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The incoming Trump administration has said it will create a Department of Government Efficiency aimed at reducing the size of government and the federal workforce, scaling back regulations, and cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, X, and SpaceX who is the world’s wealthiest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate in 2024, have agreed to lead this effort.

We asked Harvard Kennedy School faculty experts to explain how government efficacy could be improved; what is the possible scope of reform or savings; what obstacles lie ahead for any such initiative; and how we can think about the public value of what government does.  Several ����vlog���� scholars share perspectives and insights in these essays: 

• Linda Bilmes: Painstaking work, patience, and endurance
• John Donahue: The soft targets fell long ago
• Karen Dynan and Doug Elmendorf: Don’t look to efficiency for big deficit reductions 
• Jason Furman: Twitter is not a good model for the federal government
• Stephen Goldsmith: Government can go on a diet
• Steve Kelman: How would reductions in force work?
• Elizabeth Linos: Make visible the unseen work of public servants 
• Paul Peterson: Can newbies obliterate iron triangles? 
• Roger Porter: The challenging quest for greater efficiency
• Malcolm Sparrow: When the de-regulatory wind blows
   

On its current trajectory, DOGE is adopting the “cut off your arm to lose weight” method

Linda Bilmes

DOGE is far from the first attempt to reduce wasteful government spending. Many new presidents have launched such initiatives, including the Hoover Commission under Harry Truman, the Grace Commission under Ronald Reagan, and the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review (“Reinventing Government”) led by Vice President Al Gore. Each of them had some important successes. For example, Reinventing Government helped federal agencies to become more “customer-focused” in their interactions with the public and reduced government overhead costs. The program was part of the cost-cutting culture that enabled the U.S. to balance its budget and generate a surplus from 1998-2001.  

What feels different this time is that Elon Musk is running the show. Musk is a fast-paced tech titan with little affinity for, or understanding of, the lumbering federal bureaucracy. 

He doesn’t have to look far to find examples of wasteful spending. We mint billions of pennies each year at a cost of 3.7 cents apiece. The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent over $20 billion on an electronic health records system for veterans that still doesn’t work. The Pentagon has spent $2 trillion on the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter aircraft, but after 18 years, it still has flaws with “reliability, maintainability, and availability” and is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, according to a recently declassified analysis. No private sector company would sustain such losses. 

Beyond the headlines, the real “waste” in government is buried in overheads, inefficiencies, no-bid contracts, end-of-year spending, and thousands of individual line-items that need to be re-examined and pruned. This requires painstaking work, using cost accounting, financial accounting, cost-benefit analyses, and other ordinary management tools. 

The question is whether Musk and his team will have the patience and the endurance needed to engage with this process in a serious way. Trump has fired most of the government’s inspector generals—precisely the people who already have the knowledge and mandate to root out waste and fraud. It would have been far wiser, and far more effective, to empower the IGs and work together with them. On its current trajectory, DOGE is adopting the “cut off your arm to lose weight” method—which will cause a lot more problems than it solves. 

Linda Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy.
 

The soft targets fell long ago

John D. Donahue

The Department of Government Efficiency won’t be a department. Will it boost efficiency? It might—if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy play to their strong suit.

Even in the best-case scenario, federal spending won’t radically shrink, to be sure. The big bucks in the budget go to social insurance, national defense, and debt service, and much of this is politically or legally off the table. Even a genius can’t get $1.24 trillion to beneficiaries (the 2022 Social Security tally) without spending $1.24 trillion, for example. There’s waste in the federal budget but it’s mostly in well-defended pockets scattered here and there. The soft targets fell long ago.

What about squeezing savings out of the bureaucracy? Over several decades the federal payroll has already shrunk dramatically relative to government’s scale. Still—and much as I respect the federal workforce—there is no denying that it could do with some tightening-up. But distinguishing the fat from the muscles and nerves is a delicate task for which Musk and Ramaswamy are in no way prepared.

