TL;DR - The compounding consequences and constitutional violations by DOGE should be a call to action for practitioners of multi-stakeholder work, which needs to prove it can move quickly and decisively in complex environments in order to avoid future chainsaw approaches to government reform.

We seem to be in a moment where you have to work especially hard to find some cause for optimism, but in that spirit, today I want to look at the US Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, for a bit of a silver lining. While the whole thing might look like a train wreck, what I want to know is: can we learn anything from it?

Many Canadians like myself are watching in dismay as the administrative state of our neighbour to the South is being hacked to pieces, with the many checks and balances that have held them together for centuries are dismantled at a record pace.

While Elon Musk’s slash and burn tactics at Twitter caused some disappointment in the loss of what was - for some - a beloved platform, they were also a source of schadenfreude as the scattershot cuts destabilized the site, alienated users, repelled advertisers and violated a host of legal obligations. It was easy to sneer as Musk’s ham-handed tactics failed to account for the social, technical and legal complexities of running a modern social media platform.

But government is another animal entirely.

A few years ago I read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, which stemmed from a column he had been writing about the various functions of US Government Agencies. Lewis began writing the column because he realized that at this stage, many Americans had no idea what agencies like the US Department of Agriculture or the Department of Energy actually did. His research happened to be ongoing when the first Trump transition took place, so he saw first hand as critical fumbles took place with the machinery of government took place, such as an employee finally going home with the nuclear codes when no one relieved him of duty.

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While in many Western countries there has been a narrative for years that government should be run more like a business, the fact is that no businesses exist that have both the obligation to service and the level of complexity that governments have. While business may have some practices and principles to be applied to elements of government, the idea of simply “running it like a business” is like saying you should run a railway like a bicycle - sure, they both have wheels and move things, but they exist for very different reasons.

At the same time, I think that it is important to recognize that political moments don’t just appear out of nowhere. The narrative of porting business into government, I think, comes in part from the view that businesses face a kind of Darwinian pressure to deliver that governments don’t, meaning that organizations that fail to deliver simply cease to exist. While this is debatable, I think it reflects a growing sentiment in Western democracies that governments are increasingly expensive, inept and incapable of change.

Enter Elon Musk

With his very subtle chainsaw metaphor, Musk has, in very short order, made more changes to the US government than, I think, anyone would have thought possible. Entire agencies shuttered, whole functions erased, and tens of thousands of employees sent packing. Clearly the business principle he is bringing in is “Move Fast and Break Things” - the early motto in Facebook used to experiment, iterate quickly and adapt based on results. In this case, cut everything, and if any of that causes a problem, switch it up and keep moving. Instead of debating what might happen, make the change and find out, then make more changes based on what you find out.

But as we’ve seen, the stakes are somewhat higher with the US Government than with, say, a micro-blogging platform. We’ve already seen programs to prevent ebola get briefly cancelled, workers who maintain nuclear weapons get furloughed and those responsible for fighting forest fires get sent home.

“Breaking things” on Twitter might cause some slow load times or a glitchy livestream. With the government, breaking things might mean nuclear disaster or a global pandemic.

Silver Lining

So, you may be asking; where is that silver lining I was talking about? What Musk has demonstrated is that, well, it turns out rapid change is possible in government. It also demonstrates one possible method for doing it, and a host of lessons that we are likely only just beginning to be able to learn from.

I’ll say up front that taking a chainsaw to a set of functions you don’t understand that affect the lives and wellbeing of millions of people is a terrible idea. It is almost inevitable that something very bad will happen.

I do think, however, that it is worth being specific about why it’s a bad idea, and also, if there’s anything that we can learn from it.

Why Chainsaws are Bad for Surgery

The four main issues with Musk’s approach are around risk, complexity, authority and purpose.

