I think I’ve figured out where waste in government comes
from. I discovered the answer by going back to work for a government agency
on a part time basis. For the last seven months I’ve been running the local
transit authority in Clark County as the Interim CEO. Before that I’d spent
eight years in semi-retirement. Life was good and I only worked when somebody
hired me to do something or when I found something interesting to do.
Then I agreed to run C-TRAN as a half time job. Many of you might think that
the punch line for that statement is that it turned out to be a full-time job.
Well, it didn’t. It turned out to be almost exactly half-time because that’s
what I set out to do. I kept track of my time and I prioritized my efforts and
it worked out pretty well.
Now some of you might think that I’m going to tell you that waste in government
comes from executives who get paid for full-time work when I’ve just proven
that the job can be done in half the time. There’s some merit to that hypothesis
but it can’t be proven by my experience. As I said, I prioritized my efforts
to fit into a half-time mold so some things didn’t get done. It may be
that it really is necessary to spend 60 or more hours a week in these jobs if
everything is to get done. I don’t think that can be proven either because
the people who spend 60 or more hours per week still don’t seem to get
everything done.
No, the waste in government comes from a different source. What I found shortly after I took the job was that people started asking me for stuff. An old friend called and wanted to buy one of our old buses for his non-profit organization and he didn’t want to follow our procedures. Then there was the guy who wanted a bus stop and didn’t like what he heard about why it wasn’t justified. After just a few of these requests I noticed that in the eight years of semi-retirement that I had been enjoying I had none of these requests. Clients called and asked me to do work and paid me when it was done. No wasted motion, no little extras that had nothing to do with the job. Just the work and that’s it. Government isn’t like that. We have these pesky things called citizens who keep asking us for stuff. Because they’re our customers we have to deal with them. Some of the requests even make sense. But my point is that we spend a lot of time dealing with stuff like this and it doesn’t add anything to the bottom line.
This is why new cities are surprised to find out that government is costing more than the study told them it was going to cost. Some consultant prepared the bare bones budget they were told to prepare and everything looked good on paper when the new city was being considered. After the new city is formed, however, those pesky citizens show up at council meetings and they ask for things. It should come as no surprise that elected officials want to keep their jobs so they give citizens much of what they ask for. As time goes on the budget increases and people wonder why the consultant lied to them about the cost of the new city.
There’s another source of waste in government that’s
just as fundamental. I don’t agree with too much that Donald Rumsfeld comes
up with but he said something a few years ago that I think is really profound.
He was talking to some troops about why America chose to go to war with the
allies we had rather than waiting for everybody to sign on to the program. He
said that you don’t build the mission around the coalition, you build the
coalition around the mission. If you build the mission around the coalition
you dumb down the mission. He didn’t know it but he was describing most
regional planning efforts in America and explaining why they don’t work.
Governmental strategic planning is about inclusiveness and isn’t as focused
as business strategic planning. Therefore, we always dumb down the mission to
make it acceptable to everyone in the coalition.
So, there you have it, waste in government identified at the source, citizens
and their need to be involved. There’s probably no way to ignore our citizens
since they are why government exists in the first place so maybe there will
always be waste in government and we’ll just have to live with it. I said
I found the source, I didn’t say I found the solution.
As usual, comments or questions can be fielded at ostrowj@pacifier.com.