But they are almost uniquely well-positioned to improve government contracting. Private companies provide a vast range goods and services, from military hardware to Medicare Advantage, and account for a huge share of federal spending. There’s nothing wrong with this, in principle. Done right, delegating public tasks to the private sector can deliver big benefits for the citizenry. Done wrong, it can undermine accountability and, yes, efficiency. Musk and Ramaswamy have tons of experience on the private-sector side of the table. They have intimate and detailed knowledge of the ways sloppy contracting cheats the taxpayer. If they choose, they can serve their country well by raising our game on contracting. Here’s hoping that’s how they play it.   

John D. Donahue is the Raymond Vernon Senior Lecturer in Public Policy.
 

Don’t look to efficiency for big deficit reductions 

Karen Dynan and Doug Elmendorf 

Trying to reduce federal budget deficits by increasing the efficiency of federal operations is an appealing idea. However, greater efficiency alone would make only a small difference in the wide gap between federal spending and revenues. 

To be most effective, large organizations with challenging and multifaceted missions need ongoing attention to the ways they operate and need to change those ways as conditions evolve. The federal government is no different, although changing the government’s operations without disrupting the delivery of services and benefits is hard, requiring detailed knowledge of the government’s activities and close coordination between the executive and legislative branches. If policymakers’ current attention to efficiency instills an enduring commitment to this work, that would be valuable. 

However, increasing government efficiency—or “reducing waste, fraud, and abuse,” in the traditional terminology—would not have a marked effect on federal deficits. Federal spending and revenue are now close to $7 trillion and $5 trillion, respectively, leaving a deficit of about $2 trillion. Holding federal debt equal to annual national output, as it is roughly today, would require cutting deficits by about $900 billion per year in the coming decade. 

That amount is far larger than any plausible effect of increasing efficiency.

The Government Accountability Office wrote that estimated overpayments across 71 federal programs totaled $175 billion in fiscal year 2023. In addition, given the inherent complexity of determining appropriate payments in many cases, reducing overpayments significantly probably would involve both greater government spending on staffing and larger administrative burdens on recipients.  

Meanwhile, total compensation for federal civilian employees is under $250 billion per year. Moreover, roughly 60% of those employees are at the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, which are areas the incoming administration seems poised to invest in rather than trim back.

Fraud and abuse also occur on the revenue side of the federal budget when taxpayers do not pay all they legally owe. Estimates of the “tax gap” between payments and obligations run above $500 billion per year, according to the Tax Foundation. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that greater funding for the Internal Revenue Service would more than pay for itself by narrowing that gap, but such funding is regularly resisted by elected officials who are concerned about intrusive tax authorities.

Therefore, substantial deficit reduction cannot be achieved through the popular step of making the government operate more efficiently. Rather, it would require the unpopular steps of cutting back government benefits and services and increasing taxes.

Karen Dynan is professor of the practice of public policy and Doug Elmendorf is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor.
 

Twitter is not a good model for the federal government

Jason Furman

Elon Musk’s efforts to cut Twitter’s head count by about 80% were widely expected to grind the social network to a halt. Instead he defied critics and not only kept the social network functioning but continued to add features—dramatically increasing its efficiency (although other choices he made resulted in even more dramatic reductions in revenue). Could he do the same for the federal government?

I am skeptical that Twitter is a good model for the federal government for several reasons, most importantly that federal employment has been basically flat for decades unlike Twitter where the head count increased rapidly in the years leading up to Musk’s takeover. With Twitter he simply returned the head count to what it had been in 2013; doing the same with the federal government would produce little in the way of savings.

Moreover, personnel costs are only a small part of federal spending. Consider the Social Security administration. They spend about $5 of every $1,000 on personnel—the other $995 is in the form of checks to Social Security beneficiaries. It is possible that efficiency improvements could reduce that $5 a little further, but it would still barely make a dent in the program. In fact, even eliminating all federal civilian compensation costs—all wages and salaries and benefits for all civilian workers—would not produce enough to even offset the cost of making the tax cuts permanent.

Efficiency implies getting the same or more output from a given amount of input. There is more the government could do to accomplish this including technological upgrades and shifting the way it pays people—including raising pay for workers with a stronger educational background (who tend to be very underpaid compared to their private sector counterparts) and possibly lowering it for workers with less skills and educational experience. In the short run, these efforts could actually end up costing more not less.

