Last week, Americans watched a heavyweight slap battle between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. While few were surprised to see Musk and Trump part ways, the divorce became more entertaining with memes like one suggesting the Ukraine mediate their conflict and ensure Trump thank Elon for his donations.

The DOGE Assumption of Easy Wins

Behind this split lies the truth that there are no easy wins for eliminating unnecessary spending in bureaucracy. Except, DOGE workers thought it would be easy as we learn from an interview with Sahil Lavingia just before he was fired from DOGE for talking about the work.

I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. … I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.

Let’s stop briefly to note that “sitting around doing nothing” is a perception. Perhaps his perception is accurate. Yet certain critically important work must not appear to be busy-ness or it will fail. An ad writer, for example, noted they felt they couldn’t pause to look out the window while considering what they were writing because it made them appear to not be busy. Enough said, Lavingia continues:

The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn’t to say that it can’t be made more efficient — elimination of paper, elimination of faxing — but these aren’t necessarily fraud, waste and abuse. These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.

No wonder DOGE so quickly announced huge claims of savings which were also wrong. My skepticism about the DOGE effort was founded on their lack of understanding of government. Their ultimate failure is now thoroughly assured because they started from the false belief waste would be obvious. No effort to reduce bureaucratic waste will succeed under these conditions but must build on deeper understanding of how that waste builds.

Bureaucracy is Only Effective If It Is Somewhat Inefficient

Before proceeding note that bureaucracies of varying types are critical for success in human endeavors. Thus, there is great potential social good from bureaucracy as it makes society safer, helps us resolve disagreements, protects society from the madness of individuals, and protects individuals against the madness of the mob.

Accepting this good value, any investigation of waste within bureaucracy must start with the truth that bureaucracy is inherently wasteful in its purpose. Investopedia describes company bureaucracy as:

A bureaucracy is a system of managing organizations characterized by a strong hierarchy and complex [sic] rules and procedures.

Hierarchy and complicated rules inherently slow decision making and are costly. Bureaucracies are not, then, efficient but must waste some money hoping to grow better company health. It is difficult, though, to determine which bureaucratic spending is wasteful and which is useful. While standards and best practices claim to make this clear, all waste is local and specific to a company or operation. Net out, standards and best practices typically increase waste.

A First Feedback Loop: Bureaucracy Grows Because We Can’t Know if it Matters

Last year I put out a blog post titled Half the Money I Spent on Bureaucracy is Wasted; The Trouble is I don’t Know Which Half. In that post I note the trickiness of knowing whether bureaucratic work matters. Here we note this truth is a feedback loop:

1. Bureaucracies become large AFTER companies have initial success and are built with profits from market success.
2. It is, then, rare that companies know whether their bureaucracies enable better success.
3. Thus, bureaucracies end up judged on whether managers and executives believe they are effective.
4. A manager’s “belief” in the bureaucracy becomes a proxy so that structures are no longer evaluated based on knowledge about whether and how they matter.
5. In a broad sense, if a bureaucracy makes an executive happy, it is considered to be important.
6. If considered important, the bureaucracy naturally expands (see loops 2 and 3). Rinse and repeat this process.

This is why half the money spent on bureaucracy is likely wasted and why bureaucratic spending and waste are far more nuanced than DOGE ever realized.

A Second Feedback Loop: Fighting “Waste” Often Increases Waste 

A great deal of waste growth comes within a feedback loop of policy fights among competing groups — ironically from fights to limit waste. I’ll illustrate with a US government example with Republicans and Democrats. This feedback loop is also common in companies where it is driven by competing cliques or power groups.

Suppose a new social program is created. At program start, a bureaucracy must be built to, somehow, administer the program. For a few years the program will have “normal” growth befitting the services it delivers. Then two competing feedback loops form:

Eventually, those who gain from opposing the program begin one feedback loop. Because Republicans claim innocence around government size, I feature them in this feedback loop — but both parties are equally responsible:

• • Eventually, Republicans claim spending must be out of control or that there’s massive fraud.
  • As a result, congress demands more rigid controls through more detailed rules.
  • Of course, “more rigid controls” and “more detailed rules” inherently grow the bureaucracy without improving program effectiveness.
  • So despite Republicans claiming their efforts will “save money” they increase costs.
  • Of course, this also sets up Republicans to complain more how costs increased (despite those increases being ones they caused) and we return to the start of the loop.

