How to Succeed in Government Without Really Trying

One of the challenging debates, for economists and policymakers as much as historians, is about how to define efficiency. One of its most standard applications to policy and law is cost-benefit analysis — or sometimes, benefit-cost analysis — which, to put it simply, calculates efficiency by measuring if gains exceed losses. Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is a recent example of this kind of business logic applied to government. If efficiency implies solely gains, or in DOGE’s claims, savings outnumbering expenses, then the recent projection by the IRS that DOGE may actually cost the government half a trillion dollars in tax revenues seems to undermine the premise of the task force — if it is in fact about the calculus of inputs and outputs.

But in political history, efficiency is a symbol and a value claim far more often than it is the actual answer to a math problem. (The math problem question itself is flummoxed by the fact that revenues and expenses simply do not work for a monetary sovereign government the way they work for a private business or a household bank account.) The persuasiveness of a household checking account (or even small business checking account) metaphor for a government budget is politically appealing and has been used more and more widely since the 1970s to advocate for policies like a “Balanced Budget Amendment” that the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has shown would likely exacerbate recessions and lead to much shorter periods of economic growth. It also provides a defensible alibi for more unpopular ideological movements and attacks on the most vulnerable.

A fundamental problem with applying a model like cost-benefit analysis that relies on clear, calculable inputs and outputs to measure results from complex, long-term government programs is a function of time and historicity. A famous case of this problem playing out in the private sector was the exploding Ford Pinto scandal of the 1970s (in which the company’s internal estimates of burn deaths counted as “savings” because they relied on skipping a very minor design repair). After years of post-accident litigation and large damage awards for victims had been factored in, the “efficiency” of not adjusting the Pinto’s instruments before market turned out to cost far more money over time than the initial expense of the adjustment would have entailed. The effects of lost lives or horrific injuries are grimly visible in the aftermath of a policy or regulatory failure, but it’s much harder to persuade the public to see the concrete value of accidents avoided and pollution not inhaled thanks to safety regulations.

It’s harder still to calculate the actual return over the course of a human lifetime — in terms of social contributions, consumer spending, taxes, community joy, and much more — of SNAP funds providing adequate nutrition to one family with a young child, as feminist economists might argue. Or to calculate the cost, decades later, of failure to implement anti-pollution laws, in terms of suffering, health care costs, lost productivity, premium increases, and more. Efficiency is a profoundly ahistorical ideal, as it almost always relies on a deeply partial and often very flawed “snapshot in time” calculus for the purposes of expedient political results.

There has been a long history of politicians promising to run the government “like a business” to improve “efficiency,” from Fiorello LaGuardia in 1938 vowing to run the New York City government “as any honest man attempts to run his business” to 1990s candidate Ross Perot, who cultivated outsider appeal on the basis of his businessman background, to Donald Trump in 2016 (and again in 2020 and 2024). 

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was in part the drive to prevent waste of public funds that pushed public sector reformers to replace profit-seeking (and often blatantly corrupt) government officials in the name of greater efficiency. The spoils system for public officeholders was shifted through countless reform projects to a salary system that freed public servants from trying to “create profit” for themselves through their government work, reforms that coincided with the overall bureaucratization and democratization of the administrative state. The Pendleton Act (Civil Service Reform Act of 1883) was the most significant first step in this process, guaranteeing a merit-based process for a small number of federal civil servants (which expanded over time), and requiring a Civil Service Examination. Woodrow Wilson advocated strongly for the professionalization norm, arguing in 1901 that the past approach of “non-professionalism” (cronyism, essentially) in public service was itself the problem, and that “in many great matters of public action non-professionalism is non-efficiency.” His later administration also implemented a policy of federal segregation, and civil service applicants were for a time required to attach photographs of themselves to their applications in order to allow for more “efficient” racial discrimination.

In a sprawling and uneasy coalition spanning eugenics, anti-immigrant Americanization movements, as well as Prohibition, social work, home economics, and conservationism, Progressive Era reformers emphasized efficiency as a core value of good government. At the same time, “scientific management” was revolutionizing the private sector, as the ideas of inventor and engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor reshaped the processes of industrial manufacturing. In business and industry, efficiency imperatives drove massive profit increases for corporations by shifting operations from the task system to the assembly line. In schools, as scholar Raymond Callahan showed in his 1964 study of Progressive-era education reforms, Taylorism was taken up by administrators who, to the chagrin of contemporaries like John Dewey, set out to “run schools like a business” — or in some cases, like a factory.

Enamored of modernism and the advent of new technologies that promised greater efficiency in all aspects of life, from elevators to dishwashers, many reformers sought to find technological and “scientific” solutions to any political problems that emerged. As part of his push for professionalization of the federal administrative state, Woodrow Wilson in 1916 established the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency, which issued efficiency ratings for executive agencies.

Warren Harding’s administration, generally remembered as corrupt and self-dealing, simultaneously emphasized the importance of business. He and his commerce secretary, soon-to-be president Herbert Hoover, treated government as largely there to facilitate business activity. Like later presidents who became enamored of the concept of efficiency during periods of seeming economic prosperity, Hoover abhorred the concept of government providing direct services to the people, even in crisis. In 1930, Hoover pushed for private unemployment insurance systems to address economic suffering during the Great Depression. 

