The USA has gone so far as to have a new department of governmental efficiency. I cannot find a definition for governmental efficiency that would allow for a measurable determination of success. What does it mean to have an efficient government? In a non-profit, efficiency might be measured in the proportion of dollars donated that are directly spent on the task. A less efficient charity uses more donated income on advertising, swag, or administrative costs.
For me government efficiency would be the ability of a government do deliver on its plans. That is if the plans themselves were made according to the needs of the citizens, and areas of difficulties reported back to them so that they are understood. Then to safeguard consistencyin this regard, monitoring and evaluation measures be in place. Legislative oversight would be key in doing that as it is outside the actual execution in terms of the doctrine of separation of powers.
Government is created to provide public goods such as defense, transportation infrastructure and social welfare. So, government efficiency can be measured by its output (public goods) relative to its input (such as budget that includes costs of capital and labor).
Government efficiency results from the optimum use of resources to pursue public goals, which aligns with public interest and the general welfare. Drivers of efficiency have to be contextualized in terms of locale and culture. While there are varied indicators of efficiency; it should not veer away from innovation, economic dynamism, upskilling, and resilience.
Government efficiency is the best use of resources to achieve a desired public goal, which can be estimated by a cost benefit analysis of existing operations and also of alternative means. This needs to be considered holistically to consider all the factors actually involved to achieve the publicly desired end, not just what a bureaucracy thinks it is working toward. Cyril's comments above are part of this. Buerocracies often are out of touch with the needs of policy recipients, especially involving differences of all kinds (culture, geography, economy, etc) in individual places. For example, if the goal is to provide housing for people, it is not just about how cheaply a house of a certain size can be built, but also involves building one suitably for the recipients in a particular place which may involve different materials and arrangements than what is best in another location.
What the public goal should be is a different question, which is prior to the issue of efficiency.
It is clear that Mr. Musk is in fact working for government inefficiency, both because he and his people seem to have no knowledge of or concern for the purposes of agencies and programs, and also because he and his people are just making or proposing cuts in staff and programs without any concern for who does what or what the effect will be. The aim seems both ideological and to reduce spending, regardless of the public cost, quite likely to allow for tax breaks for the very wealthy without greatly increasing the deceit. But even in those terms, the cuts are not well thought out (are inefficient), and in some cases are actually reducing government income, as in firing large niumbers of people at the IRS.
So a Department of Efficiency should include an independent metric of efficiency without which it cannot function. The metric needs transparency so there can be informed discussion of evaluation methods. It needs both an actual expense, and a theoretical target to act as a basis for evaluation. Yet if public goals are part of efficiency then how do we function efficiently in a government that will do an about-face every 4 to 8 years?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology
- Mental Processes
- Learning