Everyone wants to fix the government, but nobody ever really succeeds. It’s not that the ideas aren’t right or that people aren’t smart enough – but those can be problems too. It’s because governments are ecosystems, and you can’t just fix one part of it, or remove one part of it. You need to know where the boundaries are. I was part of the first Reinventing Government program under Vice President Gore. Some great ideas never saw the light of day because they crossed too many boundaries. One that I liked was making Post Offices shared government service centers. It addressed the coming transition to email (early 1990s), and it addressed a real need in most American communities – access to services. But it would have involved dozens of departments coordinating and sharing costs and died under its weight.
Others were killed because certain people thought they would lose their little piece of the political pie. Still, others failed because their scope was limited to a specific area that didn’t encompass the whole project. Demonstrating how a process that once took 4 hours had expanded into 7 days didn’t win me a lot of points. Things are the way they are because they got that way. Understanding how things evolve is key to understanding how to fix the problems.
What about Systems?
If you can’t fix the processes or the ecosystem, maybe you can fix the systems. There are two main problems here; assuming everyone needs to use the same system, and assuming that everyone’s needs are different. My last few years in the Federal government were spent consolidating 42 different systems down to 23ish since there was lots of duplication, there was no communication in contracting, and they needed to be interoperable.
Fast forward a few years and I have dealt with the opposite issue more than once on the state side. It usually involves someone who thinks it’s better to use the same system for different agencies because it’s efficient contractually. The reason there are over 400 Electronic Medical Record systems in the market is that different populations have different needs. For instance, a psychiatric facility doesn’t need trauma ER capabilities. Group homes need a very different scheduling system, etc, etc.
There’s also a third problem which is caused by funding sources and the complexity of doing cost allocation across programs. It may be next to impossible for agencies to share the same system or even the same contract, based on contracting rules, security, and other considerations.
Adapting to Change
Governments are a lot like cargo ships. Once in motion, it takes a long time to change direction or stop. The average cargo ship needs 2 to 4 miles to stop at full speed. Governments take a comparable amount of time to pivot. Many government job descriptions haven’t been changed since the 1980s. When was the last time you needed Cobol or worked on a mainframe?
Remote work is an interesting example. We had a situation with Covid that happened overnight, and people adapted relatively quickly. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) studied remote work in government for several years and showed that it improved productivity and saved money. Still, some leaders in both government and the corporate world are not comfortable with remote work despite the documented benefits. Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) is known for saying he believes people should work in an office and usually gets quoted as such. If you listen to full interviews, he does acknowledge that his preference for in-person work is not supported by research. Too many decisions are being made by not paying attention to actual research.
A Novel Solution
If you want to know how to fix government – wait for it – ask the people who do the work. Is that so hard? Apparently it is. Otherwise, more leaders would actually do it. This generally means setting personal/political agendas aside and listening. It also means setting aside existing structures and organization charts. This is going to scare people higher in the food chain.
We also need a couple of new concepts. First, government should be focused on service and not homesteading. There should be term limits for all elected officials, and government employees should have service limits up to a certain level. The Military has a similar model where you can serve up to a certain point unless you reach specific ranks. Almost all governments are top-heavy organizations with a workforce that is about 10 years older than the country’s workforce as a whole. Most people think a government org chart should look like a pyramid. But if you look at governments based on employment history, they often look more like a parfait glass.
They tend to have a wide base and then it constricts at the 5-7 year employment mark where people find there aren’t opportunities for advancement. Those that cross the barrier are in it for the long term. Over time this often results in organizational changes to allow upward mobility for people in structures where there is nowhere to go. Eventually, this might look a little odd as people change positions. It also results in dysfunctional organizations where processes are designed around positions and not the flow of the work.
Government agencies also need to regularly reinvent themselves. For those of us who learned Total Quality Management, it’s about continuous process improvement. One caveat about TQM-related initiatives is that they focus on reducing waste. This sounds great in theory, but eventually, you optimize things to a point where they are no longer resilient to unintended change. This is why so many things broke during Covid. We need to remember that government agencies are ecosystems and they don’t just need to be efficient, they need to be able to adapt to unplanned change.
