💰✂️ We’re from the government and we’re here to … be efficient?
💰✂️ We’re from the government and we’re here to … be efficient?
Why taxpayers save the lives of coal miners and provide air service to rural towns
What’s this? Another newsletter so soon, and about politics again? Yes, well, I seem to have enthusiasm to write at the moment, but don’t worry — I’ve got some other topics planned soon, including reviews of new graphic novels.
I could only fit five choices. Please email me with other suggestions!
Elon Musk seems motivated to cut inefficiency in the federal government. And this makes some sense: we all want our tax dollars to be well spent, and the deficit is pretty huge.1 It’s not like the government is perfect and needs no improvement — just ask the exhausted TSA agent yelling at you for some reason.
Yes, there are definitely ways the government could be changed for the better. I’ve lived here in DC for close to twenty years, and a decent number of my friends are now working in a variety of federal agencies. A lot of them have horror stories!
But here’s the thing: in prioritizing what to cut, there are other important metrics to consider besides efficiency. Not everything the government does can be reduced to pure economics and dollars and cents, even in a budget.
Famed nonfiction writer Michael Lewis recently convened an all-star group of writers to tell the stories of civil servants for The Washington Post. Lewis himself anchors the package with an extremely long piece about Chris Mark, a former coal miner who developed technical standards so good that now miners no longer die from underground “roof falls.”
The essay, which I really enjoyed, bears all the hallmarks of a great Lewis yarn, featuring a deeply motivated, interesting central character with an unusual job they’re great at.2 And on the website, there’s a great infographic that uses a layer cake metaphor to explain the geologic complications of coal mining. It advances as you scroll through it:
The crux of the piece is that roof falls, in addition to being extremely deadly, are also hugely expensive to the mining companies. “Even though the coal mine industry had a huge financial incentive to figure out how to solve the problem, it hadn’t solved it,” Lewis writes. For many reasons, which Lewis lays out, the industry never would have figured this out on their own. It took Chris Mark, with his singular focus, relentless determination, and his government job:
The role played by his managers in Washington was to give him the space to work. “What the government job gave me was the freedom to do these things,” he said. “No one told me to do it. No one could have told me to do it.”
I think one point Lewis is trying to make here, and in his bestseller The Fifth Risk, is that the US government is chockablock with dedicated, relentless patriots who seek to protect us and improve our lives. And often, their work is quite inefficient. When you only value efficiency, you miss all sorts of vital government services that really help people, like NIH research on opioid addiction and HUD housing assistance (which are said to be on the chopping block).
I do think that Lewis, in glamorizing heroic civil servants, risks oversimplifying. Not every service provided by the government is life or death. Some parts are really deeply inefficient and also just somewhat useful for some small percentage of people. One example is the Essential Air Service, which Trump proposed eliminating in his first budget in 2017. The EAS is an obscure piece of the Department of Transportation that subsidizes airline service for 100+ communities that are a couple hundred miles from a large airport. It’s an important service in some rural, isolated communities.
But is it worth $175 million each year for the government to provide this? I honestly am not sure, and could probably be persuaded either way. However, there are obviously much more difficult, important questions to answer if we actually want to cut down the budget and reduce the deficit.
For example, the EAS is a rounding error compared to the defense budget. Politically impossible to cut and way behind the times, it is on its way to being half of all defense spending in the world. The defense budget is so huge and unwieldy that the Pentagon doesn’t fully know what all the money is being spent on. This, and entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, are obviously what we need to reckon with if we genuinely care about tightening the US budget. But Trump obviously doesn’t. This sort of exercise in government efficiency is fundamentally unserious and besides the point. This is just about making cuts that hurt.
I need you to know that I fully realize that I’m arguing with a straw man — at the top here I’m kind of pretending that Musk and the incoming Trump administration are acting in good faith. I just think it’s an interesting question: how important is it for the government to be efficient? But I know they don’t actually care about this stuff at all.
While most of Lewis’ subjects are admirable people, his most recent book, about Sam Bankman-Fried, seems to be a fascinating exception.