Yet Hoover also, in a roundabout way, used his deeply pro-business stance to articulate the value of government as government, at least insofar as government could not be the same as a business. In a speech on “Rugged Individualism” during the 1928 presidential campaign, Hoover described the many valuable and important accomplishments of federal government emerging from World War I, a laundry list of public goods ranging from outdoor recreation and public health improvements to scientific research, the development of aviation, radio, safer highways, and improved social welfare. But he followed with dark warnings about Europe and socialism, saying that if government were to go further and “succeed in business,” it would become “in effect a despotism.” His mistrust of government providing direct aid, shown in his refusal to support unemployment insurance and economic relief efforts after the 1929 crash, signaled to a suffering public a lack of empathy that would linger as his defining historic characteristic.

The New Deal, ushered in by Hoover’s successor Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the most powerful 20th century reminder of the role of “government as government.” It also emphasized the importance of the sympathetic state, a structure utterly unlike private industry in that it was designed to respond to and limit the harm of disaster, vulnerability, and crisis. As exemplified by its cornerstone program, Social Security, the New Deal made a long-term investment in the public good, rather than a series of more immediate economic responses. And while New Dealers’ embrace of expertise and oversight shaped the emergence of the federal administrative state, many progressives ultimately soured on the elevation of government “efficiency” over values like human rights and justice for all.In 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace wrote that “the myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people.”

Calls for government efficiency eventually returned once economic calamity was distant enough to make some voters only see what government did for others. From the 1950s on, anti-New Deal Northern business conservatives found common cause with Southern segregationists in forming a “new right” that treated government spending as inherently wasteful. They deployed racist imagery to unite fiscal conservatism with white supremacism and build a new voting bloc. A longstanding and problematic presumption that “taxpayer” identity could be mapped onto whiteness served the goals of the new right in stoking the belief that “taxpayer dollars” were being “wasted” in programs serving people of color. As historian Andrew Kahrl has shown, this neglected the extraordinary degree to which Black communities and homeowners were subject to overtaxation and predation throughout the century. Still, in the post-war era, efficiency was so baked into political discourse that civil rights advocates critiqued segregated education systems by pointing to the profound waste and inefficiency involved in running two sets of schools, libraries, classrooms, and transportation. 

Ronald Reagan was especially effective at taking the language of freedom and pivoting it, in the waning years of the Cold War, to mean freedom from government, or at least from government benefiting “other” Americans, as he demonstrated in his 1976 “welfare queen” campaign speech. In 1980, Reagan ran on the idea of shrinking government as a presumptive outcome of efficient management and, as he had as California governor in 1967, quickly set up a privately-funded “President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control” chaired by chemical executive J. Peter Grace to uncover waste and improve efficiency. The Grace Commission report led to some of the more longstanding media anecdotes about government waste, such as the story of the Department of Defense spending $436 on a claw hammer. A joint report by the Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office found the potential savings to be much lower than projected by the Commission. The Grace Commission’s recommendations stalled in Congress anyway. 

It was the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who oversaw a more concerted reorganization and reform of the administrative state, under the “Reinventing Government” initiative led by Vice President Al Gore. Because this initiative had congressional approval, involved federal workers themselves, and rolled out slowly over several years with deliberative processes, it achieved improvements still valued by many citizens today, such as the possibility for people to file their taxes online. Senior Gore adviser Elaine Karmack, who ran the initiative, highlighted the conundrum of applying business logics to a complex government serving hundreds of millions of people — “the stakes in federal government failure are really, really high in a way they’re not in the private sector.” She has also emphasized the key difference between efficiency projects designed to make government services work better, and the ones we are seeing today, which are designed to make government cost less money. “We were very careful to try and cut fat, not muscle,” Karmack says, “and they [DOGE] clearly are cutting muscle.”

Why do so many voters assume that “running a government like a business” will lead to beneficial outcomes, even with very little historical evidence? Some of this question is explored in Suzanne Mettler’s work on the submerged state, which delves into the origin of statements like “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Obscuring the role that government has played in everything from healthcare breakthroughs that are the envy of the world to the technological innovations that created Silicon Valley to the long-term impacts of environmental protections has been an intentional choice, according to Mettler, part of a compromise between the two parties in which the rhetorical conservative victory of deeply burying and even hiding the myriad benefits of government has been the postwar price for the material liberal victory of actually providing such benefits.

For well over a century, many American leaders have prioritized efficiency over values like stability, fairness, security, and responsible stewardship of the world we’ve inherited. This tradition reflects a fundamentally extractive approach to government, focused on squeezing every last drop out of lands, people, communities, and resources. And yet the calculus of efficiency obscures more than it illustrates when it comes to the long historical arc of human lives and their ebbs, flows, vulnerabilities, and connections. Ultimately, history shows us that it is less of a mathematical term than a political term, and therefore more easily serves as a weapon than a solution.