't. It's a fundamental misunderstanding that you can parachute in some MBAs from Deloitte for 6 months and expect them to have any understanding of the actual mission, constraints, intergovernmental issues, etc. that an agency contends with in time to accomplish anything useful.
I find folks who hold this opinion either haven't worked in a bureaucracy, haven't seen what happens when contractors try to 'do the job' of the real employees, or both.
Yeah, that's the "why can't we treat government like a business?" mindset which runs into problems due to the fact that governments are not for-profit. I hate this new idea of calling the people using government services as "clients" or "customers" because they're not; if they don't like/can't get the service they want, it's not like "Aldi didn't have the thing in stock, I'm going to Tesco instead" for them.
And it's also not similar in "okay this person is renting a local authority house, you can treat them like someone renting from a property management service" because you can't. Sometimes I wish you could, because (again) there are people gaming the system and not paying even the minimum rent, and practically daring the council to evict them because they know they can go to court and the judge will order the council to find housing for them.
But in the main, you can't charge "market rate rent" etc. to those people, and you are (technically at least) obliged to provide a range of services in maintenance and upkeep and accommodating needs for them, so it's not at all like "put an MBA in charge of the housing department and they'll get all the backlog of rent paid up on time".
In my experience the people from Deloitte or wherever are 9 times in 10 wildly better than the bureaucrats and more helpful even if they have only been there a week.
I don't know I get hired as a contractor all the time to basically do shit that employees should have done. It is like my main line of business. And how it generally goes is something that was someone's full time job to do, or say 40% of their full-time job, and that they have had a year or two to complete.
I get done in a couple months of working 10 hours a week.
One $20 million program I worked on the main lady working on it was making like 1-23 phone calls a month, and sending maybe 5 emails. Full time staff head of this project, accomplishing nothing. "What is happening with subgrantee X?" I don't know I haven't talked to them in a 6 months. There are only 30 subgrantees and your WHOLE job is managing them, you should be talking to them EVERY SINGLE WEEK.
Some of the places I get hired the people are overworked, and I legit feel bad of them. But many they are just incompetent/ignorant or lazy. Paying me $20k for two months to complete something that is 5 years overdue (yes I do a lot of things like that) when the full-time staff haven't gotten it done in that time seems like a steal.
That's the thing - if you don't/can't have the personnel in your organisation all in the name of Lean Efficiency, then you have to hire outside consultants for expert advice on tricky problems and large-scale projects, and of course this costs a minimum of twice as much, because now you're paying them market-rate fees.
Do federal agencies need to be capable of being sued by the general public? If they need more accountability couldn’t that be provided by greater legislator scrutiny? Someone with some basic incentive to make sure the agency is still able to function.
"Grow the government while taking away power from individuals to sue the government" does seem like a way to increase government capacity. It also seems out of step politically for both parties at this moment in time.
That's essentially what various forms of government immunity is all about. Prosecutors can't be sued for bringing charges. Judges can't be sued for ruling on cases.
If/when people are able to sue, it was often intentional on the part of Congress allowing it, and always should at least have been contemplated because Congress knows how to add immunity to lawsuits in bills.
Those immunity rules were mostly created by the Supreme Court, who apparently thinks that nobody could possibly enforce and administer the law if they were actually SUBJECT to it. It's like eating at a restaurant where the chef says he couldn't do his job if he had to eat the food they serve there.
In practice the rules get applied in pretty horrifying ways sometimes, as in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson where a man spent 18 years wrongfully imprisoned when there was exonerating evidence withheld and the Court insists it's important that nobody be liable for this.
Soldiers can and do get tried for murder, even during war. Murder is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Your example isn't even a very good strawman.
No, but I also don't think that really has anything to do with what I said.
Connick wasn't a soldier, he wasn't making decisions while somebody shot at him, and his actions and the actions of his staff falsely imprisoned somebody for almost two decades. And he wasn't even being held criminally liable.
I think it's very clear that the state shouldn't be able to falsely imprison its own citizens and then refuse to so much as compensate them for it.
In your post, you suggested, "couldn’t that be provided by greater legislator scrutiny?" In practice, the legislature would direct the Executive to stand up an oversight organization to provide this scrutiny and provide reports to Congress. This is actually a common thing that they do! The result is that you grow the government by creating a new oversight organization. This growth occurs even if the oversight organization is good at its function.
But critically, inspectors general and the like probably don't slow things down the way the threat of a lawsuit does. They can be more judicious about holding government accountable for things that are actually bad while not picking a fight over stuff that's basically fine.
Agree with all of this. My point is just that creating offices like this is ADDING bureaucrats, which is the opposite of what everyone wants to do! :-D
I think such agencies make a lot of decisions which affect some people disproportionally. Say the FDA bans a certain food chemical (phthalates, lactose, whatever). This would certainly impact some food manufacturers, and it is good that the have the ability to sue.
However, if they only can get sued by persons disproportionally affected by the regulations, this will distort their incentives. If you have to prove that you have personally suffered negative health consequences of e.g. some mild carcinogen allowed by the FDA (lest they get sued by Big Carcinogen), and realistically you will not be able to prove that, because cancer is stochastic -- if the substance increased your cancer risk by a factor of two, that means that it is entirely plausible that you were not harmed by the substance despite getting cancer, and thus you would not have standing to sue.
I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it. However, courts take their time, and there are a zillon chemicals someone could either put intentionally into food or detect in food at any day, and having blanket rules which allow or forbid all substances not explicitly regulated would both have bad consequences. Thus having a regulatory agency which can make decisions (a bit) faster than the court system seems reasonable.
Private lobbying basically already fulfils the same function in representing special interests. It’s just the money goes to lawmakers instead of lawyers. Arguably only a dubious improvement.
So whenever I am dissatisfied with a decision of a regulatory agency, I should try to lobby the US congress to add a provision like "Also, the FDA must allow/ban phthalates" to the FDA mandate?
I am not sure what it costs to get special interest legislation the public does not care about passed in congress, but I assume that it is much more expensive than suing in federal court.