Ultimately, policymakers will not be able to escape the difficult choices of what they want less of (e.g., Social Security benefits or Medicare benefits) or where they want to find new money to pay for what we are doing now (e.g., taxes or—hopefully not—tariffs). Even an effective and well-executed approach to government efficiency, and it remains to see whether DOGE actually is one, cannot make much, if any, progress without grappling with these bigger issues.

Jason Furman is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy.
 

Government can go on a diet

Stephen Goldsmith

President Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency is aimed at streamlining federal operations, reducing wasteful spending, and enhancing overall efficiency. Already, advocacy groups and politicians are taking sides on what programs should be protected, eliminated, or cut back. Such a debate, if well managed, could in fact produce a valuable contribution to helping our country live within its means while also supporting necessary services and assistance.

Standing between the status quo and a more responsive tomorrow rests an outdated bureaucratic form of government dominated by layers of oversight, rigid procedures, and resistance to change. This could be a historic moment for the federal government, not just because of the tidal wave of potential change, but also because almost one third of the federal workforce is eligible to retire in the next two years. Forward-looking union officials could advocate for more meaningful, better-trained and -paid members whose new productivity coupled with repetitive tasks transferred to machines will compensate for retirements.

I learned many of these lessons while mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana, where we reduced size, waste, and administrative expenses while concurrently increasing program government effectiveness. By injecting competition and privatization as drivers of change in over 80 services we lowered taxes three times, invested over one billion dollars in infrastructure, reduced the nonpublic safety work force by 40% (without laying off union workers)—all while improving services. Government can go on a diet while concurrently better performing better its core functions.

Unleashing the full power of change requires freeing federal employees to be more creative, data driven, and productive in their jobs. We need to remember that most public employees took their jobs in order to make a difference. Many of these jobs were designed for a paper-based analog era. Federal workers need the tools, permission, and culture to provide better services. Layers of bureaucratic oversight, narrow job classifications, and union rules confine well-intentioned workers in narrow cells of activity. Now digital advancements support the customization of online services while empowering the front-line workers and providing audit trails for oversight. GenAI promises to provide much broader access by employees to the data and evidence they need to take action, allowing preemptive, faster, and risk-based decisions.

Of course, a reform effort should also include attention to agency redundancy, obsolete missions, and ineffective results. Yet the hard work of dieting should not be ignored, and public employees, provided the right tools stimulated by competition, encouraged by a culture of innovation, can produce meaningful changes.   

Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy.
 

How would reductions in force work?

Steve Kelman

What could President Trump do to reduce the federal workforce? The most potent way to do so is to fire employees. Agencies have lots of discretion on doing so-called “reductions in force”—terminating feds. If an agency wants to terminate a group of employees, it basically can do so. The main limitation is that who gets terminated is largely, though not exclusively, determined by length of service (first in, last out), which corresponds to the most-common practice in the private sector. This means that federal “lifers,” who have been around for decades, will likely keep their jobs and newer hires will be eliminated. This means that young, often better educated and more enthusiastic, employees will go. If Musk and Ramaswamy either want to degrade the performance of the government or don’t care whether performance goes down, this may be an attractive approach. Others are likely to be less sure.

Musk and Ramaswamy also suggest moving agencies outside of Washington, which would encourage many with family and community ties to Washington to quit. The government has the authority to order employees to move to a new location if the agency has a reason for them to work there. The agency, however, is required to pay employee moving expenses and real estate fees, as well as to provide temporary housing. And if relocations became a mass phenomenon rather than a sporadic one, agencies would need to create local infrastructure for these employees’ work, which is more difficult and expensive than adding onto the existing ecosystem that exists in Washington.

Their third idea for reducing the number of workers is “requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week,” which they believe would “result in a wave of voluntary terminations we would welcome.” Only 10% of federal civilian employees are currently fully remote, actually lower than the 12% in the private sector. And 22% of government employees “usually” telework, compared with 25% of private sector ones. The idea that the workforce is all working from home is false.

Bottom line: if Trump wants to reduce the number of federal workers, the old-fashioned way of a reduction in force is the one that would have the most impact. The more out-of-the-box supposedly brilliant new ways of doing it that Musk and Ramaswamy have invented, not so much.