First, with risk, there does not seem to be any weighting to account for how much caution should be taken relative to the risk of the functions they are playing with, whether immediate - in the case of nuclear weapons - or long term, as in the case of kneecapping research. Generally, one would assume that the greater the risks involved with an effort, the more effort should be put into mitigating those risks. While juggling rubber balls and juggling chainsaws are both juggling, most would approach the latter with a bit more caution than they might the former.

Second, making changes becomes more fraught in complex environments where second and third order effects might not be immediately obvious. Governments in general, and the US Government in particular, are highly complex, navigating a wide array of responsibilities, legal requirements, security considerations as well as constitutional and treaty obligations. Given the status of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent superpower, there are also a web of geopolitical implications that extend far beyond the nation’s borders. Governments span a dizzying array of functions, with responsibility sometimes spanning across agencies, and systems of varying vintages supporting all kinds of mission-critical processes which are, in many cases, poorly documented, if at all.

Third, as is becoming increasingly clear, Musk’s group appears to lack the necessary authority to carry out their efforts. As he moves from agency to agency, cancelling contracts, seizing data and laying off staff, the justice system has been following, identifying a litany of legal, employment and constitutional violations.

Finally, one of the factors that is animating opposition the most with DOGE is the lack of any clearly defined purpose in their actions. While “efficiency” is often touted as an end in itself, it is actually simply a measure of the resources required to achieve a specific goal within a set of constraints. What is happening with DOGE, however, is the wholesale dissolution of functions because the goal is deemed unimportant, rather than finding the approach inefficient. Further, having a private citizen who is a recipient of significant government funding and whose activities are regulated by agencies he is now influencing creates - I’ll be generous - a lack of clarity on what the objectives, decision criteria and guiding principles of DOGE’s activities might be.

Speedrunning Complexity

When I first started in consulting at Capgemini Ernst & Young, I was in a group called the Accelerated Solutions Environment, which was based on the MGTaylor method, which I still use to this day. Most of the major consultancies still have some variation of this method somewhere in their mix of offerings - with notable investments by PwC, KPMG and Oliver Wyman building out their capabilities and Capgemini continuing with its own.

The conceit of the method, as we practiced it then, was to compress decision making in complex, high risk situations by gathering all the “right” people (decision makers, influencers and implementers) in a room, giving them access to all the information they would need, and running them through an intensive, three day, highly iterative process that would end in a decision and a plan to move forward.

There was obviously a lot of marketing jargon we built around the offering - “months or years of work in three days!” - but there was actually something to it. If you add up all the meetings, emails, working groups and conference calls, making a major policy or strategy change can take AGES. Not to mention that over time, groups tend to lose the plot and settle on the easiest answer. So, compressing that process, and making sure that everyone who either had knowledge or influence was in the room and fully dedicated to generating an outcome actually can allow for a significant amount of acceleration.

The challenge was that getting leadership teams to fully sign on to an intensive process where stakeholders of varying levels would roll up their sleeves side-by-side was always a tough sell. And in many multi-organizational processes, stakeholders would rather send subordinates to consult than to send decision-makers to commit.

What we’re seeing with DOGE, however, are the consequences of not being able to make meaningful change in complex environments on a meaningful timescale. What DOGE has succeeded in doing is making significant change non-negotiable and unavoidable, which is, actually, rather significant.

Due Process

This, to me, is where the idea of “due process” in decision-making is so important. The justice system accepts that in order to render judgement in a criminal proceeding, there are certain considerations that should be made, certain rules and procedures that should be followed, and certain types of evidence that should - or shouldn’t - be brought in to the decision making process if it is to be considered fair.

There is also the imperative built into the justice system that, however exhaustive the process might be, the end result will be a decision.

For anyone that has been involved in a “public consultation” or a “strategic review” in government, however, or even a multi-stakeholder process, there is not necessarily the same imperative. A lengthy process might end in a series of recommendations. Inter-agency talks might end up deadlocked. Inexpedient evidence might be ignored, and turf battles might undermine processes completely.