Also, I have slightly higher confidence in the court system to actually make a reasonable decision than in the outcome of lobbyists interacting with congress.
In a functioning Constitutional system with separation of powers, yes. To me, the core issue here is that the regulatory agencies have been given huge swaths of power to make their own rules, to be judge, jury, and executioner. In a dream world, all rulemaking would have to get passed as Congressional legislation and executive agencies would only have enforcement powers. All ALJs world be moved to Article 3 courts. And all regulations would sunset every X years.
It's fine to "distort incentives" that way. The FDA's regulations are not supposed to be driven by lawsuits (thus it's not the "correct battleground"). The Constitution gives Americans rights that the government can't violate without being sued, it doesn't grant us the right to sue the government to compel it to act.
All rights come with corresponding obligations to preserve those rights. The right to property means little if the police refuse to investigate crimes against you. A law protecting you from tainted drugs means little if the FDA is corrupt and not doing the inspections that it should. So the proper solution in this case is to get a judge to tell the offending branch of the government to do its job properly.
Did you know that the police don't have a legally enforceable duty to protect you or to investigate anything? You can't actually sue the police to have them do their job--and many times you're not allowed to successfully sue them when they did something wrong! So no, this just isn't at all how things work. Private causes of action are the exception, not the rule, when it comes to government.
No, "equal protection" does not mean that. It can give you the same access to the courts as anyone else, but those courts can still say the government isn't legally compelled to act (as in Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
My understanding is that "they only can get sued by persons disproportionally affected by the regulations, this will distort their incentives* is pretty close to the default rules of standing in federal courts. In order to bring a case before a federal court, you need to have a personal stake in the "case or controversy", in some direct and concrete way.
For more or less the reasons you describe, Congress has often created statutory causes of action allowing interest groups to sue regulatory agencies. And where they haven't, there are workarounds like shopping around for state governments to sue on behalf of the collected interests of their citizens, or finding an individual who is personally inconvenienced by something you already want to sue over and getting them to agree to letting you sue nominally on their behalf.
"I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it."
The problem isn't just that courts are slow, it's that they are not experts in the thing they're being asked to ban. The point of regulatory agencies is to hire experts who can make good decisions and, if necessary, defend them in court. If everything started out in court, the courts would have to hire all those experts instead. As it is, when regulations get challenged in court, the decision often reflects a lack of technical understanding because the judge just doesn't know that much about it.
> I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it. However, courts take their time, and there are a zillon chemicals someone could either put intentionally into food or detect in food at any day, and having blanket rules which allow or forbid all substances not explicitly regulated would both have bad consequences. Thus having a regulatory agency which can make decisions (a bit) faster than the court system seems reasonable.
Except the FDA does NOT regulate additives very much. Since 1997 (really since the 60's), they allow any company to "self determine" that any given additive is safe, and put it directly in the human food supply.
The FDA on food is the exact opposite of "kill thousands by having ridiculously high 10 year, billion dollar hurdles," in the sense they let food manufacturers put whatever they want into the food supply at pretty much any time.
Since 2000, there’s been only 10 "full process" approvals. There have been 766 new food chemicals since then, which means 756, or 98.7%, have been “self-determined” and put in our food supply with essentially zero vetting or oversight, or means of measuring impacts, or means of recourse if they’ve messed up, either via incompetence or malice.
This was reaffirmed in 2016. The US has ~10k food additives, vs Europe and the UK's ~2k.
“The FDA has established a GRAS Notification Program to help ensure that these ingredients are safe for the ways in which they will be used and to help industry meet its responsibility for ensuring the GRAS status of ingredients they intend to use in food. **This notification is not mandatory; however, the FDA strongly encourages manufacturers to contact the agency** and follow the available procedures for our oversight of GRAS conclusions by submitting a GRAS notice.”
(bolding mine)
“By 1997 FDA had tentatively concluded that it could no longer devote substantial resources to the GRAS affirmation petition process. The agency published a proposed rule outlining a GRAS notification process to replace the resource-intensive GRAS affirmation petition process.”
“The GRAS notification program provides a voluntary mechanism whereby a person may inform FDA of a determination that the use of a substance is GRAS, rather than petition FDA to affirm that the use of a substance is GRAS.”
This seems to be one of those things that changed in the 60s/70s. In the New Deal era the federal government could run rampant and there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Later you get Jane Jacobs opposing Robert Moses on freeway construction, Ralph Nader the crusading consumer-rights lawyer, the environmental movement creating myriad opportunities to sue, and of course the civil rights movement setting the norm that the courts are more reliable than the (constrained) ballot box. https://www.slowboring.com/p/community-meetings-arent-democracy
I think the short answer is 'yes' - it is important to allow some check on administrative power. Congress, for various and sundry reasons, seems incapable of performing that function, which leaves the judiciary.
That being said, Congress can (and should) provide numerous offramps that allow the process to be expedited. That could mean providing specificity over what types of things can be sued over, how many appeals they get, carving out specialized courts that only hear specific classes of cases, etc, etc.
Queuing theory shows it's actually much worse than doubling the time, because a task doesn't just take the time it needs for someone to work on it, it also takes the time it needs for someone to be free to work on it. Basically once the amount of tasks slightly exceeds the number of bureaucrats, the expected time taken shoots off to infinity. To solve that, one needs excess bureaucrats.
Thank you for referencing queueing theory here. Understanding the basics can really illuminate situations that appear very counterintuitive.
Yes. There is basically a Micawber Principle for any system with a queue:
Admissions 20 per hour, discharges 21 per hour, result happiness; admissions 20 per hour, discharges 19 per hour, result misery.
> admissions 20 per hour, discharges 19 per hour, result misery.
This isn't really a result about queueing. If the amount of work to be done exceeds the amount of work you're able to do, then work is going to remain undone. How you organize the work will never make any difference. What you're losing the time to isn't queueing, it's incapacity.
