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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I think the best thing I've read so far on DOGE is this lengthy tweet from Devon Eriksen, on what DOGE will need to be effective (and thus why it probably won't be). Some highlights that stood out to me:

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

  • It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
  • It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a "ruling".
  • The only recourse against a "ruling" is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
  • But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
  • But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
  • Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
  • And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

…

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people's lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

…

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

"You have to stop that now" is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

…

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn't just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies' staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

…

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing".

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

I would point out that much of this — treating bureaucrats as "agents with agency" and responsibility, rather than procedure-following human automatons with "bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility — runs counter to the basic Weberian character of bureaucracy (as well as the "machine mindset" and allergy to human authority characteristic of modernity). Eriksen does provide a number of likely failure modes, though.

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