To Save Our Government, We Must Dismantle It: Bring Modern Management to the Bureaucracy

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Commentary

As the National Debt Clock has now crossed $34 trillion—and a trillion just in the last quarter of 2023—it’s time to bring some serious, proven, managerial expertise to the federal government’s runaway spending.

November’s winner should immediately prioritize remaking the Washington bureaucracy from the ground up and ask the hard questions any responsible business manager would have asked decades ago.

Zero-Base Budgeting

America First firebrand Vivek Ramaswamy has departed the Republican inaugural sweepstakes, but not without leaving a valuable notion for the eventual winner of the presidential sweepstakes to pursue.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign promise to adopt zero-base (not “based”) budgeting to trim egregious federal spending certainly struck a chord with me, as I have been a fan of the process for more than 40 years.

Zero-base budgeting has been used by governments, businesses, and not-for-profits for more than half a century to reassess priorities, operations, and funding in a systemic, regular, periodic fashion.

Collage of “Zero-Base Budgeting” and “Lean/6σ” books from author's library. (© 2024. J.G. Collins. All rights reserved. Used by permission.)

Regrettably, Mr. Ramaswamy is not the first presidential candidate to make such a promise.

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Former President Jimmy Carter promised to adopt zero-base budgeting in his 1976 presidential campaign, after successfully implementing it as governor of Georgia. But Mr. Carter did nothing with it in the White House; I don’t know why. The Government Accountability Office was certainly well aware of it, as evidenced by a document from July 1977, just six months after President Carter took office.

Zero-base budgeting is different from the usual budget, wherein budgeteers just assess how much more, or less, to allocate to a given activity. Zero-base budgeting is not intended as a means to “cut” budgets. Instead, zero-base budgeting forces managers to assess what they are doing, and whether what they are doing is the best means of achieving organizational priorities and objectives. Zero-base budgeting is cathartic; it demands a reckoning of the organizational inertia that almost always results in waste. In the case of the federal government, I’m not aware that those priorities have ever been reassessed. Ever.

In zero-base budgeting, budgeteers, working with line managers, break down each task in an activity to assess whether the task is necessary to fulfill the activity to achieve the organizational objective. In many instances, it’s found that not just a given task is unnecessary but also that the overall activity is unnecessary. Sometimes, it’s found that the entire objective is unnecessary. On the other hand, zero-base budgeting, properly implemented, can result in more money being allocated to an activity to ensure it is properly carried out, such as long-neglected Veterans’ Services, for example.

Zero-base budgeting is a cathartic, demanding, time-consuming process that is not without execution risk. It often fails because senior management, the people who must be the prime drivers of the process, do not fully embrace it. But properly implemented, it will find the nooks and crannies of the enormous leviathan we call the federal government like flood waters immersing the lowlands of a shore and clean them out. It can eradicate deadwood and waste that should have been eliminated decades ago.

And although cuts to America’s so-called “entitlements” are, indeed, the “third rail” of politics, and Defense Department budget cuts are verboten by certain misguided elements of the U.S. political class, zero-base budgeting can be used to eliminate administrative and operational waste while still delivering the benefits to Social Security and Medicare recipients have earned, and needed defense dollars to our fighting men and women. But after a review of zero-base budgeting, those things will be done in a manner that is more efficient and at lower cost than has been traditionally done for decades.

Consolidation

There are, of course, other managerial practices and techniques that can and should be brought to bear on the federal budget, ranging from advanced managerial techniques such as Lean/Six Sigma to more straightforward, commonsense techniques such as consolidating cabinet departments.

Think about it: Do we really need a Cabinet-level Environmental Protection Agency if we have the Department of the Interior? Or separate departments of Labor, Energy, Transportation, and Agriculture when we have a Department of Commerce? Are these Cabinet departments actually necessary, or are they just legacy political sops to special interest constituencies whose support was needed for a president’s reelection or a boost in the congressional midterms?

Etching from “Destruction of Leviathan” by Gustave Doré (1865; public domain via Wikimedia Commons). The etching depicts the Our Lord slaying the Leviathan as described in Isaiah 27:1.

A Lasting Legacy

I have always asserted that we are merely stewards of the legacy left to us by the Founding Fathers—the brave, brilliant, but altogether very human beings who pledged their “Lives, ... Fortunes, And ... Sacred Honor” at Philadelphia in 1776. They brought about a wholly new type of Western government reflecting the most thoughtful elements of the Enlightenment, but in an act that was, for them, high treason punishable by death.

As our debt and uncontrolled spending accelerates to an existential threat of that beloved human enterprise, it is clear, certainly, that our next president must just as courageously take the lead and spend the enormous political capital necessary to save us. As in Isaiah 27:1, the next president must throw a tight net over America’s bureaucratic leviathan, bring it aboard the ship of state, and kill it so that its remnants can be distributed to the people as a better, more efficient, better managed—and, hopefully, far less costly—federal government.

It will be the next president’s greatest legacy, both to our nation’s history and our legatees.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.