Note that in your parent comment:
> once the amount of tasks slightly exceeds the number of bureaucrats, the expected time taken shoots off to infinity
this is a queueing result; what's necessary is that tasks outnumber bureaucrats, not that the time required to complete the tasks exceeds your available bureaucrat-hours.
The mathematical study of queuing definitely includes statements the time taken by tasks, without which it would be difficult to do any calculations about queue length. The fact that a queue will grow to infinity if the arrival rate exceeds the processing rate is an elementary result that you will find in most introductory queuing theory texts.
It's so elementary that actual elementary school students have no trouble giving a rigorous proof. You don't even need a queueing concept. If nothing ever queues, you get exactly the same result, although the identity of which work gets done may change.
The point we want people to grasp does involve queues, and is not intuitive: there is a discontinuity at arrival rate=processing rate, in queue length or waiting time. since waiting time is infinite at arrival rate>processing rate, it must tend to infinity as arrival rate tends to processing rate. This is important as it means that 100% utilisation is a bad goal. But it's a goal that is often aimed for in the name of efficiency.
The 'Micawber principle' is trivial as stated, but it allows people for whom talk of infinities and discontinuities would be offputting,to generate the correct intuition naturally. expenditure being too close to income is bad, (the original Micawber principle), so too is arrival rate approaching processing rate ("result misery").
> The point we want people to grasp does involve queues
Sure. But the point you keep talking about doesn't. There's no relation. Your annual expenditures don't change whether you pay for things before getting them *or afterward*.
> This is important as it means that 100% utilisation is a bad goal. But it's a goal that is often aimed for in the name of efficiency.
I don't think this is true anywhere except political rhetoric.
I think they are trying to say that even if the intake is less than the nominal capacity queues still grow non linearly as you approach 100% utilisation if the system has dependent events and randomness in process time.
A toy example:
A worker feeds product into a machine. The machine can't work unless fed product (dependent events). The machine can process 1 a minute and the human doing the loading averages loading 1 a minute but the exact time varies, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes 90 (random process time)
When the worker is slow, the machine has nothing to do, so capacity is lost. The worker may feed the next products faster than average but the machine can't work faster to make up the lost time.
In one sense the machine and the worker really can process one product per minute. In another sense when you account for the lost capacity above they can't and the closer you get to trying to operate at 1/min the more the queue will build up.
The market will respond by not trying to approve as many drugs (because the wait isn't worth it). Which will prevent unifinte queues, but also the survival of thousands of patients.
This is it! People get sick, people go on holidays, a new programme is introduced which means a flood of new applicants to deal with -you need some slack in the system to handle it.
If you've calculated "on the volume of current work, we only need N admin staff in this office", then you're up the creek without a paddle when the number becomes "N - 1 or more", or the volume of work increases. Files *do* pile up on desks because the one person in the office dealing with this is out and there is no-one free to take over, due to the New Efficiency Drive which meant that when the experienced people retired, no new hires were taken on and trained in.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
As a former bureaucrat, I just want to say thank you for a great informal articulation of how bureaucracy actually works.
Yes, this is very good. I am merely married to a bureaucrat (but one who worked at OIRA, the beating heart of American bureaucracy!)
A few things I'd note:
- the first Trump admin already did the "2 for 1" approach to regulation https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2018/01/trumps-regulation-czar-touts-success-of-two-for-one-executive-order/ -- this was painful at the time, and there was lots of cheating/use of technicalities to keep things from grinding to a halt. Last I heard people were floating "10 for 1" for this incoming administration. This is consistent with the hyperbolic nature of DOGE pronouncements, too--it's all likely to come down to earth, but not guaranteed to since there are a lot of insane tyros about to be put in power.
- decreasing regulatory page count is an ok metric I suppose, but in addition to clearing out unused cruft (that lottery reg was probably not doing much harm) and some justifiable wins about saloon doors, I would be very curious to see how much of this got done by aligning Idaho regs with external standards by reference. It's a lot shorter to say "use this trade association's safety code" than to write it all out! At past jobs I have spent time analyzing state legislative output and though I don't mean to knock Idaho, I think it's fair to say that small states' government is often surprisingly threadbare. Many are part-time, and it's totally normal for legislators to have to share staff https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_a_full-time_legislature. All this is to say that what Idaho's doing might be good or bad, but I suspect it's something others have thought of, and might well only be practical because of how small the state is.
- a surprising number of those legislatively mandated reports don't get written on time (or at all). It's something Congress throws into laws left and right, and agencies sometimes decide to accept the risk of their boss getting yelled at at an oversight hearing when there isn't enough time to get everything done.
- more work has been done to avoid unnecessary thrash than you might imagine--"economically significant" regulations receive higher levels of scrutiny, for instance
- it's not just nuisance lawsuits: advocacy groups have been doing their part to make rulemaking worse by encouraging the public to spam dockets with thousands of nearly-identical comments about hot button issues. bureaucrats are typically required to review and respond to every substantive comment in the course of the process. they can ignore the junk, but just sorting through it takes time--and of course a lot of it isn't "junk" per se but is prosaic and obvious, but still must be accounted for.
Regarding page count, I rewrote a procedural manual for my job not long ago. I *easily* could have made it 50% shorter... by using more jargon and less clear language, cutting out explanations and examples, and ignoring rare edge cases. I don't think that would made it better! But it would satisfy the demands of idiots that want to cut page counts in half.
Grinding things to a halt is the point, though. Our government has been mandated to do too many things -- more things than we can afford. Something will give. The only choice we have is in exactly what breaks and when it breaks. We have a choice now, but if we wait much longer, we won't have a choice. What cannot go on, will not go on.
I object to saying we can't afford it - it's not like the EPA or the FDA have massive slices of the budget. The FDA's budget is $7.2 billion - which isn't nothing, but it's about 0.1% of the budget. We absolutely could scrape up another $7 billion if we decided we wanted the FDA to get stuff done twice as fast, we just don't have the political will because the Republicans are obsessed with "starving the beast."
