Myrtle Beach, SC
The second half of this question contains an assumption that is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters for the whole file.
The premise is that the civil service could shrink itself and has declined to. It could not. A career official at Health and Human Services cannot abolish a program Congress created. A contracting officer cannot repeal a statute. An agency head cannot decline to spend money that has been appropriated, at least not without running into a 1974 law written specifically to stop him.
So the concession being described is not that career employees lack the will. It is that they lack the authority, and so does the president, for most of what people mean when they say shrink the federal establishment.
That is not a technicality. It is the reason fifty years of efficiency drives have produced reports rather than reductions.
I work in marketing and I know what happens when a campaign identifies the wrong obstacle. You spend the budget on the wrong audience. If the obstacle is career resistance, you hire a famous outsider to break it. If the obstacle is that the spending is written into law, you need Congress and the outsider is beside the point.
Now, having said that — yes, name the outsider anyway.
Not because he can shrink anything. Because there is one thing a well-known outside executive supplies that no career official and no appointee ever can, and it is not analysis. It is somebody willing to absorb the blame.
Every cut has a constituency. Somebody has to be the face that constituency shouts at. Career officials cannot be that person, appointees will not be for long, and members of Congress absolutely will not. A famous man with no career to protect can be, and that is a genuine and underrated function.
So: yes to the named role, and no to the framing. The arrangement does not concede that the civil service will not reform itself. It concedes that nobody in the executive branch, career or political, can cut what Congress has written, and that somebody has to be willing to stand there while the shouting happens.
Novi, MI
A line that cannot scrap its own defective process hires an outside quality lead. That is the instinct and I want to test it against what the career service has actually produced, because the record is not what the second half of this question assumes.
The Government Accountability Office has published a High-Risk List every two years since 1990. Thirty-five years of it. It names the federal programs most vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, and it names them specifically — improper payments, Medicare, Medicaid, IT acquisition, DoD financial management, the same entries recurring for decades because nothing gets fixed.
The most recent improper-payment estimate is somewhere around two hundred and thirty-six billion dollars in a single year, and the cumulative figure since 2003 runs into the trillions.
Who produced those numbers? Career civil servants at GAO, at the inspectors general, and at the agencies themselves. Nobody smuggled them out. They are published, indexed, and free.
So the diagnosis exists. It has existed for thirty-five years, in extraordinary detail, produced by exactly the workforce this question accuses of refusing to reform itself.
In quality terms that is a crucial distinction. There are two different failures and they have different fixes.
Detection failure means nobody knows where the scrap is. Fix: better inspection, better instrumentation, an outside quality lead.
Response failure means everybody knows where the scrap is and nothing happens. Fix: authority, consequences, and somebody whose job depends on the number moving.
The federal government does not have a detection failure. GAO’s own accounting is that its work produces something on the order of sixty-seven billion dollars in financial benefits annually — a return of roughly seventy-six dollars for every dollar spent on it — and the improper-payment line has not moved.
That is a response failure, and an outside quality lead does not fix a response failure. An outside quality lead produces another report that joins the thirty-five years of reports.
So what would fix it?
Somebody with the authority to act on findings that already exist, and an obligation on Congress to vote when the findings require a statutory change. That is what the first Hoover Commission had in 1947 and what the Grace Commission conspicuously did not have in 1982.
I still want the outsider hired. Not to find the waste — it is found, catalogued, and published. To be the person who will not let the findings sit, and who has no career inside the building to protect while he refuses to let them sit.
Name him. Just be clear about the job. The job is not diagnosis. The job is refusing to accept the answer that has been accepted for thirty-five years.
Orange County, CA
Orange County boards hire turnaround managers when the staff will not propose their own cuts. That is the standard defence of this arrangement and I think it is only half right, so let me say what an outside executive actually supplies.
It is not information. The information exists. Every major waste category in the federal government has been documented for decades by GAO and the inspectors general, in public, with dollar figures.
It is not authority. An outside advisor has none. Under the announced structure he is explicitly outside the government, which means every actual decision will be taken by an officer with existing power.
What he supplies is willingness to be hated.
I work in finance and I have watched a dozen turnarounds, and the single scarcest input in all of them is a person who will take the reputational damage of the cut. The analysis is usually sitting in a drawer. What is missing is somebody prepared to be the villain in a newspaper for eighteen months.