Steve Kelman is the Albert J. Weatherhead III and Richard W. Weatherhead Professor of Public Management, Emeritus.
 

Make visible the unseen work of public servants

Elizabeth Linos

The narrative of a bloated and inefficient government has fueled calls for indiscriminate spending cuts under the guise of addressing “waste, fraud, and abuse” for almost half a century now.  This approach has seen limited success because it misdiagnoses the core challenge. The issue is not rampant inefficiency or bloated bureaucracy—it is a lack of investment in the building blocks of effective governance: people, processes, and policies. Without these, government struggles to meet the rising demands and expectations placed upon it.

Most Americans agree that we need a government that is nimble, responsive, efficient, and effective. Indeed, no major societal challenge can be addressed without a functioning public sector. Yet, we have long underinvested in its foundation. For example, the federal workforce is facing a staggering human capital crisis, with twice as many employees over 60 as under 30. Younger employees are less interested in working in government, and more likely than other age groups to quit when they do, leaving agencies ill-equipped to deliver critical public services.  Solving this crisis requires simplifying the hiring and selection process, drastically cutting down time-to-hire, and re-thinking compensation. But we also need to make it more attractive to stay in government: employees need opportunities for growth, peers and supervisors who value them, reasonable workloads, and clarity about how their work contributes to the mission. If we expect public servants to take on responsibilities that the private sector cannot, we must create work environments that match the enormity of the task at hand.

Investment must also focus on improvements to service delivery, reducing administrative burdens—complex, opaque, stressful, stigmatizing, and time-consuming processes—that make some programs inefficient and exclude vulnerable households from receiving services they need. The good news is, we have pockets of excellence throughout the public sector that demonstrate what is possible when we invest in infrastructure, data and analytics capacity, and resident experience.  The Department of Veterans Affairs transformed how veterans engage with their services, increasing trust in their agency at the same time; the IRS is piloting a Direct File tool to make tax filing easier and quicker; and federal and state responses to the pandemic delivered food, shelter, and vaccines efficiently to residents across the country. It’s now time to make visible the unseen work of public servants that led to these shifts, and invest in scaling success stories. Operational transparency on what government does (and how it does it), paired with evidence-driven improvements, won’t just inspire public trust—it will attract the talent needed to sustain progress.

Expecting more from government is both reasonable and essential for a healthy democracy. But cutting funding from already strained systems will only deepen frustrations. The way forward is clear: invest smarter and more in the public sector to create a government that is efficient, capable, responsive, and trusted.

Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor for Public Policy and Management, and faculty director of The People Lab.
 

Can newbies obliterate iron triangles?

Paul Peterson

President-Elect Donald Trump harbors deep hostility toward vested interests and Washington insiders he calls the “swamp” or “Deep State.” Political scientists prefer the name, “iron triangle,” as the nexus has three sides—narrow groups and organizations at the base, congressional committees on the left side, agencies and departments on the right. This trio of sides is linked together by:

1. Group endorsements, donations, and constituency mobilization,
2. Committee earmarks and appropriations, and
3. Agency largesse distributed to groups and constituents.

Trump’s attack is two-pronged. He has asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a Department of Government Efficiency, which is expected to save trillions by identifying waste and abuse, cutting regulations, eliminating programs, and dismantling agencies. But DOGE must rely on exposure, public relations, and the president’s bully pulpit, as it has no governmental authority to effectuate change.

The other tine has a finer point. Trump is selecting outsiders to obliterate, or at least contain, the triangles. Seventeen of his twenty-four Cabinet-level nominees are “newbies” who have never walked the hallways of executive power.

Presidents characteristically appoint “inners and outers,” familiar faces who trundle into high positions when their party wins, slip out to law offices, think tanks, and lobby firms on K Street when the party loses. President Joe Biden appointed no fewer than 17 inners and outers to the 24 Cabinet-level positions in his administration. Trump has nominated only seven.