Heck, Trump's tax plan is expected to add 3 *trillion* dollars to the deficit over 10 years - how is it possible that we can afford that, but we can't afford a few billion a year to make the bureaucracy function smoothly?
The "twice as fast" is tricky for the FDA, though. They passed the Covid vaccines fast, now some people are arguing those same vaccines are killing healthy young people by inducing cardiac complications and that these dangerous vaccines were rushed through too fast without proper checking. There is some evidence of the mRNA vaccines being implicated:
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/myocarditis-and-covid-19-vaccines-should-you-be-worried
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
We need to spend less. That means having fewer laws and less enforcement. That means fewer people, but it also means less harm to the people. It's not realistic to think that everything the government does is helpful. Plenty of examples of special-interest legislation.
Special interests legislation simply means "two factions compromised." There isn't any other kind of legislation. Regulations exist because they serve the interests of one or more factions of the public. Cutting regulation simply means choosing which factions get screwed.
That's very optimistic, and not very realistic.
"It gives the example of repealing a regulation about what kind of doors pharmacies can have."
I just get the feeling that this was downstream of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and that pharmacies were required to have wheelchair accessible doors, which meant that there had to be a new regulation put in place about "your door must be of this type". I also wonder if there was a lawsuit or some sort of activist campaign, because generally that is what causes such specific regulations to be passed.
A lot of bureaucratic inertia is caused by badly written regulations which are left up to interpretation *plus* ambulance chasing law firms being all too willing to go "Did the local council refuse to rebuild your entire house because you are entitled to have the door frames expanded by 0.5 cm? Call us for legal advice now, you may be entitled to compensation!" advertising.
This means that bureaucrats are *very* hesitant to make decisions which are not backed up in triplicate by CYA, as if you make a decision which grants something, this will cost money and moreover set a precedent for others to claim the same, which means the Department is unhappy with you. But if you decide to refuse the thing, there is the possibility of a lawsuit which may well go against you, create a precedent for others to claim the same, and cost even more what with damages and fees, which means the Department is unhappy with you.
I have seen people absolutely trying to game the system re: the width of doors being too small to let a wheelchair through, so that's why I have my suspicions about that particular piece of legislation.
Oh, the ADA is definitely gamed. You take an unscrupulous attorney, and a cooperative disabled person, and go looking for any business with any ADA violation. The disabled person attempts to enter and claims that their rights were denied by the business. Then the attorney sues them and immediately offers to settle for thousands of dollars.
It could be any business even if the disabled person would otherwise have no reason to enter.
Never going to be any lack of unscrupulous lawyers, either. If Vivek turned his sights on the legal profession, he'd probably have near-unanimous public support, but he went to law school himself, didn't he? 😀
Yes 100%. Scott's understanding of the administrative state has deepened dramatically over the last few years it's really impressive.
As a former biltong business owner, im glad someone sees my pain at the insane bureaucracy around getting succulent cured meats to the people
I've heard that it's bad out there! Thankfully geelvet droewors and wet-cut biltong is only a short drive away for me...
> is not really associated with smallness.
He IS associated with ambitious infrastructure projects though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama's_Bridge, and bureaucracy holds those up too.
Also associated with not transgressing social limits, which is why he put aside his wife Sita for rumours among the people as to her being unchaste when captured by Ravanna.
One time in history when a king really should have gone "Stuff you, I'm the king, I am above the law, and if you don't like it then lump it, peasants". Ah, well!
Too lazy to hunt the citation, but the Niskanen Center had a piece where a fellow pointed out that the raw number of federal employees had not grown much in the past 60 years. Growth has come from contractors bureaucrats hire, not bureaucrats per se.
So if anything we have been experimenting with the Vivek’s proposal already. Grow the scope and scale of the federal government without growing its headcount or capacity to deal with congress’ shirking of legislative responsibility to clarify statutes, and see what happens. Seems to be bad things to me!
Anyone with experience/knowledge of transit + infrastructure knows that it’s a fundamental mistake to hire consultants instead of just growing the bureaucracy to match needed expertise…
Instead of just hiring a core group of competent engineers, the NYC transit agency just outsources to consultants, who then hire contractors. No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost. Every party to the infrastructure work *but transit users* benefits from wasteful spending. So New York builds for 5-10x the cost of the Swedes
"Anyone with experience/knowledge of transit + infrastructure knows that it’s a fundamental mistake to hire consultants instead of just growing the bureaucracy..."
Not true if you are the owner of the outside consultant group being hired. \S
I expect they know it. It's just not to their advantage.
"No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost"
It's worse than that -- people are incentivized to inflate costs. I've worked on government funded research projects and from a manager's perspective it is worse to underspend the grant than to fail to meet the original goals. You're punished for being more efficient than you originally planned for.
Though I partially agree with you, I'll try to give the other side of the argument. I manage some government contracts, and when my management tells me to make sure all the money gets spent, part of what they really mean is "money is very tight, don't ask for more than you're going to use, because if you don't need it we can use it somewhere else."
Underspending is frowned upon because budget people at every level share this concern. Inflating the cost at the last minute to make sure you spend everything is a particularly underhanded and wasteful solution to keep from getting dressed down by the boss; the preferred solution is to make a good estimate before the project starts. Unfortunately it's very hard to carve out flexibility for something like a research project where costs are inherently unpredictable. The system demands a budget in advance, and demands you follow it.
That's not really my experience. There is concern that it "looks bad" if you don't spend everything because it means you can't properly estimate your work and costs, and that will reflect poorly when your next proposal is being reviewed. Or, even worse, for ongoing stuff your budget might get cut in the future.
I would agree the grant sin my world are all "spend all the money or you are a bad performer", they NEVER want money back. There is some minor pressure for cost reasonableness, but only on the front end. On the back end they just want all the money gone and to know that you vague accomplished what the plan was.
Yep, clawback. That's why at the end of the financial year, if there's anything left in the budget, you are encouraged to spend! spend! spend! since not alone will the excess be taken back, but next year your budget will be reduced.
