For a couple of decades I had a job (well, a series of jobs) as a program evaluator for state legislatures. It was mostly enjoyable — for example, when governors denounced me by name in the press — but precarious, because in most legislatures staff members serve at the pleasure, with no civil service or union protection.
If your job is to tell legislators whether they are spending the people’s money wisely, some of them will be vexed if you find their pet programs deficient. One staff I worked in handled this by never stating any opinions or findings or recommendations. There was a lot of “it would seem to appear ...” or “the legislature might wish to consider …”
You will not be surprised to hear that I chafed under this regime until the agency figured out what to do with me. They seconded me to various ad hoc study committees who could say whatever the hell they found and recommend whatever they thought needed to be done. It was just swell.
Most of the rest of the time I was either a member or the director of a staff whose remit called for language as frank as we could support with evidence. So we did that, and kept alive a network of colleagues in other states in case we needed a job on short notice.
But I digress, as is my custom. Sorry about that.
An important part of useful program evaluation is keeping separate the concepts and methodologies of several distinct sets of criteria, which normal people usually conflate.
“Economy” means spending as little money as possible on a function. This is comparatively straightforward: If you spend less money this year than last, you are running the program more economically. If you are of the mindset of DOGE (pronounced around here as “dodgy”), you just cut spending as fast and deep as ever you can, and then go home to sleep the sleep of the just.
“Efficiency” means optimizing the function’s activity per unit of input. This is more difficult to assess. You have to decide what activities to measure and then sort out how to calculate the inputs’ unit cost. Miles per gallon is an efficiency measure; so is student-teacher ratio.
“Effectiveness” is yet more complicated, and means seeking to ensure that the program meets its stated goals. Schools were not established for the purpose of having low teacher-student ratios. High graduation rates and improved standardized test scores seem more on the mark. But what variables outside the schools’ control might also affect these results?
“Impact” means whether the program produces its desired results in society. Does the broader society think the purpose of education is to have high test scores, or actually to learn things? And if that’s it, what things and in aid of what social benefit? This is a terrific pain in the ass to assess because there are a whole lot of possible intervening variables, and increasingly fuzzy data on pretty much everything.
Here's the simple case: The most economical way to own an automobile is to leave it in the garage until trade-in. So you take your car out of the garage. The most efficient way to use it is to drive it around in a tight circle in a parking lot until the petrol is gone. You will get fabulous fuel mileage, but you won’t have any groceries. So you go to the store and buy some groceries, and your use of the car has become more effective. But the impact of your trip depends on what groceries you buy and what you do with them when you get them home.
Obviously there are unavoidable tradeoffs here. If you can’t make a program more effective by dumping more money into it or you can’t improve graduation rates by giving everyone a diploma at birth, you are too dumb to live. Efficiency and effectiveness are always in tension, and both must trade off with economy.
(For the moment we’ll put impact aside, because it’s really hard and it doesn’t start with E.)
It matters that people smoosh these notions together, because obviously DOGE is not doing anything in the gummint beyond locking the car in the garage. This is economy without either of the other E’s. It is also the limit of the MuskRat’s grasp of government, which by the way far surpasses that of the Prince of Orange.
I have worked as a staff member or a consultant for enough governments to know at least two things: First, there is some amount of wasted resource in every program and every government; and second, it’s not as much as you think, and nowhere near as much as Mr. Tangerine Man and his lapdogs seem to think.
Not much you can do about this, of course. The No Child Left Alive program and other victims of DOGE (do remember how to pronounce this) will roll along until my fellow Republicans get spine transplants and stop it — or, in an unlikely manifestation of poetic justice or karma or something, die because a program that could have saved them has been eliminated or mutilated.
In the meantime, if you feel you must get into conversations about this train wreck, try to steer the discussion to the Three E’s and see if you can foment a thoughtful exchange about whether the DOGE approach is the most likely to be helpful in our present situation. Try not to think about the odds of such an exchange, but give it a try anyway.
Do give a thought to the many dedicated public servants whose lives are in turmoil or ruins because a couple of arrogant and ignorant plutocrats are temporarily in charge of the asylum.
And if you meet any of these public servants or ordinary citizens who seek sympathy, find out how they voted before you grant any.
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