Cutting Government Agencies Doesn't Just Happen

Alec MacGillis's excellent story on the difficulties of closing a small Labor Department office that tracks international economic statistics to determine how the U.S. is doing in comparison is a good example of a basic fact: government agencies just don't go away and get replaced on a regular basis. Whether that lack of a market dynamic is a good thing or not is obviously a hotly-debated question. Obviously, from an organizational perspective, it takes a long time to stand up a new agency and get it functioning. The cycle's very different from the time horizon for setting up, say, a restaurant, and determining whether it's successful. And it would be incredibly wasteful if agencies were getting created and dismantled every time there was a shift in the political winds, both in terms of time and money. That said, perhaps the threat of competition might encourage agencies to act more quickly to implement management and process changes (although contracting out would seem to be a test case for this, and I'm not sure there's evidence that the prospect of being contracted out has improved efficiency anywhere, though I would be very interested to know if there was).

But I think it's notable that a lot of commentators don't understand that there isn't a cycle of standing up agencies and disbanding them at all. Understanding that that's the case, and why that's the case is a necessary step before you can even begin having these "shrink the government" conversations about what ought to go.