What to do on the day after?

At some point, the Trump administration will have fired all the employees it wants to fire, cancel all the programs it wants to cancel, and cut all the programs it wants to cut. What happens on the day after?

The Trump administration is right in fingering many federal government problems. That’s a point that many of my friends on the left reject, but they need to accept the reality. However, the administration’s opening salvos aimed at reducing government employment, cutting government spending, and slashing government programs won’t solve the real problems of the U.S. government. That’s a point that many of my friends on the right will reject. 

On the day after, two facts will be inescapable. One is that the people will expect that their government will work—maybe even better than before. They will want to feel safe about flying on planes without a door plug blowing out, buying eggs in the supermarket without worrying about bird flu, or working among cancer-causing chemicals at work. Cutting government is one thing. Delivering on its promise is quite another. 

The second is that we’ll wake up with a government that can’t do the job we want done. Why am I so sure? Because that’s been the case for years. Seven years ago, in fact, two National Academy of Public Administration panels I chaired issued reports entitled No Time to Wait. We concluded that “the federal government faces profound problems in making government work for the American people in large part because its human capital system is fundamentally broken.” There’s even less time to wait now.

So how, on the day after, can we pivot from making cuts to building capacity? Even those who don’t want to admit it publicly know that they need government to work for the things they care about. It’s one thing to strip our 1950s government down to the chassis. It will be another to build the vehicle we need to navigate the high speed and sharp curves of 21st century roads.

Consider eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. To get a snapshot of the problem, we don’t need to look any farther than the federal government’s improper payments. The Government Accountability Office estimates that fraud sucks out between $231 and $521 billion every year in payments that shouldn’t have been made for Medicare, Medicaid, grantees, and contractors. That’s more than we spend on salaries and benefits for federal employees. 

So let’s start with Medicare and Medicaid along with unemployment insurance. Some “improper payments” aren’t fraud at all but are caused by sloppy paperwork. Sometimes, clever operators have devised schemes to defraud the government. Elon Musk could put his army of techbros to work with their AI systems to sort one from the other and then identify the patterns that the fraudsters are using, like phantom billing (when a provider bills the programs for tests or services or equipment a patient never got) and upcoding (billing for a more expensive service than a patient received), along with blatant kickbacks and prescription drug fraud. Not chump change.

Then there’s the problem of hiring new government workers. The time to hire a new federal employee is about 119 days, or more than three times as long as in the private sector. Musk’s experts could help us break the hiring deadlock. 

One of Trump’s executive orders gives a senior presidential aide until the end of April to come up with a plan to fix hiring (or, at least, cut the time-to-hire to 80 days) and bring better performance management to the federal government. But the federal government needs to learn the real lessons from the private sector. The premier private sector organization in the field, the Society for Human Resources Management, concludes that performance “reviews generally do not work.” The federal government needs to be cautious about insisting on ideas that smart private-sector managers are abandoning. That’s a project to which Musk’s techbros ought to put their shoulders to the wheel to solve.

Then there’s the talent-mismatch problem. Getting rid of thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of employees is certain to produce one effect: the talent the government has won’t match the talent it needs. We can be sure of that—it’s the lesson from the buyouts during the Clinton/Gore reinventing government initiative: buyouts never leave you with the people you need. But we had a talent mismatch before Jan. 20 as well. So now we have a golden chance to fix federal hiring and its performance management system to get—and keep—the talent we need. 

Finally, an agency-centered slash-and-burn strategy misses the most important opportunity for results. There’s one, simple, inescapable fact: there’s no problem that matters more than any single agency can control. Big problems that force themselves onto the agenda can only be solved by building bridges across federal agencies, across levels of government, across the sectors of society, and even across international boundaries. The fatal flaw in tackling government reform agency-by-agency is that it misses this critical point. We need instead to create a new generation of bridgebuilders.

Like the fires in LA, we have a big problem. There is the short-term focus that’s in front of us, but there is the long-term—and inevitably transformative—question about rebuilding. We have the opportunity to be the architects of the government that must rise from the ashes—and that must rise if we are to sustain the promise of American democracy.