[smcin]

How do you define the principal-agent problem when appied to govt, though? Govt and its departments are not 'owned', and cabinet secretaries and even Presidents are not principals. Who is the 'principal': that particular govt's most powerful donors and lobbyists? Also, govt has both career and political appointees, the latter can change every 4/8 years. So seems to me there are multiple groups of agents/parties.

So when you say 'does not benefit any defensible purpose of government', is that a statement about political science, rather than two-party govt system with lots of lobbying? I mean it seems like any policy you could concoct would benefit some (posibly small) interest-group of people somewhere, unless it was 100% wasteful.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-principl...

[jessaustin]

No one who has read your link would then question whether the chief executive is a principal: of course not. In polities who aspire to representative government, agents are anyone in public employ. Principals are the rest of us. Our interests are not served by solving problems without oversight, as GP suggests.

[smcin]

But still unclear which among us is the Principal, in US-style democracy? Principals are only the tiny few among us who control election outcomes, through funding/ influencing/ lobbying or (rarely) affecting the outcome in one of the 8% of House seats that are still competitive [0]. Even if you believe it is all the rest of us, we certainly aren't equally influential principals.

> Our interests are not served by solving problems without oversight, as GP suggests.

Sure, that's a given. But many of us think the oversight is working on our behalf, yet isn't. (Compare e.g. the sham of the TikTok oversight hearings vs the not-very-effective Facebook ones.)

[0]: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-score/2023/02/27...