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Max Stier is the president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. He wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, seems motivated by the popular Silicon Valley mantra of “Move fast and break things.” When it comes to the federal government, however, that’s a recipe for disaster.
The president-elect is right that the public deserves a more efficient government. That’s why the Partnership for Public Service, where I am president and CEO, has spent more than 20 years advocating for reforms to build a more modern and dynamic government.
But proposals to arbitrarily fire huge portions of the workforce or eliminate vital agencies such as the FBI would put essential public services and national security at risk.
DOGE will not be the first effort to bring a “business perspective” to government reform. For decades, presidents have convened similar groups, composed of corporate and public-sector leaders, to streamline federal operations and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse. The results have been mixed.
Business-world principles have an important place in government reform. But running the government like a business — especially a technology startup — simply won’t work.
The fundamental purpose of government is to ensure public safety and to represent the public interest when dealing with social, economic and political problems. Efficiency is important — but effectiveness, reliability and accountability are even more so. If veterans’ hospitals were to treat more patients, for example, but rush through critical diagnoses, the consequences would be grave.
When a private company is dismantled, customers lose access to its goods and products. But the market, so the theory goes, will eventually offer alternatives. In government, a total restart would create gaps in crucial services and could result in missing Social Security benefits, unsanitary food and water, or inadequate responses to natural disasters.
Calls for government efficiency have real merit. The government should indeed use its resources wisely, and it already has a central watchdog agency as well as inspector generals in just about every federal agency. Instead of breaking the government, DOGE should start by carrying out many of the good ideas these organizations have identified.
Here are three additional suggestions for how DOGE could pursue a more accountable and responsive government.
First, the new administration should choose agency leaders who are capable managers of large organizations and will prioritize fixing current government operations, not just announcing new policies.
All political appointees should have performance plans, like career civil servants currently do, and these plans should be made public and used to hold agency leaders accountable. These plans should also ensure agency programs deliver specific outcomes and that the career workforce is equipped to meet them. They should also include high expectations around the hiring and recruiting of qualified talent and assessing how employees experience the workplace to improve performance.
Second, Congress should reform the appropriations process so agencies receive predictable funding.
Legislators have not passed on-time appropriations in nearly three decades, instead relying on shutdown threats and the provision of stopgap funding, or continuing resolutions, to keep the government running. This forces agencies to waste time and money on shutdown planning, pause critical services and halt investments in long-term innovation.
To start, Congress should prioritize bipartisan legislation that would automatically continue government funding at existing levels when Congress and the president miss the deadline to enact yearlong appropriations bills.
Third, rather than resorting to slash-and-burn cuts to federal services, agencies and Congress should prioritize a full menu of options to make them more modern and customer-focused.
That should include updating the government’s badly outdated IT systems, investing in the safe and responsible use of artificial intelligence, making it easier for agencies to share customer data, and instituting hiring practices reform that would enable the government to match the best of the private sector in the recruitment of tech, data and customer-experience talent.
In leading DOGE, Musk and Ramaswamy have a real opportunity to make the U.S. government work better. Our federal government definitely needs improvement. But there are better alternatives to breaking it further.