Most of Trump’s newbies offend the very triangles they are expected to control. A fracker will head the energy department, even though he is hostile to freshly green Big Oil. The governor of North Dakota, a farm and fossil fuel haven, shall command the environmentalists populating the Department of the Interior. To wrestle with college presidents, school districts, and teacher unions, Trump has chosen a former chair of an entertainment company devoted to the art form. A vaccine skeptic has been nominated to head health and human services. The departments in charge of defense, justice, commerce, and housing are also scheduled to be directed by secretaries suspicious of their respective iron triangles.

Cabinet candidates always express undying allegiance to those whose pleasure must be satisfied, but in the Trump II Administration it will be assured by their dependence on the White House. Only one of the nominees (discussed below) enjoys a national reputation in his or her field of expertise. Otherwise, newbies must rely heavily upon White House backing and can be dismissed without jeopardy. The trump card is in firm possession of the man who holds that name.

Three nominees are former presidential candidates, but they form no “team of rivals” comparable to Abraham Lincoln’s. Such a team would have included Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. Trump instead picked Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive, Democratic, former member of Congress from distant Hawaii, Doug Burgum, a small-state governor, and Robert Kennedy, Jr., a family reject.

That the newbies are marginal figures is of little concern to a television star on a show celebrated for apprentice dismissal. Nine of the 15 Cabinet-level department heads in Trump’s first administration were replaced, often within a year. The second administration got off to a good start when Trump’s initial, over-the-top pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, handed back his nomination. If Trump succeeds in persuading Congress to recess for longer stretches of time, he will be able to refill his cabinet with recess appointments that do not require Senate confirmation. At that point he can fire and hire at will.

Two exceptions to the triangle-busting strategy have emerged. The Department of Labor will be led by a former member of Congress from Oregon who supports pro-union legislation. Ultra-liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren may back Lori Chavez-DeRemer on the grounds she “understands the importance of unions to represent workers and give them some power in the workplace.” If the Oregon ex-representative turns out, indeed, to be a friend of organized labor, Trump will have made a deal made to consolidate his working-class coalition. Family considerations are paramount in the second instance. The president-elect has nominated a prominent U.S. senator and rival presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, as his secretary of state. The White House cannot afford to lose Rubio’s support, but, in return, the new president may be able to refer to his daughter-in-law, Lori Trump, as the senator from the great state of Florida.

Otherwise, Trump’s two-pronged, anti-insider strategy is well conceived. But triangles rank among the most stable of geometric forms, and iron is so indestructible it has named an archeological era. Though metal softens when touched by the hot glare emanating from the Oval Office, presidential eyes are easily distracted by more pressing business. No matter how loyal, newbies, when left on their own, may lack what it takes to swing a mallet with the force and precision needed to smash a triangularly shaped piece of iron.

Paul Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared in Professor Peterson’s Substack, The Modern Federalist
 

The challenging quest for greater efficiency

Roger B. Porter

One of President-elect Trump’s early post-election announcements was designating Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head an advisory body, a Department of Government Efficiency, to eliminate waste, promote efficiency and reduce government spending.

The quest for greater efficiency has long been a goal of government reform. In his first term, Ronald Reagan established the Grace Commission (the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control), comprising mostly business leaders. It produced volumes of recommendations after sending teams into executive departments and agencies to identify ways to produce savings.

Many of these recommendations were embraced by the president and implemented by departments and agencies. Others ran afoul of existing laws. Changing those proved much more challenging.

Reagan was disappointed that more was not accomplished. When he met with President-elect Clinton before Clinton began his first term in 1993, one of his three pieces of advice was to look again at the Grace Commission recommendations for ideas advanced by the business community.

The Clinton administration under the enthusiastic leadership of Vice President Gore undertook a “Reinventing Government” agenda that also sought to streamline regulations, improve procurement, and provide incentives for the “permanent government” to embrace efficiencies.

Are these efforts worthwhile? Yes and no. Every organization, public or private, can find ways to do what it does more efficiently. Indeed, the quest for efficiency is a defining characteristic of modernity in general and American culture in particular. Sharing ideas advanced by those in the private sector can yield some useful fruit.

At the same time, they often promise more than they can deliver. As an exercise that will produce budget savings, however, its success is likely limited. If the objective is reducing the growth of government spending, the central problem is not doing what the government already does more efficiently.

