It might be a controversial take, sure, but the linked article/post makes a pretty thoughtful case for the benefits of having functional state capacity vs. outsourcing or just not having it
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The concept of outsourcing government services never made sense to me. Ostensibly it’s to reduce costs, but the company has a vested interest in lobbying for as much funding as possible, and delivering as little service as possible. Without a huge amount of oversight we can’t have a system like that. Which means we have to pay for a bureaucracy and to fund the program.
That being said, we can eliminate a lot of cost and resentment of social programs by making them universal. There’s a reason Social Security is a third rail: Everybody gets it, so everybody has a stake in preserving it.
Government does not exist to make a profit. Private companies do. Outsourcing services to a private company cannot save money in the long run. Instead of paying for just the costs to administer and provide the service, we, the taxpayers, now need to pay both of those costs plus a percentage more that the company needs to make to stay in business.
The idea that competition in the private sector will somehow breed innovation and efficiency is a lie.
My opinion is that the true gain of outsourcing is that the private company can cut corners until it gets caught. Then it can change it’s name and bid for the same job. So it can in fact be much more efficient, just at the cost of quality.
It also gives poloticians a way to trade favors with each other. Politician A gets a donation from the private company. So Politician B helps that company win the bid. In return A votes for Bs bill. Without that, how would any bill ever get passed.
With a government that had ample bidders and that made sure that there’s good requirements for the bids, made sure they’re followed through and whatnot could get away with outsourcing stuff. And hell, it might be more efficient in some cases. But often it just falls flat in some regard. Often with the service ending up more costly and shittier to the citizen than the government service.
Even in an ideal situation you’d need a government agency to oversee the bidding process, and to monitor the services to ensure they’re effective. I just don’t see how that ends up saving money, especially when the company has to also make a profit.
Plus, there’s some things government handles that shouldn’t ever have a profit motive. And ideal society would have zero prisons, but there’s an entire prison industry in the US that has a vested interest in growing the prison population.
If we’re talking about a big operation then the bidding savings can be dwarfed by the cost of overseeing the project. Not to mention the government needs to oversee its own work too, to make sure an acceptable result.
Bureaucracy is one of those things that people like to bash, but don’t really spend much time considering what it is or what it’s meant for.
“Bureaucracy is when stupid form” is a superficial understanding of an organizational structure intended to:
- mirror the dominant governing structure, so everyone has a shared frame of reference for how decisions get made
- help keep authority is tied to a position/role rather than to an individual to reduce instances of nepotism and favoritism
- standardize oversight structures so there’s a clear accountability chain
- champion expertise so there are people who comprehend important peripheral aspects of a discipline/profession/industry that can cause compounding downstream issues
There are certainly poorly run, poorly organized, and intentionally misused bureaucracies. And we all have nightmare stories of getting bound up in procedural hell. But organizational alternatives for large, complex organizations usually end up being less efficient and more convoluted while also being less effective.
The issue has always been reduction of red tape and corruption and then appropriate funding not whether bureaucracy should exist at all. Glad to some movement away from generalized “bureaucracy bad” takes on the matter.
Why did they use a still from ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’?
This is a picture of Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a character from the comedy sci-fi movie Everything Everywhere All At Once — an IRS auditor who hounds the immigrant protagonists mercilessly. I loved that movie, but I also thought Deirdre’s character was emblematic of a common and unhelpful way that Americans tend to think about the civil service.
Thanks, I probably should have just read the article, lol.
I didn’t read the article until I saw your question!
Well it’s a clear example.of bureaucracy tbh. And it’s funny specially with those trophies back there.
Enforcing environmental regulation via judicialized procedural review has had devastating consequences on America’s ability to build the thing we need. Housing projects are routinely held up by NIMBYs using environmental review laws to sue developers, often under the most ridiculous of pretexts
The other side to this is that it only protects the people wealthy, organized and well connected enough to sue in the first place. This incentives developers to target lower income rental areas to get around this friction. Don’t want to pick a fight with all the nimbys in the affluent neighborhood, just build your luxury apartment complex in the poor rental neighborhood, where the average person doesn’t even know their councilman, much less that there’s gonna be a town hall on whether to build this gentrifying complex that will probably increase your rent. You don’t even have to pay attention to the environmental toll then, what’re they going to do, sue with all their money going to rent and necessities? The landlords, who do have money, don’t give a shit about the long term health of their tenants and don’t live there so they won’t do anything either.
This is absolutely why infrastructure costs so much in the US.
It took too long to even try to support what positives bureaucrats are meant to bring, then it ended up being something about courts shouldnt be involved in environmental regulation? I gave up after that.
The TLDR is that for almost any given thing we want the government to do, it’s cheaper and more efficient to hire government workers to do it than to hire contractors and nonprofits. The author generalized this conclusion from studies finding a correlation between higher quality dept of transport employees and lower department costs. Makes sense to me.
This take of all government employees being bureaucrats is… oversimple at best. In much the same way that I don’t consider the military servicemembers to be bureaucrats.
You’re right of course, this article specifically talks about civil servants (i.e. bureaucrats) and not other government employees like elected officials or military service members.
