It's Necessary To Continuously C Northcote The Bureaucracy

Not just government, all and any bureaucracy

The problem is not that this is happening. It’s that this is not seen as a necessary and continuing task. In all organisations of all types:

US state department announces plan to lay off nearly 15% of its domestic staff

Several hundred bureaus will be merged or eliminated after supreme court sided with Trump administration

This has to be done - even if the State Department is the most important thing in the world it still needs to be done:

The layoffs, which are commonly called reductions in force (or RIFs), along with voluntary redundancies, will affect nearly 15% of the state department’s domestic staff. A senior state department official said that was close to 1,800 people. The restructuring will also see several hundred bureaus merged or eliminated entirely.

This is true of all organisations, always.

State department officials said they wanted to eliminate redundant positions and agencies, noting that there were three offices at the state department managing sanctions policy, and that other offices had “proliferated” under Bill Clinton during the post-cold war era.

Don’t forget that each bureau will have a head, a deputy head, there will be assistants to the head, the deputy head - and then we will start getting down to the level of the three people in any one of each bureau that actually does anything. Well, OK, that’s to claim that a bureau of the State Department does anything but that’s not a point of the observation here.

The Guru here, the epitome of the management science, is C Northcote Parkinson. Best remembered for Parkinson’s Law - work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But a deeper thinker than that aphorism.

The essential point being that the output of a bureaucracy is bureaucracy. There is nothing measurable that is being done, no financial value being put upon the work. Sure, sure, it might even be that what is being done is of value - we’ve not got a simple measure of it though.

Therefore a bureaucracy measures itself by the budget and staff count. The success of a bureaucracy - a bureau perhaps - is measured by increases in either or better both. Which really does mean that the output of having a bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.

In the private sector this occurs as well. That’s how the power skirts get to take over large corporations. Of course, at some point in that process the company runs out of money and goes bust - the land is cleared for the next attempt to actually add value.

With government that doesn’t happen. Which leads to one of my favourite little thoughts - every civilisation survives until it is parasitised, eaten from within, by its own bureaucracy. We’d probably prefer that this didn’t happen. Yes, anarchy is all very well in theory but no one does like it when the bins aren’t emptied and there’s no state left to keep the French at bay.

The result of this is that the state bureaucracy needs to be pruned. Always. The actual job of a minister is - should be at least - to muse on what shouldn’t be done any longer and who can we fire? As should be the waking thought of any CEO of course.

My preference - because I’m extremist, obviously - is that we just fire them all. Then hire back the 2% we actually do require in order to have a civilisation. Remember, the Empire ran India with 1,000 men. And, well, it’s not wholly obvious that it’s been run any better than that since then.

That’s therefore the job of a manager. To get all C Northcote on bureaucracy. Always and everywhere. If you prefer your phrasing a little more red blooded the answer to bureaucrats is the Carthaginian Solution. Not that anyone would buy them as slaves, not productive enough, but we can try, right?