In this fable of “good” vs. “evil,” the “good” forces of efficiency must chainsaw their way through the administrative state and the rules and processes that its “evil” bureaucrats hide behind. Even the political voices opposing Musk’s efficiency drive explicitly accept the goal, arguing that DOGE’s actions (for instance, firing inspectors general) are the wrong way to improve efficiency. On the centrality of “efficiency,” there is bipartisan support, even in these polarized times.

But could it be that the problem lies in our collective acceptance of “efficiency” as the core value proposition of the state, to be unquestioningly maximized at every turn? The state is far more than a public goods cousin of Amazon.com, and the quest for efficiency above all else constitutes a collective forgetting of what government is or can be.

From endless paperwork queues to demands for bribes and shoddy quality of basic services, state inefficiency imposes great costs to citizens, with the most vulnerable paying the greatest price. Greater efficiency saves collective time and money. But the singular focus on an “efficient state” is not just potentially counterproductive—it is also a dangerous and slippery slope toward authoritarianism.

To make efficiency the overarching goal of government in fact undermines its performance. For more than two decades, we have studied the administrative state in contexts as diverse as India, Thailand, Liberia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our scholarship highlights that when efficiency becomes the primary goal, performance generally falls. The state works best when its actors—the “unelected” bureaucrats that have become DOGE’s primary target—are empowered with discretion and autonomy, and when they are held accountable by a shared sense of mission. Successful delivery of state services requires judgment from humans who are capable of balancing the multiple competing needs of service delivery.

This is not a challenge just in the United States; across the globe, efficiency is often the ruse used to pursue a much deeper project of democratic erosion. Only by allowing ourselves to question the efficacy of efficiency can we possibly have means to interrogate what we are sacrificing on its altar. Perhaps one critical way to defend democracy is to question this assumption and to reframe our debates on the state and its mode of delivery.

The value that we place on efficiency as the goal of the modern administrative state traces its history to at least the 1960s, as documented by sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman’s 2022 book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy.

The policy approach of an “economic style of reasoning,” as Berman terms it, is anchored in market principles: choice, competition, cost effectiveness, incentive compatibility. Under this logic,  efficiency is presented as a politically neutral holy grail that governments ought to pursue.

A 1923 motivational poster by a Chicago printer, meant to be hung in factories and offices, capitalizes on the era’s fascination with enhancing efficiency.Robert Beebe/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

But governments did so to a fault. Berman traces the evolution of this the economic style of reasoning to the 1960s and show how over the decades, efficiency became fetishized as the only goal of government, often displacing considerations of equity and democracy.

Berman focuses her inquiry on the United States, but this mode of reasoning about and within the state has a much wider resonance. It certainly characterized India’s approach as the policy elite embraced globalization and liberalized from the early 1990s onwards. The policy logic was—as it is in so many countries—that adopting the tools of “scientific management,” or in public administration terms “new public management,” we will control our way to success.

By monitoring and measuring everything that we can, the thinking went, we will improve the state, driving toward key performance indicators (KPIs) and realizing efficiencies. This manifests in different forms, such as the consequences of “teaching to the test” in response to the United States’ 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, or in biometric attendance systems introduced in India designed to ensure public servants show up but which do little to control what happens once they do.

In the contemporary moment, these ideas have converged with the possibilities offered by technology to create a new hypercharged, technology-infused vision of utopia that has shaped the DOGE view of the world. Musk and his ilk seem to imagine that the holy grail of efficiency can be reached even more effectively through the algorithms that automate processes. Just as Google serves search results, the government can deliver to citizens what they want and need, with no troubling humans slowing things down and leaving a trail of fraud and waste. One cannot make the wrong decision if there is no decision at all.

The fable is not without its logic; however, it has two serious problems. First, it is an approach that can very rarely work for government. It doesn’t work because—and this is the second critical problem—efficiency is the wrong goal.

It would be wonderful if we could monitor and measure all the important things that states do, turning all services into garbage collection or vaccine administration—relatively rare cases where what can be observed and KPI’d is, in fact, a pretty good summary of what we want the workers to do. Perhaps in these cases, we do need fewer supervisors, and data systems may be able to substitute for traditional levels of hierarchy. Perhaps there are other functions of the state—for instance, tax administration—where technology can drive automation.

Unfortunately, much of what the administrative state does falls outside these two categories, and it requires empowered humans exercising judgment to do well.

