Effective government, please

Efficiency is all the rage, even in the blue states. “Do more with less” is the battlecry. In my day it was “work smarter not harder” but I think harder work harder is the secret sauce in today’s wishful thinking, that and the panacea of frictionless perfect totally not scary nor dangerous AI.

But (forgive me, Mike G.) the Nazis were famously “efficient.” Efficiency is a value-free metric. How efficiently you are shredding baby squirrels in a blender can be measured just as how efficiently you are getting the trains to run.

So you can keep your non-Department not exactly in, by, with, or from not-understanding-the-Goverment Efficiency initiative of unvetted, uninvestigated, uncleared, untrained, unethical quasi-employee enforcers.

I’m thinking what we really need is not that dogeshite but rather something like (just spitballing here, no bad ideas in a brainstorm) a program of developing Effective Digital Government Experiences (EDGE).