And if next year you have extra unforeseen expenditure? Too bad, you managed to be too efficient for your own good. So better to buy stuff you don't need now (because you're not allowed to keep the saved amount on hand to cover anything else or for next year) rather than lose the money going forward.
It's one of those "looks good on paper" ideas that works out terribly in practice.
Obviously YMMV depending on the domain, but sometimes it’s not even that the contractor is particularly bad or inefficient. It’s that the government ends up spending almost as much effort “overseeing” the contractor (and the entire contract bid and award process) as they would if they just did the work themselves.
The bit I took from Edward Snowden's book about NSA contractors probably applies to bureaucrats in general.
There's rules on how many employees NSA can have and how much they can pay them, because these are federal employees. So what do you do when there's more work than employees, and you also want to keep your best people but can't pay them market rate?
After a stint as a proper NSA-employed agent, you let them switch to becoming contractors and hire them back at a higher rate. That's why Snowden was officially working for Booz Allen Hamilton, in a NSA facility with the same job and security clearance as before.
I guess they hire consultants when some regulation stops them from growing the bureaucracy or paying the internal experts as much as they'd like?
Yes, this is a very underrated factor: I'd be more keen to stop them hiring management consultants and contractors at vastly inflated wages than to arbitrarily cut headcount (especially if you're not cutting the actual legal risk or bureaucratic requirements first).
>Yes, this is a very underrated factor: I'd be more keen to stop them hiring management consultants and contractors at vastly inflated wages
If you did this much of the government would cease to function.
Ding ding ding.
That's the problem with the top-down approach by politicians and government ministers versus the on-the-ground view of the people tasked with implementing the shiny new policies.
Not to mention that some of those aforesaid politicians and ministers have nice cosy relationships with the outside consultants, be it "they donate to my election campaign" or "my brother-in-law's cousin runs this".
"outsources to consultants, who then hire contractors. No one is incentivized to care about efficiency or cost."
You should see the saga of the Irish new children's hospital. This has been going on for decades at this point, and it's *still* not ready yet, and the fancy contractors who won the contract are still "yeah it's gonna be late and over-budget even more":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_children%27s_hospital
"The Chief Officer of the NPHDB, David Gunning, reported in July 2023 to the Oireachtas Committee on Health that the costs of merely building the hospital, excluding the costs of commissioning it for use, were now expected to approach €2.2 billion due to further overruns. Only 27 of the 3,000 rooms had been completed, and the expected building completion date had been revised to May 2024. By October 2023, that date had been revised again to late October 2024, and it was emphasised that the last date of the building phase would be the first date of an "operational commissioning phase", so the hospital would not actually open before April 2025. The government confirmed in February 2024 that the total sanctioned budget had now reached €2.24 billion, and that this would now be the "maximum allocation", with no further funding to be put towards the project. By May 2024, the date for "substantial completion" of building had been revised to February 2025, with a further six months before becoming operational. By October 2024, the completion date had again been revised to June 2025."
Bear in mind, they initially lumbered into action on this in 2006. Building didn't start until 2016.
So how much of that overrun was due to lawfare vs. changes requested/mandated by the government vs. underestimation by the contractors?
Yes.
A beautiful stew of "government has no frickin' clue what it wants; changes its mind about location several times; entities already on-site take lawsuits against putting new building on that site; lots of consultants, lots of reports, no action for years; finally decide they'll build it on this site, plus two satellite sites (already a change from "one all-purpose centre"); contractors start building and then Covid lockdown hits in 2020; now it's "yeah it'll be open in January February June well sometime" and the budget has spiralled from €650 million to €2 billion and that's probably not going to be the final cost".
That's not even counting "and when it's open, half the wards will be shut due to staffing limitations" which is what I anticipate to happen. Saw it with our own local regional hospital; fancy new cardiac ward got built after massive fund-raising effort, then - was closed for ages because there wasn't the funding in the budget to staff it. Thankfully, that has been sorted out now, but I'm going to believe in the shiny new promises when I see them fulfilled.
Yeah, a new building means a politician gets their name on it. Money for staff, or even cleaning the building? Not sexy, no publicity (unless it's bad publicity for spending too much), cut it.
Most of the military forces in the world are like that too. Lots of money for new tanks and planes, nothing for maintaining the ones they have.
You need consultants because often they are the only people who know what they are doing. The DEI hires in the bureaucracy can't actually get anything done, so you bring in the consultants to actually do the heavy lifting.
I agree a better system would be to pay those consultants less and actually make them federal employees, but many of them couldn't get jobs with the federal government because they don't meet the "desired" criteria (veterans/disabled/minorities/etc.).
If you don't think it is DEI related I would love to introduce you to the racial/gender demographics of the consultants versus the staff in the two main departments I know well. Advancement is a real non-starter for white males unless they are super exceptional, so where do they all end up? Consulting making more than the bureaucrats and doing their jobs for them. It is a pattern that is clear as day, but no one ever wants to talk about it. There is a huge brain drain where the top staff tend to leave after 3-5 years and go work at like Deloitte or some other big contractor because there is simply more money to be made and they will actually pay competent people whereas the government will even promote them much less pay them.
I work in a bureaucracy (though not the US federal one).
Headcount is restricted by budget, and which bucket their compensation comes from. It's a lot easier to write a justification for hiring a contractor "for 6 months" to fill a perceived need than to go through the process of hiring an employee. Many of those employees start out temporary as well.
Of course those contractor positions then get extended. Subject to budget, though budgeted money gets moved around to different buckets all the time.
The way a friend of mine in federal government explained it to me, it's hard to hire new people above about a ~$100k salary, and the maximum pay is well below corporate rates. If you need some sort of tech service, you have to hire a contractor from Booz Allen or wherever. Of course, making it easier to hire $250k/year government employees has its own problems.
Assuming the work exists and has to be done, you can hire a 100k employee. Or you can hire a contractor. But you'll pay 200k or so for that contractor.
