The Department of Government Inefficiency

In which our new leaders apply lessons from the Soviet Union, bringing the Communist Party's "vertical of power" to America. This was written by a Network contributor. Your contributions are welcome.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is not about efficiency. It’s about destruction and control.

The Executive Order on “Ensuring Accountability for all Agencies” is a vision for government-wide inefficiency. It wipes out all of the the institutions and procedures that are needed for any government agency to function, along with any guardrails, transparency or accountability. The President and his Attorney General Matt Gaetz Pam Bondi will approve law, policy and guidance across all government agencies. In Trumpspeak, this is called “accountability to the American people.”

The system Trump is constructing is almost identical to what in Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia is called the “vertical of power”, in which all power across government is concentrated in a single leader. The system rewards loyalty in those who carry out their orders with the opportunity to gain wealth through corruption and patronage. In countries such as Kazakhstan and Russia, leaders provide loyal civil servants with the opportunity to control portions of the economy thereby enriching themselves and their families. This patronage system includes employing members of loyal families by giving them government salaries for positions they may or may not be qualified for. Public accountability isn’t even a question. Those who resist - or do not demonstrate their loyalty with enough enthusiasm, for example by calling the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico - face being fired, publicly humiliated, sued, arrested, and have have their assets seized.

In English, we talk about carrots and sticks.

In Russian the choices are more stark: the cake or the whip.

Trump’s problem with independent agencies is that they are independent. They “exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the President, and through him, to the American people…For the Federal Government to be truly accountable to the American people, officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people’s elected President. ”

When the Trump Administration uses the word accountability, they actually mean obedience. In normal times, regulatory agencies promote transparency through public records, expert testimony, collecting public comments on policies, and so on. The aim of this transparency and engagement is to ensure that the public has the information they need to hold officials accountable for their actions.

In Trumpspeak, accountability in this EO means the opposite of public accountability: it is attempting to create a bureaucracy that is accountable to the leader and his ideology. Section seven, in particular, seems to broadly apply to a variety of the functions that most agency experts perform in the course of their work, such as issuing guidance about how policies should be implemented.

In these systems, there is nothing efficient about government. Most bureaucrats “play act” that they are working but get very little done. They will not take action without direct “orders from above” either because they are afraid of getting in trouble or they don’t understand how to do their job. When they are not executing orders from above, they spend their time finding the least risky things to do, whether or not these activities advance the mission of their ministry or department.

This paralysis intensifies when there is uncertainty around what is and is not ideologically acceptable to the current regime. In Uzbekistan during its early post-Soviet transition, bureaucrats were instructed to implement President Islam Karimov’s vision for independence as outlined in the short books he wrote, trying to reframe activities they did under Soviet ideology as now fitting the ideology of independence. But none of them were empowered to try out new and different ways of realizing what their ministry could do now that they were independent. Instead, as their increasingly isolated and paranoid president deepened his grip on power, the independent state and its economy stagnated for more than 20 years.

Of course the United States is different. The vertical of power usually emerges from a previous autocratic system rather than from the breakdown of existing systems of checks and balances. However, the current administration has learned lessons from places like Hungary, where Victor Orban dismantled independent oversight and allowed the vertical of power to control how law is interpreted. This EO shows us how the United States can catch up to and even surpass Hungary in turning accountability into obedience.