Where does government inefficiency come from?

The following commentary is written for publication in LeftWingCapitalist by my good friend and multiple-time guest commentator Guy Heston.

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In many communities across our nation it is local election time. Mayors, council members, county supervisors, sheriffs, prosecutors and so forth will soon be elected, re-elected, not elected or thrown out of office. Predictably, many of the want-to-be elected officials include in their platform that one of their goals if elected will be to make the government entity to which they want to be elected more efficient. They will ferret out waste! They will make sure the taxpayers' dollars are well protected! They will cut back administrative overhead! Etcetera.

This particular form of campaign rhetoric begs the question: where does government inefficiency come from? There are many sources, of course. We can all tell stories of trying to work our way through the system, say at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  But having managed in the public sector for over 30 years I can tell you with absolute certainty that one of the greatest sources of government inefficiency is (drum roll here).... elected officials! Yes, the very ones who get elected swearing they will make government more efficient proceed to make it more inefficient.

For instance, elected officials often want to study something, especially if they think the study will forward their agenda. In my hometown in the past month the city council has considered ordering the city staff to conduct two studies: one on the possibility of offering free preschool to all local children and another on making records of all city expenditures available on-line. I don’t necessarily disagree with either of these concepts, but let’s be clear it takes time and effort to study. If I were city manager of my hometown, I would establish a “Department of Studying Things.” It would not be cheap considering the city council’s proclivity to order things studied. And if you want to know why it takes so long to get a request, permit or application moved through your local city hall, well it might be because the staff is busy studying something they were ordered to study by the governing body.

Once things are studied, there is often a resulting rule, regulation, law or ordinance duly passed by the elected officials, which results in rules and regulations promulgated by the public servants (sometimes called bureaucrats) trying to implement the idea which was studied and passed into law. To see how this works, look no further than the private sector trying to bid on a government contract. I cannot tell you how many times in my career I told a prospective supplier who complained upon receipt of a jaw dropping gazillion pages (rough estimate) request for proposals/bids that the various rules and regulations with which they must comply, the forms and certifications that must be filled out and so on were required by law (that would be a law passed by elected officials who presumably wanted to make the government more efficient). Sadly, many of the suppliers would not bid because it was too much hassle. And we had a person on staff designated to try to walk prospective suppliers through the byzantine process of making an offer. Yes, the staff person had to be paid salary and benefits. When I was accused by a prospective supplier of being an inefficient bureaucrat, and believe me this happened more times than I would care to remember, I would advise the complainant  to contact their elected officials to request a change in the law as I was simply implementing what was required by said law as efficiently as possible.

There is much fun to be had in carrying on about government inefficiency and it’s an easy topic to include in a candidate’s election mailers.  My advice is to just be sure to ask for the specifics of exactly how the candidate will reduce government inefficiency. What will he or she not study?