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In the private sphere Musk also has the advatnage that he can attract top talent on prestige. Government workers enjoy the opposite of that. The most common response to someone pontificating on government work is "the job security must be nice." In other words, you're only going to be fired for terrible malfeasance, not for run-of-the-mill incompetence. And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.
To make the government leaner and more effective, I'd couple cuts with an increase to prestige. Make government jobs highly sought after. Make the pay something like 95th percentile for comparable industry jobs. Make expectations high, with a target on attrition at well above zero. Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce. They could have immediate access to Tier I support at other federal agencies. Access to exclusive spaces at national parks. Franking privileges. The rights of an FFL without the paperwork. There are many possible privileges that would cost very little.
The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.
Government jobs (at least the ones with policymaking discretion) are highly sought after.
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Making federal employees a higher tier of citizen is a horrible idea that would contribute to the Sovietization of society and is directly contrary to the American ideal. The government being generally low quality is fine (though the floor should be higher than it currently is) it just needs its scope massively reduced. If it had the scope reduced to match capabilities, then you don’t have to increase capability
Furthermore, one way to lower the temperature in politics is to reduce the size of government.
When the government controls everything, the question of who controls the government is paramount.
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While there are certainly plenty of examples of this, I don't think it's as universal as is often claimed. I've known government technical folks that are incredibly competent and focused, especially in leadership roles. Sometimes you get folks in over their heads, but I don't know that the general low-level public-facing employees (social security office staff?) should be taken as typical examples. And honestly I've had pretty good experiences even with my local mail carriers and park service rangers. I've seen general-level officers speak a few times and always been impressed -- memorably, one gave an hour long technical keynote with slides without ever glancing at anything but the audience.
There is a lot of pride and patriotism, and to be honest not even that bad of pay, in the federal service in at least some areas. On the other hand, they are hamstrung by a very risk-averse culture -- nobody ever got fired for adding an extra protracted approval process or required training -- and by complicated rulebooks cooked up in response to the last few thousand times someone defrauded the government. There is certainly room for substantial improvement.
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Depends on which part of the government, and which part of the country.
Looking at PMC-tier jobs, the military officer corps is more prestigious than comparably competitive private-sector careers in the red tribe, and comparably prestigious in the pro-establishment bits of the blue tribe. The career foreign policy bureaucracy is the other way round, of course. Teaching is almost always government work, and carries more social prestige than you would expect given the average SAT score of Ed school entrants. In my area (finance) government jobs are prestigious because quite junior people at a regulator or in the Treasury can make quite senior people at banks jump.
At the blue-collar level, law enforcement and various types of public safety work analogous to firefighting are pretty prestigious, as is the NCO corps (at least within the red tribe).
The point is that there are a lot of jobs that are "cool jobs" to a subset of the population that mostly can't be done outside the government, and very few of them come with the "government job" stigma. The "government job" stigma as I perceive it mostly relates to people doing and supervising routine office work (DMV staff being the paradigmatic example), who are assumed to be lazier and dumber than their private-sector counterparts.
There is also a set of jobs where the prestige doesn't change when you move between the private and public sectors because the job doesn't. A professor at a State university enjoys the same prestige as a professor at a comparably elite private university. A doctor or nurse doesn't gain or lose prestige if they take a job at a VA or municipally-owned hospital. If anything, a USPS (or Royal Mail in the UK) postman enjoys more prestige than a UPS/DHL/Amazon deliveryman.
SpaceX is a small, elite firm, so the fair comparison is a small, elite part of the government. But I think in most bars in most of America, a Navy Seal is less likely to be buying his own drinks than a SpaceX rocket engineer.
In any case, the question isn't "How do you make a senior policy-making role in the Commerce department prestigious?" because those types of roles are already ultra-prestigious. The question is "How do you make the IT guy at the SSA who makes sure pensions are paid on time as prestigious as the IT guy at Google who keeps the site up?" - because those are comparably responsible jobs.
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The pay yes, but this I'm not sure that would be a very popular move. From my understanding of them, Americans hate privilege. Even if money obviously changes everything in practice, they love the idea that they are all technically equals in the eyes of the law, of bureaucracy, etc...
Frankly even the pay might be a tough sell: if we’re looking to slash wasteful spending, why would we pay bureaucrats even more?
(Yes, yes, I’m aware that the goal is to hire talented bureaucrats who will use their prodigious skills to bring government closer to private-sector levels of efficiency and productivity and thus more than make up for their higher salaries. But it’s hard to get buy-in from the public, especially the Red Tribe, on such second-order concerns)
The issue is that pay increases for government employees just means poaching talent from the private sector. You’ll increase government efficiency at the cost of lower private sector efficiency. There’s only so many competent people. Raising pay doesn’t make more of them.
Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.
The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).
By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.
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I think the pay might work because it can be presented in multiple ways. Much is made in tech of the 10x engineer. Instead of saying you're going to increase salaries, say you are reducing the salary mass by replacing 10 checked-out, unmotivated, aging, inflexible paper-pushers with 1 young well-paid bureaucrat, 1 part-time tech consultant and an OpenAI enterprise account.
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