Career officials cannot be that person — they have thirty-year careers and a pension and they will be there after the political appointees leave. Appointees will not be, because they want the next job. Members of Congress absolutely will not, because they want the seat.
A wealthy outsider with a fixed term and nothing to protect inside the building can be. That is the whole product, and it is worth real money.
Now the risk, which follows directly from the same fact.
Somebody hired for willingness to be hated will be hated, and hatred is not self-limiting. The identical trait that lets a man cancel a beloved contract also lets him cancel something load-bearing, because the internal check on both is the same and it has been deliberately removed. That is not a hypothetical vice of this particular person. It is the structural consequence of the hire.
So the design has to supply the check that the hire removed. In a corporate turnaround that check is a board. Here it would have to be an officer with signature authority who can be fired by a president who can be voted out, plus a published list of what was cut and why.
Neither of those exists in what was announced. What was announced is an outside advisory body with a nineteen-month clock and a partnership with OMB.
So my answer is: hire him, understand you are buying blame absorption rather than analysis, and build the board before you turn him loose. The second half of the question is a misdiagnosis — the career service has been producing the findings all along. What it has never been able to do is take the hit for acting on them.
Bismarck, ND
Run it the other way before deciding whether the arrangement is legitimate.
A Democratic administration brings in a billionaire donor with substantial federal contracts, gives him a named public role in reorganising the executive branch, no Senate confirmation, no statutory office, and a mandate to work from outside the government.
Would this Forum call that ordinary? It would not. It would want to know who he is accountable to, what happens to his contracts, and which officer signs when he recommends.
Same answer here, and those are the right questions in both directions.
In compliance work the test is never whether an outsider may be engaged. Outsiders are engaged constantly and there is nothing improper about it. The test is whether the engagement has three things: a defined scope, a named accountable officer inside the organisation, and a disclosure regime.
What has been announced has one scope in general terms and neither of the other two.
Now the second half, which I think is misstated. The claim is that this concedes the civil service will not reform itself. What the record shows is that the civil service has documented the problem exhaustively — GAO’s high-risk list has been published every two years since 1990 — and that nobody with the power to act has acted.
That is not a workforce refusing to reform. It is a political system refusing to receive.
So the concession, correctly stated, is that the elected branches have declined for thirty-five years to act on findings their own auditors handed them. Hiring an outsider does not fix that. It changes who is standing in front of the microphone when somebody finally does.
I would take the hire. I would attach the officer and the disclosure. And I would stop telling career employees they refused to do a job that was never within their power, because you will need those people to run whatever survives.
Clermont, FL
Parks do not ask the gift shop to close itself. That is the instinct behind this question and it needs one correction before it works.
The gift shop cannot close itself. Not because the staff are unwilling — because the lease is held by somebody else.
Most of what people mean by the federal establishment is written into law. Programs exist because Congress created them and money flows because Congress appropriated it. A career official who decided tomorrow to stop running a program would not be a reformer; he would be committing a firing offence and probably violating a statute.
I consult with small businesses and this comes up constantly with owners who are frustrated that their people will not fix something. Nine times out of ten the people cannot fix it — it is a vendor contract, a lease, a franchise term — and the owner has been directing his irritation at the only group in the building without the authority to help him.
That is the shape of the second half of this question.
So what can an outside executive actually do?
He can look at things that are within executive discretion — contracts, leases, vacant positions, IT projects that are not delivering, payments that should not have gone out under current law. That is a real portfolio and it is not small.
He cannot abolish a program, and neither can the president, and no amount of energy changes that.
What I would want is for the brief to say so, in public, on day one. Here is what we can do without Congress. Here is what requires a vote. Here is the list we are sending to the Hill.
Say that and you get two useful things at once. You avoid the disappointment in eighteen months when the establishment is still there. And you put the members on record, by name, on the things they will not touch.
Hire the outsider. Give him the discretionary portfolio. And be honest that the rest of it is a legislative problem wearing an administrative costume.
Jacksonville, FL
Ports do not ask the extra crane crew to write the layoff list. That is sound and I want to work through what the announced arrangement actually permits, because “named role in shrinking the federal establishment” describes something nobody has been given.
The founding statement puts this group outside the government, advising and partnering with OMB. Outside means no appointment, no line authority, and no ability to sign anything. Every action will be taken by an officer of the United States who already has the power to take it.
So the named role is a role in recommending. That is not nothing and it should be described accurately, because the alternative descriptions — a shadow government on one side, a new department on the other — are both wrong and both will get used for a year.
