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There isn't. Cutting bureaucracy has always been an applause line for the right, even more so now in the age of Trump and all his "deep state" talk. But if the ultimate goal is to save money, then dealing with the unpleasant political realities of targeted spending cuts is the only way to do it. But unless the goal is to inflict maximum chaos, consequences be damned, then Vivek's is an unserious proposal from an unserious candidate. I'm sure certain offices would handle it okay, but a lot of them wouldn't. And when these offices are critical, the fallout can be severe. What happens when your grandmother doesn't get her Social Security check? What happens when you stop getting reliable mail delivery? What happens when all the stuff your state and local governments rely on Federal grants to get done doesn't happen because the distribution of those grants goes to a standstill? How long do you think the remaining employees will stick around and work for free if this fucks up the payroll department? "Fixing whatever breaks" isn't a viable option since you'd probably spending more money to untangle the Gordian Knot that would develop within weeks.
The hope is that the decimated services immediately switch over all their efforts to the critical stuff because they’re decent people who don’t want grandmothers to starve to death and leave the makework to one side.
Would this happen, and would it be enough? I don’t know. You would have to look into crises of state capacity and the response to them. You would also have to judge how likely it is that state employees would aim to maximise rather than minimise pain to enforce rollback (quite likely, I think).
Is there any historical example of significant state simplification? Possibly the dissolution of the monasteries in the UK but that’s a rather different kettle of fish. OTOH it worked at Twitter.
(I’m not arguing for Vivek, he sounds feckless as hell, just musing about the viability of rip-off-the-plaster policy generally.)
That’s a very optimistic view of government agencies. These are the same institutions that close federal parks every time their budgets are threatened. It’s more likely that they will withhold the vital care grandmother needs so that the whole world will see how necessary they are and how evil the people who are trying to take away their money are.
There’s a pretty big difference between closing a park and letting grannies die. It might be a sufficiently large distance, idk.
Steelmanning aside, I agree with you. I’m just troubled by the fact that institutions tend to get as large and ineffectual and corrupt as they can until they collapse. I’m therefore interested in potential methods of creating a controllable disaster rather than allowing one to happen naturally.
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