As the same time, those who supported the program begin a feedback loop of expansion. Such expansions are often easy political wins proving to followers of the cause that the politicians deserve their support:

• • At some point, they claim the same program needs to expand onto the natural next problem.
  • After considerable maneuvering, a bill is passed which expands the program.
  • As the program expands, bureaucracy inherently expands faster than quantity of services delivered.
  • Believing in the good of the program its proponents refuse to consider this growing waste.
  • Thus waste inherently grows through changes based on (usually) noble ideas.
  • Return to start — rinse and repeat.

No bureaucratic controls can keep this from happening or change these bureaucracies to deliver the same end-user services but at lower cost. None other than curmudgeonly conservative Winston Churchill discussed the danger of moralistic bureaucratic idea driving up waste. His reason for keeping such controls out of the National Insurance Act of 1911 (unemployment insurance) are summarized as:

…provisions…against the malingerer or the fraudulent applicant…would simply be using up his contributions. There was, therefore, no need to apply a test, as some moralists wished, as to whether unemployment might be due to personal failings such as laziness, drunkenness or misconduct of some sort.; and in any case Churchill did not “like mixing up moralities and mathematics”.***** (emphasis added)

Further, this type of waste can only be reduced with the involvement of BOTH political sides. While Republicans claim Democrats are the party of “big government,” Republicans are equally to blame for government wastefulness. In the eternal words of Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It is worth noting that, despite these trends, some of the biggest bureaucracies of US Government are more effective than we are told to expect. I have found this in my dealings with the IRS, Medicare, and the Social Security Administration. I cannot speak to issues of operational waste but, as a citizen, find they are well run.

A Third Feedback Loop: The Human Behavior of Parkinson’s Law

Another source of waste is described by what is known as Parkinson’s Law.**** This “law” was first put forth in 1955 when The Economist published a report from a commission investigating civil service growth in the UK — particularly “the growth in the size of the British Admiralty and Colonial Office even though the numbers of their ships and colonies were declining.” The report is brief (3 pages) with the law named after naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson who authored the report and subsequent books on the topic. Note that Parkinson developed equations for estimating this growth. (I have not yet validated the equations.)

The report starts by recalling a well known work challenge:

…work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it is assigned. … The fact is that the number of officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all.

Eventually, he turns to two Factors at the core of Parkinson’s Law. These two factors also operate in a feedback loop of growing waste.

• Factor I. — An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
• Factor II. — Officials make work for each other.

This law also involves groups we don’t think of as “bureaucratic.” For example, technology efforts are often at very high risk of a successful project lead wanting to, also, multiply subordinates and subsume work within his or her department. While there are well meaning short-term reasons for these steps the long term result inevitably grows waste.

Note the waste Parkinson described is NOT a waste of individuals but of a departmental or divisional whole. Suppose a department’s team grows to 20 who do what could arguably be achieved by eight. It is never the case that 12 people in that department are doing nothing (except, apparently, in tech according to the DOGE interview). Instead, the whole of the work is spread across all 20 people. Thus, should someone arbitrarily choose to cut, say, FOUR of the 20, the department will always become less effective.

Some Thoughts from Complexity

This discussion of feedback loops make it clear there no simple paths to (a) identify bureaucratic waste nor (b) know how to reduce costs while maintaining success levels. Yet top-level bureaucrats and partisan politicians claim they can magically do this. How? Adding more rules, controls, and bureaucracy which will, of course, only drive costs higher.

It is also worth noting that major corporations don’t often reduce expenses by meddling within the bureaucracy but by cutting operating segments, markets served, or other large elements. While this shows wisdom up against bureaucratic waste, it also reveals their powerlessness when it comes to  the feedback loops of waste.