Over two-thirds of the federal government’s budget is mandatory or entitlement spending, including more than $1 trillion annually of interest payments on the growing national debt.  Other spending mandated by law includes roughly $1.6 trillion benefiting more than 72 million social security beneficiaries. Generating savings in other income transfer programs including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, rent subsidies, and benefits for those who are disabled would also require a change in law.

Even when such efforts are organized on a bipartisan basis, such as the 2010 National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, they require sustained presidential support and the acquiescence of Congress.

As discretionary spending has shrunk as a percentage of the federal budget, policymakers have turned increasingly to regulation and other administrative measures. Some are warranted and have benefits that exceed costs. Others do not. The process for implementing them has contributed to uncertainty and delay. Creating a regime of regulatory reasonableness is a worthy objective in order to establish policies that are both sound and efficient.

Success requires patience, persistence, and finding common ground. It will take more than identifying and eliminating waste, fraud, abuse. Achieving greater efficiency will also necessitate identifying priorities and taking actions that would ensure that the things that matter most are not at the mercy of the things that matter least.

Roger B. Porter is IBM Professor of Business and Government.
 

When the de-regulatory wind blows

Malcolm Sparrow

The anticipated Trump II deregulatory fervor may produce some reductions in federal (regulatory) expenditures. But the main purpose is to reduce the costs and constraints imposed on industry through regulation. Professional regulators, deeply committed to their protective missions, find a lopsided “better business” agenda deeply worrying, even threatening, and are sometimes tempted to hunker down and hope that “this too shall pass.”

Regulators, often demoralized during such times, look for support and advice. I urge them to engage more constructively with the “better business” agenda, finding ways that do not compromise their integrity or their commitment to protecting the public.  Specifically, I offer them five pointers:

1. Balance the rhetoric.  Every time someone says “better business,” do not respond with “better protection.”  That merely emphasizes the political tug-of-war between less versus more regulation, which is ultimately unproductive. Instead, respond with “Yes, better business and better protection, at the same time.” Aiming to deliver Pareto improvement on both fronts is much less political, appeals to a broader audience, and is professionally responsible. Achieving such Pareto improvements is intellectually challenging, requiring more artful, sophisticated, and risk-focused regulatory operations.
2. Distinguish outcome quality from process quality. Without compromising on levels of protection (regulatory outcomes), use the best of business process improvement practices available—automation, interagency collaboration, single points of contact, client-facing web portals, etc.—to make compliance easier, cheaper, and more convenient, thus improving regulatory process. Such steps not only save time and costs for industry; they actually improve compliance rates as well.
3. Practice regulatory craftsmanship. Embrace the full range of available regulatory instruments and harm-reduction tools for modifying behaviors, including education, outreach, partnerships, persuasion, “nudges,” public awareness campaigns, rewards and incentives, as well as enforcement when necessary. Skillfully deploying a broader range of harm-reduction strategies and techniques minimizes the need for regulation and enforcement, allowing regulators to be more economical with their use of the coercive power of the state.
4. Use risk-based targeting.  In low-risk areas, significantly reduce (but never to zero) the probability/frequency of inspections & audits.
5. Clean out the regulatory cupboard. Practice good housekeeping, modernizing & managing the stock of regulations by eliminating obsolete, redundant, confusing, or overly detailed rules.

I deliberately put number 5 last, as the usual debate about de-regulation and the “better business” agenda makes it item 1 on a list which only has one item!  Managing the stock of regulations on the books is one important consideration, but there is so much more that regulators can do to deliver under the banner of “better business and better protection, at the same time.”

Note that the unbalanced, purely deregulatory, wind usually blows full force and unabated for no more than nine or twelve months. Then something awful happens—a plane crash, bank failure, environmental catastrophe, or corporate scandal—something quickly labelled a “regulatory failure” which rudely reminds everyone of the value of regulatory protections.  At that point, the lopsided “better business” agenda itself turns into a political liability.

Malcolm Sparrow is the Professor of the Practice of Public Management and faculty chair of the ����vlog���� “Strategic Management of Regulatory and Enforcement Agencies” program.

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Faculty portraits by Martha Stewart.

Illustrations by Gary Waters/Ikon Images/AP.

Banner image by Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA.