[thisisnotauser]

I do federal work and this is 100% correct. As a serious question, why couldn't a different administration accomplish this?

Obama's United States Digital Service, which the author worked for, did not practice the broad authorities to rewrite the federal service that the current administration is exercising. This suggests to me that a healthy democracy is perhaps subject to some kind of a "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy," wherein the assumption that rules should be respected somehow becomes a bad assumption when an organization gets large.

I've read a lot about the meaningless work at FAANGs that don't appear to tie to any bottom line, to the effect of "most employees at FAANGs seem to do nothing useful." In contrast, all federal work draws its authority to exist at all from Congressional direction, so there's always a clear connection to a "why" in the federal government for literally every role, and one that the person in that role seems to always be very aware of. None the less, federal work gets similarly mired in seeming ineffectuality where day-to-day action is so tied up in internal "red tape" the positive impact gets lost, like the 300k lives noted in the article. Government folks can always draw a straight line from their role to the impact on the public, but too often can't seem to get the authority to take any actions that move them along that line because of organizationally-imposed rules.

Which is all to ask my real question: is this "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy" an inherent feature of large organizations? How do we overcome it?

[dv_dt]

It is yet to be seen what the current administration is actually accomplishing. Tearing down administrative capacity without regard to leaving chaos and shortfalls is a lot easier than reform

[thisisnotauser]

Unfortunately true, and perhaps answers my question: meaningful improvement is hard, maybe even impossible. Meaningless harm is easy.

But that answer doesn't really solve the inherent problem that more rapid improvement is necessary, maybe even critically so. To paraphrase JFK, is the issue here that an institution that makes meaningful improvement impossible perhaps also makes meaningless harm inevitable?

[dv_dt]

I think there are many meaningful improvement strategies which could be applied that haven't been tried yet from any administration at scale.

A lot like replacing running tech systems while they're running - it's trickier doing that than stopping and starting. But, there have been a lot of technology systems less complex than the federal gov't that have stopped, changed to the new system and restarted, only to find that the new system completely broken.

If you want to replace while running, you can set up a parallel co-running system at lower capacity, trial run samples through and compare results, then take some capacity of actual cases, basically take steps to keep growing maturity. For the govt there's actually an interesting case to do this to serve younger more tech savvy citizens, while allowing older citizens to stay on the existing system - then slowly shift capacity from old to new systems.

[xnx]

"Why are we paying for all these nukes? We don't even use them." -Elon Musk next week (probably)

[Molitor5901]

I think it's the generational question every administration faces: politics. Consider federal employee reform. This means dealing with unions, congress, and everyone who depends on each and every office in those agencies, which all brings in politics. So change has to come slowly, over time. IMO Trump just doesn't care about the consequences, or maybe he does but he is certain of victory, so he's going full tilt. He's not running for reelection so maybe he figures this is the only chance I got.

[thisisnotauser]

I think I contend we must disagree with the assertion "change has to come slowly, over time." At some point, moving too slow must be more harmful than failing to address all stakeholders' interests. To wit, perhaps we would not have seen the political situation evolve as it has over the past decade if the administration that implemented the USDS had accomplished more with it sooner.

[mezzie2]

I agree. Especially since we don't exist in a vacuum. Speaking from an American perspective, if we don't change and innovate, we're going to have our lunch eaten by cultures that do.

The rest of the world isn't going to twiddle their thumbs while we decide to placate everyone's egos. (I'd say 'letting Elon run amok in our government' falls in this category as well - it's clearly an ego thing for him as a donor stakeholder).