Why? Well, when the work is done, you can stop paying the contractor. So you have to pay for their retirement/sick days/vacation somehow. Not to mention the contracting agency's cut. And the days the contractor is looking for another contract.
Of course, this assumes you're hiring the contractor for a specific project, as opposed to hiring the contractor because there's a hiring freeze on employees.
In my specific area there's a "sunshine" law, where employees above 100k compensation are on a publicly available list. 100k was specified in the law, so as the years go by (almost 30 now) inflation makes the list grow a lot.
People look at 100k and think it's a lot, so they put extra rules around it. I just looked and apparently 100k has lost roughly *half* its value since that law went into effect...
I've been travelling a lot recently, and I've noticed that fines in some countries have their own units that can then be centrally adjusted without needing to change the legislation. Researching a little bit, it seems to be mostly ex-Soviet countries, although I have seen it in Colombia as well.
For example in Kazakhstan they have the MCI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_calculation_index, and a fine might be 100 MCI, which gets adjusted every year.
To me this seems like a no-brainer, at least in a limited fashion, I'd be interested in understanding the drawbacks.
I'm aware that some places have income-based fines as well, but I think that's more of a political question, whereas keeping fines and thresholds inflation-adjusted seems pretty much strictly better than having to double them periodically? The main argument I can think against it is that fines getting eroded creates a sort of automatic sunset clause, but it has the inverse problem for thresholds.
The downside of this is that the government gets to be inflation-protected in terms of getting income from fines, and likely fees as well.
Since inflation is caused by the government, this seems somewhat unfair.
inflation is entirely caused by the government? Or do you mean more that, fundamentally, inflation of significance is. I ask because my understanding of inflation was that it occurs when, society wide, people bid up the price of goods. Thus a federal reserve increase in the money supply causes inflation by increasing ability to spend, but a society wide increase in wealth or looser lending standards do as well.
The US government pays out a $255 death benefit through SS if your spouse dies. It hasn't been adjusted for inflation since the 1940s. Since the law is still on the books, we are still paying bureaucrats to process claims for this 1940s death benefit.
That's the case in Germany. The unit is "Tagessatz", which essentially is a day of your suspected salary for a day. This also has the benefit of automatically adjusting to your income, so that punishment hurts somewhat equally (though losing 10 days as a plumber isn't exactly the same a losing 10 days as Jeff Bezos, even though Jeff Bezos would be paying millions in theory, he would barely notice, whereas the plumber most likely does).
Australia does this too. Fines are written in the legislation as x penalty units, with the monetary value of a penalty unit adjusted each year in response to inflation. Note the exact value of penalty units varies between federal and state and between each state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_unit
The context of the conversation was about Eric Snowden, and why the federal government hires Booz Allen contractors as sys admins in the first place. My friend's answer was that the government salary is uncompetitive, you couldn't get the talent you need.
Almost no one in the federal government at the professional level makes what they would in the private sector. As an extreme example, the Secretary of Defense, for example, makes $246k a year. I don't want to pretend to know what being SecDef entails, but I'm guessing they should make more than a 20-something project manager at a tech company.
No they wouldn't, but then they're not really in it for the money. Or not money as a wage anyway.
Now expand this to the rest of the federal workforce. I'm not sure a lot of entry level engineers are motivated by the prestige of working for government as GS-7s.
I think what happened instead is, you only get people who are already independently wealthy and just want the prestige, at least when it comes to secdef. or at least, the whole system is biased in that direction.
I tend to think that's what's going to happen here if they do ax a bunch of civil servants through relocations, etc. They'll end up having to hire a ton of people back, except now they'll be employees of politically connected contractors and the government will be spending more on them with even less accountability or ability to control the work.
It's not obvious to me that contractors have less accountability than civil servants do.
Contractors can do campaign donations to protect their funding streams, unlike departments of the federal government.
I wouldn't say less accountability, but they do have different incentives. Even contractors who always work full time on government projects are not part of civil service culture and are not aligned with the agency's mission the way federal employees should be (ideally). There are other advantages to using them though, like budget flexibility, scaling up and down rapidly, availability of niche expertise, and (at least in the cases I deal with) lower employee turnover. Whether it's actually cheaper to contract a job out or do it in house is very tough to figure out.
interesting!
My initial impression is that 'civil service culture' is part of the problem, from my time evaluating fed-funded ngos and their interface with the gov't... but I don't actually know if i have a good reason for thinking this, and it could be pretty localized to my field. I am interested to hear why your impression is the opposite
I'm sure it varies a lot. The people I work with are generally quite capable, and are at least motivated in the sense that they want to achieve the things they're supposed to be working on, rather than just out to further their own careers at their employer's expense. On the other hand, there is a culture of being pretty relaxed and prioritizing work-life balance, rarely working overtime, and being willing to spend lots of time on things like training, seminars, meetings and so forth without worrying too much about it. We work the way we work and things get done when they get done. I think that's a big part of what people complain about with civil service, and although it's nice it does grate sometimes. When I was a contractor it was my manager's job to keep all that stuff away from the engineers and block anything that might distract us from getting real work done. On the whole I prefer the government's way of doing things.
There's massively less accountability on the pay and hiring side of things, that's for sure.
The whole thing seems like a perfect illustration of Chesterton's Fence.
Don't have a Niskanen reference, but Brookings has a similar chart: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-government-is-nearing-a-record-high/
Considering that the contractors do the same work as the bureaucrats, I think this is a difference without meaning. We just aren't on the hook for unionized employees and pensions. Its a tool to side step those requirements, they aren't fundamentally doing different work.
"contractors do the same work as the bureaucrats"
No, they don't. It's a fundamental misunderstanding that you can parachute in some MBAs from Deloitte for 6 months and expect them to have any understanding of the actual mission, constraints, intergovernmental issues, etc. that an agency contends with in time to accomplish anything useful.
I find folks who hold this opinion either haven't worked in a bureaucracy, haven't seen what happens when contractors try to 'do the job' of the real employees, or both.
