Bureaucracies and Kipling: Why the DOGE initiative should concern Israel

Generating much controversy in America now is the initiative by the newly-designated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to pare down the federal government’s workforce.  New developments occur every day, and in some cases, every hour.  To make a gross understatement, the individual members of the U.S. government workforce are highly concerned – quite rightly – about the uncertainties as to how the DOGE initiative will affect their livelihoods.

I consider myself qualified to critique bureaucracies.  My undergrad and MBA degrees each concentrated on Management and Organizations.  And I have been a bureaucrat with the United States government, spending the money as a Procurement Agent and Contracting Officer with the Department of Defense (before being kicked upstairs to an Analyst position), and then collecting the money as an Attorney for the Internal Revenue Service.  For the record, I do not impute any negative connotations to the word “bureaucrat,” nor to service in a government bureaucracy as a career choice.

Every bureaucracy operates by certain dynamics, not because the bureaucracy has any particular mission, but because it is a bureaucracy.  The main dynamic is known as “Parkinson’s Law,” the eponymous title of a tome by C. Northcote Parkinson in which he codified his observations of the British colonial governments in Singapore and elsewhere.  In essence, Parkinson’s Law teaches that works or projects in a bureaucracy will expand to fill their allocated dimensions and limitations, whether in terms of time, budget, physical space, or personnel job billets.

Indeed, filling workforce positions was what my onboarding as a federal bureaucrat was all about.  It was mid-September and the DoD activity that first employed me needed to fill their vacancies before the end of the US government’s fiscal year on 30 September.  Less than seven minutes into the interview I had a job offer, but they needed a response very soon; they even offered to put me into a Leave Without Pay status for up to a month if I needed time to close things out with my then-current employer if I officially came aboard before the last day of September.  My onboarding was not alone; there were more than 20 newbies brought in during the end of fiscal year recruitment rush.

Conceptually, Parkinson’s Law makes sense.  The head of a bureaucratic unit rightly fears that underspending the budget for the fiscal year will lead to a budget reduction in future years.  Ditto with personnel billets, and even physical space for offices or other activities.  Likewise, a creative bureaucratic official who fears a shortage of work to justify his or her organization’s funding (or even its very existence) will often find additional projects or functions to fulfill.  The United States Secret Service, for example, was initially tasked by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to address the problem of currency counterfeiting (which it continues to do today), but following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 the Secret Service’s bailiwick was expanded to protect the President of the United States and other government officials.

Which brings us to another result of the Parkinson’s Law dynamic – mission creep.  Some bureaucracies do more than merely expand the ambit of their work; they actually shift the focus of their missions.  Sometimes the shift is rooted in technological developments, as was the refocus by the March of Dimes from polio to birth defects following the development of the Salk vaccine, or the Philadelphia Orchestra’s transition from an accoutrement of Philadelphia’s high society to music for the masses via the developing radio broadcast technologies.

And sometimes the mission creep is initiated by legal developments.  When I was with the IRS 30+ years ago, I half-jokingly mentioned to a colleague that same-sex marriage would be legalized in the United States on a taxation issue; and so it was with the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision in 2013.

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Even without mission creep, the expansions wrought through Parkinson’s Law inevitably complicate the processes within a bureaucracy, rendering the bureaucracy unable to effectively carry out its mission.  As a hyperbolic hypothetical example, let us say that a government bureaucrat of relatively high rank sees that the expenses of running the agency’s motor pool entail a rising cost of repairing and replacing brakes on the vehicles.  This bureaucrat then decrees that all agency employees need his or her approval in order to apply the brakes while driving (not all that far-fetched, considering that UPS trucks redirect the energy captured from the braking process to propelling the familiar brown vehicles).

The bureaucrat driving the vehicle, seeing a traffic jam ahead, takes out his or her cellphone (never mind the illegality of such an action), calls in to agency headquarters, and requests permission to apply the brakes.  The bureaucrat at headquarters who takes the call asks the driver for particulars concerning(1) the vehicle’s current speed; (2) the direction of the vehicle’s travel; (3) the names of other occupants of the vehicle, if any; and (4) the reference number of the authorization to use the vehicle.  After writing down (or typing in) the relevant information, the answering bureaucrat refers the matter to the relevant superior, who either approves or disapproves the brake application request.

It is obvious that in real life, the vehicle in this example would have crashed long before the driver would be permitted to apply the brakes.  But complex procedures actually do hinder a bureaucracy’s ability to timely respond.  Such is all the more prone to occur when an activity outsourced by the government is involved.  As Executor of my late sister’s estate more than 20 years after handing in my badge to the IRS, I had an experience with an IRS mailroom that had been A-76’ed.  I had sent an Express Mail letter to the IRS, with the address identifying the cognizant IRS bureaucrat by ID number.  The next day, I received a telephone call from the IRS mailroom; the A-76er in the mailroom had no way of knowing who the cognizant IRS bureaucrat was and asked me the name of the person (which I did not know; personal safety considerations give IRS bureaucrats good reason to not be publicly known by name).  The cognizant bureaucrat at the IRS did not receive the mailpiece in time to prevent a transfer of a significant asset that otherwise would have more than totally fulfilled my sister’s delinquent tax obligations, and so, the IRS had to write off the tax debt.

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Per my limited and unscientific experience, observations, and contacts, I note that the overwhelming majority of DoD employees, including and especially the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support where I worked 40 years ago, are dedicated to doing their jobs and have internalized quite well that their work can make a life-or-death difference for the military personnel they serve; but many have not internalized the fact that their funding has its limitations.

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of IRS employees are similarly dedicated to doing their jobs; they have internalized quite well that their function is to collect funds for the public fisc; but relatively few have adequately internalized that the dollars they collect are applied towards making other governmental functions happen.

But the IRS and the DoD are not reciprocal mirror images of one another.  Each of these government agencies has experienced some form of mission creep, but the mission of DLA Troop Support has crept far less than that of the IRS.  While the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision has placed the tax collector into the bedroom, the ObamaCare regime has effectively put the tax collector into the doctor’s examination room.  Moreover, the IRS, a bureaucracy specifically engineered to collect taxes, has become a dispenser of alms to the poor with the Earned Income Tax Credit, with many dysfunctions in the process.

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Houses need periodic painting, automobiles and other motor vehicles need servicing, pianos need tuning, and hedges need pruning.  Government bureaucracies similarly need to figuratively have their grass mowed from time to time by dint of the Parkinson dynamic.

There is no question that inefficiencies abound throughout the United States government, including the IRS and the DoD.  The reality is that there need to be cuts in the federal workforce.  The workforce reduction initiative now afoot is bitter medicine for many government employees, but the government bureaucracy cannot continue as it was before the current U.S. administration came in.  Some of the societal interests not directly related to the bureaucracy’s nominal function have been carried too far (can you say “DEI?”).

[I hasten to emphasize that unless they actively pushed to institute the off-mission activities now targeted by DOGE, the federal bureaucrats employed in such activities are innocent victims of the Parkinson dynamic.].

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Regardless of whether one loves or hates Donald Trump, there is no denying that his administration has been quite salutary to the safety and security of Israel.  Not only has the current President of the United States aided Israel in ways his predecessors have not, but he has actually walked back some of the harm his predecessors have inflicted upon Israel and the Jewish people.

A strong and efficient United States military is the key to not only the security of America, but also the security of Israel (and indeed, the entire free world).  The current DOGE initiative has high potential to deliver significant returns to the American taxpayers, but also runs an unprecedentedly high risk of disrupting and crippling the bureaucracies that facilitate a strong military force.  For this reason alone, Israel needs to watch quite attentively the current US administration’s reshaping of its government.

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I make no pretensions of objectivity or neutrality regarding the people of DLA Troop Support; having once served among their ranks (albeit in formerly stand-alone DLA activities that subsequently were consolidated into what is now DLA Troop Support), I unabashedly empathize with them during these troubling times.  My dedication in the book I co-authored 30 years ago is “To all my former colleagues at the Defense Logistics Agency … Patriots at work in the City of Brotherly Love.”

During my time with the IRS (my former colleagues there are also held in high regard on a personal level), there was talk of a possible reduction in force (“RIF”) in the Manhattan District where I worked.  Our union shop steward arranged for individual meetings between Management and each attorney in my Estate Tax group.  Each one of us made the following points to Management:  (1) Statistically speaking, the actuarial tables portended increased death numbers among high net worth individuals in the New York metropolitan area, and therefore, more Estate Tax Returns to process and examine; and (2) being that an Estate Tax Return audit also entails reviews of the decedent’s personal income tax returns, and in many instances, corporation income tax returns, we all had transferrable skills that applied to other positions within the IRS.

The DLA Troop Support employees need to make a case for the necessity of their functions.  The need for a strong and well-supported U.S. military force should be an obvious talking point in this regard.

DLA Troop Support, Philadelphia, PA

Which beings us to Rudyard Kipling.  One of his poems, “The Dutch in the Medway,” describes the extent to which the English Navy had been allowed to deteriorate during the reign of King Charles II (not to be conflated with the current British sovereign, Charles III).  My former colleagues at DLA Troop Support (and those who came aboard after I went onward) can use Kipling’s poetry as a cautionary tale to advance their cause:

If wars were won by feasting,
   Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
   How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion 
   Are not maintained so. 
They're only got by sword and shot, 
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

The moneys that should feed us 
   You spend on your delight, 
How can you then have sailor-men 
   To aid you in your fight? 
Our fish and cheese are rotten, 
   Which makes the scurvy grow– 
We cannot serve you if we starve,
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

Our ships in every harbour
   Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
   No oakum can be found;
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
   And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

Mere powder, guns, and bullets, 
   We scarce can get at all; 
Their price was spent in merriment 
   And revel at Whitehall, 
While we in tattered doublets 
   From ship to ship must row, 
Beseeching friends for odds and ends– 
   And this the Dutchmen know!  

No King will heed our warnings, 
   No Court will pay our claims– 
Our King and Court for their disport 
   Do sell the very Thames! 
For, now De Ruyter's topsails
   Off naked Chatham show, 
We dare not meet him with our fleet–
   And this the Dutchmen know!

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