The fires in LA are horrific. Rather than blame them in large part on California’s ecology fueled by climate change, Trump and his ilk on the right see two other sources. One, incredibly, is DEI – if only there were more white male firefighters the results would have been better. What utter nonsense!
The other source of the fires being out of control are California’s Democratic politicians, starting with the governor, Gavin Newsome, and the LA mayor, Karen Bass. Also ridiculous. Newsome and Bass are not to blame, although there may be a kernel of truth that politics has played a part. If there had been more investment in firefighting capabilities – personnel and equipment – it may have been possible to have gotten the fires under control more quickly. That’s hard to say and experts disagree.
Regardless, one important question is why hasn’t there been more investment in fire-fighting capabilities? It’s easy to blame Democrats, but, as LA councilwoman Traci Park put it, “this is decades of chronic underinvestment.” Why have there been decades of chronic underinvestment? The answer is clear: neoliberalism!
Neoliberalism is an ideological doctrine that believes the market and business know what’s best for the economy and society and that government is bloated, self-interested, and inefficient, if not downright deep state evil, and needs to be minimized. Neoliberal ideology has swept the world since the Reagan-Thatcher era in the 1980s.
Neoliberalism has undermined trust in government and has severely limited the ability to fund local, state, and federal government programs. Fire fighting is just one example of many. Into this neoliberal mess comes the Department of Government Efficiency which is basically saying neoliberalism has not been sufficiently mean-spirited. DOGE takes neoliberalism an order of magnitude further proposing massive cuts in government spending, programs, polices, regulations, and workers. And directing those cuts are Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires – the oligarchy as Biden pointed out.
DOGE is supposedly about making our government more efficient but what does that mean? For example, is it efficient for local governments and federal aid to cut firefighting services? Given the LA fires, many of us might think this is a bad idea, not “efficient” at all. What really is the meaning of efficiency?
I am an economist who has spent his 50-year career arguing that the economist idea of efficiency is bankrupt, meaningless. In theory, to an economist, doing something that is efficient means a program or policy that provides benefits for some, but most importantly, no losses for anyone! If no one is hurt and at least some people gain, it is seen as a program or policy worth doing. But, of course, this is never the case! Any government action always has winners and losers.
So what can the idea of efficiency mean in practice? Perhaps most sensibly and most broadly, efficiency should mean answering the question: “is it worth it?” In the abstract, economists talk about actions that have a net gain, that somehow we judge that the benefits of the action exceeds its costs. They often try to measure this net gain in money terms but this is just foolishness. What is needed in practice is a judgment call weighing the pros and cons, plusses and minuses, along many dimensions. This is usually accomplished through government processes led by our political representatives in the three branches of government
DOGE’s promise to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget is not a call for efficiency. It is a call for the wealthy in our society, the oligarchy led by people like Musk, to implement their judgement as to the benefits and costs of any government program or policy. And they don’t seem very interested in the benefits, just in cutting the costs. Any careful, rational look at benefits and costs of government programs would actually call for expanding some.
Obviously, we can disagree on what are public needs that government programs and policies should address better, but my list of what is underfunded includes: our global climate emergency, environmental health, public health, education, roads and other infrastructure, homelessness, housing, malnutrition, poverty, space exploration, peace-making, immigration, and so much more. While policing and military expenditures have problematic aspects, police officers and our service men and women are underpaid. There is considerable room for increasing government expenditures as a percent of GDP – the U.S. spends 36% on government while many of our OECD partners spend much more.
But instead of a rational examination of the broadly conceived benefits and costs of such government investments, we are getting the perversion of the idea of efficiency to mean a cursory look by the oligarchy into what they see as the benefits and costs – that is, to them and their rich friends – of government programs and policies. The Orwellian Department of Government Efficiency is the culmination of almost half a century of neoliberalism through which the wealthy can now openly decide what government should do.