So, to learn from the DOGE example, and imagine how we might do things better to make change across our public services, the question becomes, how do we address the complexity of public services while at the same time running a decisive process that produces provably better results for citizens?

I fundamentally believe that a multi-stakeholder approach is the best way we know to address all of the interdependencies in a modern government. It’s not really rocket science to suggest that if you are going to make major changes to something like, say, forestry services, you should involve those responsible for leading them, but also those familiar with actually delivering those services, those who understand how they intersect with urban environments, how climate change might affect the future and so on. If a service is meant to solve a problem, it doesn’t seem crazy to consider all aspects of that problem to make a decision about how to address it. But complexity shouldn’t be a license to “agree to disagree.” At some point, a decision needs to be made, and that decision, ideally, should reflect the very best of our knowledge of the issue.

Those in my industry know that a well designed process with the right people in the room focusing on a problem uninterrupted, with the right information at hand and working through tight, iterative cycles can solve enormously complex problems in a matter of days, if properly supported. Which is to say, from a process perspective, it is absolutely possible to make good decisions very quickly about highly complex, interconnected issues, if certain conditions are met.

The complexity and risk elements that DOGE gets wrong are mitigated simply by ensuring that the right stakeholders, with direct knowledge, influence and decision-power over the issue are involved in the process.

Having a well defined purpose for the change is absolutely fundamental to the success of the effort, and is not only a major driver of what DOGE is getting wrong, but is also why so many change initiatives go off the rails. Clarity on the purpose, in this case, comes both from a definition of why the change is being made, but also rooted in why the function being changed exists in the first place. A lack of coherence in either of these areas is almost a guarantee of a poor decision. Why does NOAA exist? Why does the Department of Education exist? What outcomes are they designed to create? If we don’t know what, specifically, they are meant to do, it is very difficult to meaningfully change them, or even to make them more efficient. If cutting back on researchers doing weather modelling saves millions, but exposes us to billions more in damage from weather events, is that more efficient? Because there is a dissonance there, it also means everyone in the process becomes naturally suspicious of the purpose of the change effort itself - are we really working towards efficiency (achieving the same outcomes with fewer resources), or are we just not interested in those outcomes any more? Have we just decided that we’re better off when hurricanes and tornadoes are a surprise?

I cannot stress enough how important that clarity of purpose is - it is foundational to any kind of intentional change.

What DOGE almost gets right, and where a lot of multi-stakeholder processes fall apart or end up stuck is on the authority front. I say DOGE gets this almost right because, by simply pretending that they have the authority, DOGE has, indeed, been able to make changes at a scale and pace that were, to me, previously unimaginable. I also say almost, because it seems that they don’t actually have that authority, and are, more or less, violating the constitution.

But as a thought exercise, an interagency body tasked with change that has the authority to make final decisions is a powerful tool, if it were to exercise that power according to an acceptable set of processes. Similarly, having the necessary stakeholders in the process include decision makers that are obligated to make a decision - like a collaborative form of binding arbitration - could still preserve autonomy in such a process.

This, to me, is what caught my attention as Elon waded into the government with his chainsaw, and it is also what is so tragic about how the opportunity is being squandered by his haphazard approach. Whether it is in Crown-Indigenous negotiations, the creation of Digital Services in government or even changing policy on waste disposal, the proximity of authority in stakeholder processes prevents them from being decisive, and the removal of decision-pressure allows procedural drift and a lowering of expectations that becomes corrosive over time. If you know a process is just for show, or has no stakes, you know you don’t have to take it seriously.

Move Fast and Fix Things

The optimist in me hopes that we can use the shock of the current moment to put energy into really fixing things. The Trump administration only became possible in a timeline where frustration, stagnation and a lack of confidence in our collective ability to make things better have all been festering under the surface. Throughout Western democracies, our perceived inability to make change is giving space for leaders who gain power with little more than a promise to burn it all down.

We already have the tools and methods to move quickly; we just need to use them with courage, proving to ourselves that we can be decisive without being destructive.

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