Complexity science regularly studies such feedback loops and offers a first set of useful truths:

• We cannot “solve” the problem of bureaucratic waste — but we can manage it.
• Direct efforts to manage aren’t likely to make substantial progress while also maintaining good service levels.
• Significant progress, instead, requires indirect efforts of which some (not all) will not be very costly.

To begin, though, we must change some basic assumptions about bureaucracy.

Concept:  Every Bureaucracy is an Ecosystem

Executives and politicians want to believe bureaucracies can be tuned to work like well-oiled machines. Except, bureaucracies are ecosystems so they behave in ecological — not mechanical — ways. The definition of an ecosystem, after all, is a network of biological beings within their physical environment. Yup. A bureaucracy IS an ecosystem.

A first ecological truth, then, is that every bureaucratic action (whether arbitrary budget cuts and firings or choosing to ignore waste) has unintended consequences — often for the worse. This is a reality in all ecological situations. Within any connected set of parts, change to one part leads other parts to change — with the potential for every part to change. Importantly, these changes cannot be controlled or predicted — though their general outline can often be anticipated.

Ecosystems also make clear that organization charts reflect little of bureaucratic reality. Bureaucracies and ecosystems, instead, are heavily affected by hidden networks along which flow communication, ideas, methods, and more in addition to rumors, gossip, and poor morale. Consider Suzanne Simard’s work showing that forests in the Pacific Northwest of the US are only healthy through hidden, below-ground networks of certain fungi which connect trees to pass nutrients and communication.

Every manager and employee is affected by things passing from outside the bureaucracy — perhaps through religious connections, school connections, or through activities with friends who work at other companies. In the end, a bureaucracy never executes new policies in the same form as they descend from upon high as each adapts — always — for better or worse.**

Concept:  Ecosystems ONLY Change Forward

Where there was enthusiasm for DOGE it seemed fed by the idea they would “just” turn back the clock to simpler days. Yet no ecosystem simply returns to the past — ecologies, societies, and bureaucracies can ONLY change forward.

Enthusiastic environmentalists claimed reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone would quickly restore damaged ecosystems but that didn’t happen. Even today aspen and cottonwoods populations destroyed hungry elk herds (overpopulated without wolf predators) have not returned to restore stream and fish health. Yellowstone can only change forward from the useful step returning wolves. We cannot, though, predict what its healthier future point will look like — only that it will not be that one which existed before wolves were removed.

No easy answers will return bureaucracies grown wasteful to some fantastical “good old days.” No army of 22 year old DOGE technology wunderkind’s will magically eliminate massive piles of waste while ensuring the government works well.

Concept: The Creative Destruction Myth and the Error of Arbitrary Cuts

DOGE appears to believe harsh, unthinking, and rigid cuts will lead to healthy government. I suspect this belief is based on a faith in what’s called  “creative destruction” as I have often encountered this faith in technology companies. While the faith is false it starts from a very important truth — that human societies are often surprisingly resilient against disaster and that disasters sometimes enable new paths leading to something better. The problem comes when this idea is turned around into an idea that arbitrary or unnatural disaster artificially imposed will always lead to creative results — a massive, illogical, and erroneous leap of faith.

Returning to an ecological mindset we find that the development leading to resilience starts decades in advance with societies and organizations aware of those naturally occurring types of disasters which might arrive. Thus, a mature forest is resilient to naturally occurring changes because it developed in response to smaller disasters (if you will) of similar style and content — disasters which prepare the forest for far larger disaster. Thus, small disasters develop areas — like landslides, previously burned areas, and more — where there is natural damage which, then, harbor the succession species needed for a forest to rebuild. These areas of damage are also natural barriers helping slow or prevent the spread of disasters like fire and disease. Yet forests remain at great danger to disaster from invasive species as the forest has no defenses against their invasion.