DOGE-catalyzed cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Nuclear Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Department of Veterans’ Affairs are penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Like the European reliance on natural gas from Russia in the 2010s, these supposed “efficiencies” in fact mask deepening vulnerability via decreased ability to exercise informed judgment in responding to the unexpected—be it a nuclear disaster or simply the needs of a veteran whose issues do not fit neatly into an online form. (Jennifer Pahlka documents cases of this sort under the purview of the Department Veterans’ Affairs in her book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.)

In addition to being ineffective at improving performance, the singular reification of “efficiency” also fundamentally misrepresents what the state is and how it relates to the citizenry.

The state is not a private firm. Citizens engage the state not as transactional “clients,” but in emotive, affective terms. No one would volunteer to fight in Amazon.com’s army. Firms deliver. States do more than that. In other words, the state is an identity, not just a service provider.

“The state” is all of us—all of its citizens and residents. Society delegates significant coercive power to the state so that the state can regulate societal demands via an autonomous bureaucracy. In a democracy, institutions of checks and balances, laws, rules, and processes are built in to enable the state to negotiate competing claims as it navigates the citizenry.

The administrative state’s tasks are an outcome of a political bargain that may necessitate “inefficiency” in some situations as the state makes trade-offs: between redistribution and growth, environmental protection and business, or tax cuts and expenditures on welfare.

These are outcomes of democratic bargaining, which is necessary to preserve freedoms and a stable society. When we seek efficiency, we fail to engage this fundamental reason for the state’s existence. We also run the risk of short-term efficiency gains at the cost of social instability and disaffection.

Inevitably, efficiency also becomes the ruse for a much deeper centralization and personalization of politics. While efficiency framings have accompanied a creep toward authoritarianism in many countries, in the United States we are seeing not a creep but rather a veritable sprint.  Musk links efficiency with the strategy of making everything “subject to the will of the President,” as he put it in a post on X in late February. Dictatorship is efficient in comparison to processes that give power to many people, and thus force the slow work of consensus-building and accommodation. However, without the prerequisites of decision-making, it leads to bad, efficient decisions.

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Moreover, it is this very work of democracy that ensures that the decisions of government serve the interests of the many, and that encourages diverse groups in society to feel like part of the collective. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, democracy’s strength is not to “give the people the most skillful” (or efficient) government, but rather to produce “an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which never exists without” democracy.

Efficiency as a totalizing framing allows would-be authoritarians to argue that it is not the system of government—but rather they personally—who have provided services to citizens. In the United States, this returns us to the age of machine politics and personalistic rule; more generally, this is what political scientists term “patrimonialism,” a style of governing in which all state functions flow from the personal authority of the leader.

In India, patrimonialism has been effected by using technology for welfare services and branding them as gifts and “guarantees” from the ruling party leader. Technology removes traditional intermediation by local politicians and bureaucrats, enabling in its place a direct, emotive connection with the national political party leaders who can present themselves as the benefactor.

Implicit in this process is a subtle shift in the social contract that positions welfare as the largesse of the benevolent leader rather than a moral obligation of the state to rights-bearing citizens. Democracy is practiced when citizens seek accountability and claim their rights through local state actors. Centralization of power within party leaders upends this. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and today all political leaders from across party lines have adopted this basic playbook.

USAID workers collect their personal belongings and leave work in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rather than destroy the administrative state, we need to nurture connections between state and citizens. Rather than tighten oversight and compliance for state officials, we need to build a system that allows them to pursue the goals that bring so many to public service: serving the public.

The state is not a Silicon Valley start-up; its demise is not a cost of doing business or a failure to be learned from in the next funding round. We must interrogate the value propositions that brought us here; we must develop alternative pathways to renew and rejuvenate state institutions by forming relationships of trust with citizens that restores citizen faith in the democratic project.

There is much to learn from democracies around the world on how to improve the state through democracy-enabling instruments: Taiwan’s experiments in digital democracy, the United Kingdom’s “mission-led” government, Brazil’s participatory budgeting, and even in India, the use of social audits and right to grievance redressal laws are all examples of improving state performance without compromising democracy for efficiency.

Efficiency is a good thing, but it is not the only good thing. The first step toward better answers is asking what else we care about (such as values of equity, responsiveness, and accountability), and how we can build a state that serves those goals, too.