Yeah, that's the "why can't we treat government like a business?" mindset which runs into problems due to the fact that governments are not for-profit. I hate this new idea of calling the people using government services as "clients" or "customers" because they're not; if they don't like/can't get the service they want, it's not like "Aldi didn't have the thing in stock, I'm going to Tesco instead" for them.
And it's also not similar in "okay this person is renting a local authority house, you can treat them like someone renting from a property management service" because you can't. Sometimes I wish you could, because (again) there are people gaming the system and not paying even the minimum rent, and practically daring the council to evict them because they know they can go to court and the judge will order the council to find housing for them.
But in the main, you can't charge "market rate rent" etc. to those people, and you are (technically at least) obliged to provide a range of services in maintenance and upkeep and accommodating needs for them, so it's not at all like "put an MBA in charge of the housing department and they'll get all the backlog of rent paid up on time".
evict them again, and again, and ...
... this whole absolutely crazy total submission to the high wizards of the gavel is madness
as long as the judge doesn't want to personally hold the bureaucrat in contempt of court they should do the thing they think needs to be done.
just as the courts play their part in this inconsistency theater.
eventually the legislative steps in.
instead what we have is historically low trust and approval rating.
In my experience the people from Deloitte or wherever are 9 times in 10 wildly better than the bureaucrats and more helpful even if they have only been there a week.
I don't know I get hired as a contractor all the time to basically do shit that employees should have done. It is like my main line of business. And how it generally goes is something that was someone's full time job to do, or say 40% of their full-time job, and that they have had a year or two to complete.
I get done in a couple months of working 10 hours a week.
One $20 million program I worked on the main lady working on it was making like 1-23 phone calls a month, and sending maybe 5 emails. Full time staff head of this project, accomplishing nothing. "What is happening with subgrantee X?" I don't know I haven't talked to them in a 6 months. There are only 30 subgrantees and your WHOLE job is managing them, you should be talking to them EVERY SINGLE WEEK.
Some of the places I get hired the people are overworked, and I legit feel bad of them. But many they are just incompetent/ignorant or lazy. Paying me $20k for two months to complete something that is 5 years overdue (yes I do a lot of things like that) when the full-time staff haven't gotten it done in that time seems like a steal.
That's the thing - if you don't/can't have the personnel in your organisation all in the name of Lean Efficiency, then you have to hire outside consultants for expert advice on tricky problems and large-scale projects, and of course this costs a minimum of twice as much, because now you're paying them market-rate fees.
Do federal agencies need to be capable of being sued by the general public? If they need more accountability couldn’t that be provided by greater legislator scrutiny? Someone with some basic incentive to make sure the agency is still able to function.
"Grow the government while taking away power from individuals to sue the government" does seem like a way to increase government capacity. It also seems out of step politically for both parties at this moment in time.
I would rephrase that as: “shrink the government by removing the need for it to preemptively fortify itself from privately waged lawfare”
That's essentially what various forms of government immunity is all about. Prosecutors can't be sued for bringing charges. Judges can't be sued for ruling on cases.
If/when people are able to sue, it was often intentional on the part of Congress allowing it, and always should at least have been contemplated because Congress knows how to add immunity to lawsuits in bills.
Those immunity rules were mostly created by the Supreme Court, who apparently thinks that nobody could possibly enforce and administer the law if they were actually SUBJECT to it. It's like eating at a restaurant where the chef says he couldn't do his job if he had to eat the food they serve there.
In practice the rules get applied in pretty horrifying ways sometimes, as in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson where a man spent 18 years wrongfully imprisoned when there was exonerating evidence withheld and the Court insists it's important that nobody be liable for this.
Would you demand that a solder must go through a murder trial everytime he kills an enemy combatant?
Soldiers can and do get tried for murder, even during war. Murder is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Your example isn't even a very good strawman.
No, but I also don't think that really has anything to do with what I said.
Connick wasn't a soldier, he wasn't making decisions while somebody shot at him, and his actions and the actions of his staff falsely imprisoned somebody for almost two decades. And he wasn't even being held criminally liable.
I think it's very clear that the state shouldn't be able to falsely imprison its own citizens and then refuse to so much as compensate them for it.
In your post, you suggested, "couldn’t that be provided by greater legislator scrutiny?" In practice, the legislature would direct the Executive to stand up an oversight organization to provide this scrutiny and provide reports to Congress. This is actually a common thing that they do! The result is that you grow the government by creating a new oversight organization. This growth occurs even if the oversight organization is good at its function.
But critically, inspectors general and the like probably don't slow things down the way the threat of a lawsuit does. They can be more judicious about holding government accountable for things that are actually bad while not picking a fight over stuff that's basically fine.
Agree with all of this. My point is just that creating offices like this is ADDING bureaucrats, which is the opposite of what everyone wants to do! :-D
It’s fine creating one extra bureaucratic job if it removes two or three existing ones.
> seems out of step politically
Wait what? Trump would love to do that.
I think such agencies make a lot of decisions which affect some people disproportionally. Say the FDA bans a certain food chemical (phthalates, lactose, whatever). This would certainly impact some food manufacturers, and it is good that the have the ability to sue.
However, if they only can get sued by persons disproportionally affected by the regulations, this will distort their incentives. If you have to prove that you have personally suffered negative health consequences of e.g. some mild carcinogen allowed by the FDA (lest they get sued by Big Carcinogen), and realistically you will not be able to prove that, because cancer is stochastic -- if the substance increased your cancer risk by a factor of two, that means that it is entirely plausible that you were not harmed by the substance despite getting cancer, and thus you would not have standing to sue.
I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it. However, courts take their time, and there are a zillon chemicals someone could either put intentionally into food or detect in food at any day, and having blanket rules which allow or forbid all substances not explicitly regulated would both have bad consequences. Thus having a regulatory agency which can make decisions (a bit) faster than the court system seems reasonable.
Private lobbying basically already fulfils the same function in representing special interests. It’s just the money goes to lawmakers instead of lawyers. Arguably only a dubious improvement.