The outside status also raises a statute nobody in this Forum has mentioned. The Federal Advisory Committee Act was written in 1972 for exactly this: private citizens convened to give collective advice to the President. It requires a charter, balanced membership, open meetings, and public records. There are exceptions and I expect one to be found, but the choice matters enormously.
Outside means advisory-committee law and no authority. Inside means real authority and federal conflict-of-interest law, which for a man with substantial federal contracts is a very different proposition.
Somebody has to pick, and the announcement picked outside, and the consequence is that the shrinking will be done by appointees while the recommending is done by a volunteer.
Now the second half, which I think is misdirected. The claim is that this concedes the civil service will not reform itself. The career service has produced the waste findings continuously — GAO’s high-risk list every two years since 1990, inspectors general reports by the thousand, improper-payment estimates in the hundreds of billions annually, all of it public.
The finding has never been the missing input. The missing input is anybody obliged to act on it.
So the honest concession is not about the workforce. It is that the elected branches have received a detailed map of the waste for thirty-five years and have declined to follow it, and that the response to that failure is now to hire a famous person to point at the map more loudly.
That might work. Attention is a real currency and this man commands more of it than any auditor ever will. But it is a bet on publicity rather than a fix to the structure, and if the publicity fades before the structure changes, the map goes back in the drawer where it has been since 1990.
Name him. Charter him properly so the FACA question is answered rather than dodged. Attach an officer who signs. And put the recommendations in front of a committee that has to vote, because that is the only part of this that has ever worked in American history.
Las Vegas, NV
Houses that need to cut a shift do not take applications from the shift. That is the instinct and it is right as far as it goes.
What I want to point at is what happened on the Hill four days ago, because it is the most encouraging thing in this whole file and almost nobody covered it.
Both men went to Capitol Hill on the fifth and spent the day with House and Senate Republicans. A Senate caucus is forming around this. A House subcommittee is being organized.
That matters more than the announcement did, and here is why. Every outside efficiency body in American history has succeeded or failed on exactly one variable: whether Congress was in the room at the start.
The Hoover Commission in 1947 was created by Congress, chaired by a former president, and something like seventy percent of what it recommended was enacted. The Grace Commission in 1982 was created by a president alone, produced forty-seven volumes, and Congress received them and did nothing.
Same idea, same kind of people, opposite outcomes, and the difference was a vote.
So the fifth of December is the single most important date in this story so far. Not because a caucus does anything by existing — caucuses are cheap — but because it is the first sign that somebody understood the failure mode.
In my business we would say the house has finally invited the pit into the meeting about the pit.
On the question itself: yes to the named outsider, and the concession is real but it is a concession about Congress rather than about the civil service. The auditors have been publishing the numbers for thirty-five years. The people who never voted on them are the ones now forming a caucus about it.
Better late. Watch whether the caucus produces a bill or a hashtag. That is the whole test and we will know inside a year.
Knoxville, TN
They will not cut themselves, and that is the record. That is what I would have said, and the design question is more specific than that.
Ask what an outsider is being brought in to supply, and there are only three candidates.
Information. Not this. GAO has published a high-risk list every two years since 1990 and the improper-payment estimates run into the hundreds of billions annually. The map exists.
Authority. Not this either. The announced structure puts the group outside government, which means no authority at all. Every action will be signed by somebody else.
Political cover. This is the one. A famous person with no career inside the building can absorb the reputational cost of a cut in a way that no career official, appointee, or member of Congress can.
So the product is cover, and once you name it that way the design requirements become obvious.
Cover is only useful if somebody uses it to act. A cutter with nobody willing to sign behind him is a man shouting at a wall. So the arrangement needs a paired officer — somebody Senate-confirmed, with authority, who moves when the outsider recommends and takes the political consequence with him.
And cover has a short shelf life. Public attention on any one figure runs perhaps eighteen months at the outside. The nineteen-month clock in the announcement is, whether by accident or design, roughly the half-life of the asset being purchased.
In public works terms: you have hired a battering ram. Rams work once, they work on doors, and they do not hold anything up afterward. If the door opens and nothing structural gets built in the following year, the wall reassembles and the ram goes home.
So yes to the hire, with the paired officer, and with the understanding that the concession being made is not about the civil service. It is that the elected branches have had the map since 1990 and needed somebody willing to be shouted at before they would look at it.