Human organization is no different. All organizations develop resilience from encountering small disasters — a resilience only to those types of potential disasters or closely related ones. Thus, organizations and societies are resilient to some disasters but fragile or brittle against others (like the arbitrary, unnatural actions of DOGE). It is interesting to consider how natural preparation contributed to Johnson & Johnson surviving their Tylenol poisoning disaster — survival which depended on the J&J Credo which had also been recently updates to make it an active part of the culture. Similarly, Coca-Cola survived their New Coke disaster with because, while a massive error, was a typical challenge of market response and product changes.

The myth of creative destruction, though, leads many to become excited by the idea of “burning it all down.” Yet history in companies and societies shows that passionate revolutions destroy easily but rarely rebuild effectively. In the end, fiery revolution usually replaces what is entirely mediocre with something truly terrible.

A process reducing waste must proceeds together with, or alongside, the bureaucracy if is to leverage natural resilience.

Concept: The Path to Reducing Bureaucratic Cost Must Rely, Somehow, on Self-Organization

The bureaucratic response to waste is typically either performative (but unimportant) reforms or new bureaucracy to … er… oversee projects reducing bureaucracy. In the US, consider the vaunted “Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980.” This act involved building a new bureaucracy like the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). And, 45 years later, the name of the act remains boldly printed on each part of the massive paperwork load involved with being a US citizen.

Complexity suggests success requires that self-organization must play a major role. To begin, while bureaucracies imagines absolute control, all successful bureaucracy already relies to some degree on self-organization in its success. Self-organization, after all, is a tremendously important human ability as I wrote recently. Investopedia’s description of bureaucracy, though, notes an inherent refusal to trust any idea of self-organization:

A bureaucrat makes implicit assumptions about an organization and how it operates. One assumption is that the entity cannot rely on an unsupervised system of operations. Instead, the thinking goes, a closed and rationally reviewed system is necessary to make the organization work.

Contrast this with the Taoist idea of wu wei which, among other implications, suggests managing without the appearance of managing. The need to make bureaucratic management overt and obvious is expensive and inherently inefficient.

While we do not have space and time to dig deeply into specific ideas, let me suggest any serious progress with bureaucratic costs must rely on self-organization as it is the only path to change without adding even more layers of bureaucracy. Doing this would require newly nuanced research into how pre-existing natural rules of work interplay with policy to discover ways environments can be shifted so that participants within bureaucracies begin naturally eliminating waste while also limiting expansion waste.

Merely a Start

While long, this post is merely a start. These issues and ideas would be also interesting to explore with Rory Sutherland (Alchemy) for his experience pondering such challenges up against tendencies in human behavior.

No matter where we arrive, though, I remain convinced only understanding based on complexity — rather than bureaucratic theories — can reduce inefficiency without damaging effectiveness.

Until next time be well.

©2025 Doug Garnett — All Rights Reserved

Through my company, Protonik LLC, I consult with companies as they design and bring to market new and innovative products. I am writing a book exploring the value of complexity science for driving business success. Protonik also produces marketing materials including documentaries, websites, and blogs. As an adjunct instructor at Portland State University I teach marketing, consumer behavior, and advertising.

You can read more about these services and my unusual background (math, aerospace, supercomputers, consumer goods & national TV ads) at www.Protonik.net. Roughly once a month, Shahin Khan and I discuss current issues in marketing on our podcast The Marketing Podcast available on Google, Spotify, the OrionX website, and Apple Podcast. 

** I recommend browsing the book Street-Level Bureaucracy (details below) which focuses most heavily on teachers, police, and gatekeepers for government benefits. No matter what policy makers declare to be policy, these street level people always adapt policies as they work. That said, Lipsky’s writing tends into traditional bureaucratic solutions. I would welcome additional writing which offered paths forward relying on complexity science as well.

*** Fragile Domains, Simon Levin, p71

**** “Parkinson’s Law.” Economist, 19 Nov. 1955, pp. 635+

*****Vernon Bogdanor, “Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative”, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVIII-1 | 2023, Online since 03 February 2023, connection on 01 March 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/10279 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.10279