Lawyers employ a lot more people than lawmakers.
Not sure if that's good ("job creation") or bad ("soaking up people who could be doing something more useful").
So whenever I am dissatisfied with a decision of a regulatory agency, I should try to lobby the US congress to add a provision like "Also, the FDA must allow/ban phthalates" to the FDA mandate?
I am not sure what it costs to get special interest legislation the public does not care about passed in congress, but I assume that it is much more expensive than suing in federal court.
Also, I have slightly higher confidence in the court system to actually make a reasonable decision than in the outcome of lobbyists interacting with congress.
Does the US not have select committees? In the UK legislators are able to scrutinise agencies directly. Not simply through direct legislation.
In a functioning Constitutional system with separation of powers, yes. To me, the core issue here is that the regulatory agencies have been given huge swaths of power to make their own rules, to be judge, jury, and executioner. In a dream world, all rulemaking would have to get passed as Congressional legislation and executive agencies would only have enforcement powers. All ALJs world be moved to Article 3 courts. And all regulations would sunset every X years.
It's fine to "distort incentives" that way. The FDA's regulations are not supposed to be driven by lawsuits (thus it's not the "correct battleground"). The Constitution gives Americans rights that the government can't violate without being sued, it doesn't grant us the right to sue the government to compel it to act.
All rights come with corresponding obligations to preserve those rights. The right to property means little if the police refuse to investigate crimes against you. A law protecting you from tainted drugs means little if the FDA is corrupt and not doing the inspections that it should. So the proper solution in this case is to get a judge to tell the offending branch of the government to do its job properly.
Did you know that the police don't have a legally enforceable duty to protect you or to investigate anything? You can't actually sue the police to have them do their job--and many times you're not allowed to successfully sue them when they did something wrong! So no, this just isn't at all how things work. Private causes of action are the exception, not the rule, when it comes to government.
People have tried suing the police for failing to enforce the law, SCOTUS ruled they have no legal duty to protect us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales
Sure, it does. Our rights include equal protection - which means that the government has to follow the laws that it has passed.
No, "equal protection" does not mean that. It can give you the same access to the courts as anyone else, but those courts can still say the government isn't legally compelled to act (as in Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
Following the law and enforcing the law are entirely different things.
You are right, it's not equal rights, it's a statutory right.
My understanding is that "they only can get sued by persons disproportionally affected by the regulations, this will distort their incentives* is pretty close to the default rules of standing in federal courts. In order to bring a case before a federal court, you need to have a personal stake in the "case or controversy", in some direct and concrete way.
For more or less the reasons you describe, Congress has often created statutory causes of action allowing interest groups to sue regulatory agencies. And where they haven't, there are workarounds like shopping around for state governments to sue on behalf of the collected interests of their citizens, or finding an individual who is personally inconvenienced by something you already want to sue over and getting them to agree to letting you sue nominally on their behalf.
"I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it."
The problem isn't just that courts are slow, it's that they are not experts in the thing they're being asked to ban. The point of regulatory agencies is to hire experts who can make good decisions and, if necessary, defend them in court. If everything started out in court, the courts would have to hire all those experts instead. As it is, when regulations get challenged in court, the decision often reflects a lack of technical understanding because the judge just doesn't know that much about it.
> I think that the court is the correct battleground if some people want to ban something, and some people want to allow it. However, courts take their time, and there are a zillon chemicals someone could either put intentionally into food or detect in food at any day, and having blanket rules which allow or forbid all substances not explicitly regulated would both have bad consequences. Thus having a regulatory agency which can make decisions (a bit) faster than the court system seems reasonable.
Except the FDA does NOT regulate additives very much. Since 1997 (really since the 60's), they allow any company to "self determine" that any given additive is safe, and put it directly in the human food supply.
The FDA on food is the exact opposite of "kill thousands by having ridiculously high 10 year, billion dollar hurdles," in the sense they let food manufacturers put whatever they want into the food supply at pretty much any time.
Since 2000, there’s been only 10 "full process" approvals. There have been 766 new food chemicals since then, which means 756, or 98.7%, have been “self-determined” and put in our food supply with essentially zero vetting or oversight, or means of measuring impacts, or means of recourse if they’ve messed up, either via incompetence or malice.
This was reaffirmed in 2016. The US has ~10k food additives, vs Europe and the UK's ~2k.
From the FDA.gov site:
“The FDA has established a GRAS Notification Program to help ensure that these ingredients are safe for the ways in which they will be used and to help industry meet its responsibility for ensuring the GRAS status of ingredients they intend to use in food. **This notification is not mandatory; however, the FDA strongly encourages manufacturers to contact the agency** and follow the available procedures for our oversight of GRAS conclusions by submitting a GRAS notice.”
(bolding mine)
“By 1997 FDA had tentatively concluded that it could no longer devote substantial resources to the GRAS affirmation petition process. The agency published a proposed rule outlining a GRAS notification process to replace the resource-intensive GRAS affirmation petition process.”
“The GRAS notification program provides a voluntary mechanism whereby a person may inform FDA of a determination that the use of a substance is GRAS, rather than petition FDA to affirm that the use of a substance is GRAS.”
This seems to be one of those things that changed in the 60s/70s. In the New Deal era the federal government could run rampant and there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Later you get Jane Jacobs opposing Robert Moses on freeway construction, Ralph Nader the crusading consumer-rights lawyer, the environmental movement creating myriad opportunities to sue, and of course the civil rights movement setting the norm that the courts are more reliable than the (constrained) ballot box. https://www.slowboring.com/p/community-meetings-arent-democracy
I think the short answer is 'yes' - it is important to allow some check on administrative power. Congress, for various and sundry reasons, seems incapable of performing that function, which leaves the judiciary.
That being said, Congress can (and should) provide numerous offramps that allow the process to be expedited. That could mean providing specificity over what types of things can be sued over, how many appeals they get, carving out specialized courts that only hear specific classes of cases, etc, etc.