As I draft this, the 2024 election is underway with no certain outcome. What I can tell you, regardless of the result and who will be steering the car next, is that the bureaucratic engine needs a rebuild.
The executive branch self-sabotages in many different ways, including obsessing about procedures instead of outcomes, leading to a constantly increasing procedural load that (in its well-meaning effort to do things The Right Way) allows us to forget about the right outcomes. It’s a system of HR processes that make it too challenging to hire strong talent (who rightfully will not wait the literal years sometimes required to hire), too obtuse to promote strong performers, and too challenging to hold poor performers accountable.
I see it when agencies refuse to set ambitious goals, because an uninformed oversight body might use call them a failure when a goal is missed. Far safer to aim for something easy - even if that poorly serves the public. I see it in the “accountability sinks” that prevent anyone from shouldering responsibility for hard decisions. I see it the failures of procurement and the pattern of paying contractors more than the civil servants responsible for managing their vital work are legally allowed to be paid.
These failings aren’t unique to the federal government - they are present in regulated industries and state government. I don’t have solutions to all of those spaces, and I can’t fix human nature, as described by Arthur Miller:
We reward our dealers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our teachers, our scientists, our workers who make and do and build and create. And so the urge that is in all of us to give and to make is turned in upon itself, and we accept the upside-down idea that to take and to accumulate is the great good.
But we can, and should, demand better when NASA spends more on a basic launch tower than it cost to build the world’s tallest building. It is possible to take 200 redundant questions on 60 screens and build something better.
Politicians lack good incentives to pursue these reforms - they will be challenging, they won’t actually deliver policy directly, and future leaders will benefit more from the reforms than whoever pursues them. We should pursue them anyway - or other countries will eat our lunch.