>Not so today. The civil service in western countries clearly struggles to keep up with the ever more complex and dynamic world. (If you want to understand the nitty-gritty details of that struggle read the excellent Pahlka’s book on the topic.) It clearly needs a reform, but nobody knows what kind of reform would work. Unlike in post-Soviet states in 1990’s, there’s no one to copy, no one to get guidance from. We are in experimentation mode.
>So, short of disbanding institutions wholesale without a clear plan, merely hoping they’ll improve when rebuilt, what else can be done?
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?” which is where a lot of the contention comes from. Political discussions in general get very heated and we tend to assume that the “other side” reform ideas aren’t working towards the Better Goal but to the Evil Goal. Having a target like the West which was just clearly better in their eyes makes for a somewhat more agreeable point than some generic reform idea.
As for DOGE in this process, a lot of left leaning people do the thing where they think it’s working towards the Evil Goal. Part of that is generic partisanship, but I do think part of that is on Musk constantly wading into culture war shenanigans and overselling his work. I can’t read minds and I can not know their intentions if it’s towards a mutually agreed upon Better Goal, a Better Goal that I don’t agree with but makes sense or an Evil Goal most would agree to be bad like corruption, but it does no favors when he’s on TV making unkeepable promises (like claiming Social Security benefits will increase) or he’s constantly taking sides in heated cultural debates that generates more opposition and thus distrust from the opposition.
You can’t have perfect PR, there will always be people who are angry just to be angry but people who truly believe in a positive reform should understand that your belief isn’t enough. You have to sell it to people, not just the idea of reform itself but trust in you and your implementation, and having a clear explicit and workable goal to move towards helps with that a lot.
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?”
Most of the time when people talk about “government waste” what they actually mean is “government spending money on things I disapprove of”. When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren’t asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples of government ‘waste’ is overseas aid, which is often very effective at fulfilling its aim, but its not an aim they agree with.
So in practice arguments about government waste tend to be ideological arguments in disguise, which causes people to be distrustful of them.
That’s part of the PR topic! Musk seems to have done a fine job marketing himself to the right wing aligned people, but “people who are predisposed to support you” are rarely the ones you actually need to convince. The main opinions you see will be of your friends and it feels good for them to cheer you on, but good PR strategy knows you often need to ignore your friends. It’s the fence-sitting moderates and more friendly “enemy side” people who are willing to say “Well that man is ok at least” who while relatively small in number are the kingmakers in a divided topic.
The targeting of more respected spending like foreign aid such as PEPFAR, his obsession with giving ridiculously incorrect savings estimates, constant framing of everything within the culture war, and barely disguised idealogical arguments as you point out is a breeding ground for generating the hostility and pushback from people who might have otherwise been more friendly.
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It’s simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it’s waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it’s valid use of government money. So “waste” = “spending I disagree with” again.
>Not so today. The civil service in western countries clearly struggles to keep up with the ever more complex and dynamic world. (If you want to understand the nitty-gritty details of that struggle read the excellent Pahlka’s book on the topic.) It clearly needs a reform, but nobody knows what kind of reform would work. Unlike in post-Soviet states in 1990’s, there’s no one to copy, no one to get guidance from. We are in experimentation mode.
>So, short of disbanding institutions wholesale without a clear plan, merely hoping they’ll improve when rebuilt, what else can be done?
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?” which is where a lot of the contention comes from. Political discussions in general get very heated and we tend to assume that the “other side” reform ideas aren’t working towards the Better Goal but to the Evil Goal. Having a target like the West which was just clearly better in their eyes makes for a somewhat more agreeable point than some generic reform idea.
As for DOGE in this process, a lot of left leaning people do the thing where they think it’s working towards the Evil Goal. Part of that is generic partisanship, but I do think part of that is on Musk constantly wading into culture war shenanigans and overselling his work. I can’t read minds and I can not know their intentions if it’s towards a mutually agreed upon Better Goal, a Better Goal that I don’t agree with but makes sense or an Evil Goal most would agree to be bad like corruption, but it does no favors when he’s on TV making unkeepable promises (like claiming Social Security benefits will increase) or he’s constantly taking sides in heated cultural debates that generates more opposition and thus distrust from the opposition.
You can’t have perfect PR, there will always be people who are angry just to be angry but people who truly believe in a positive reform should understand that your belief isn’t enough. You have to sell it to people, not just the idea of reform itself but trust in you and your implementation, and having a clear explicit and workable goal to move towards helps with that a lot.
Most of the time when people talk about “government waste” what they actually mean is “government spending money on things I disapprove of”. When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren’t asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples of government ‘waste’ is overseas aid, which is often very effective at fulfilling its aim, but its not an aim they agree with.
So in practice arguments about government waste tend to be ideological arguments in disguise, which causes people to be distrustful of them.
That’s part of the PR topic! Musk seems to have done a fine job marketing himself to the right wing aligned people, but “people who are predisposed to support you” are rarely the ones you actually need to convince. The main opinions you see will be of your friends and it feels good for them to cheer you on, but good PR strategy knows you often need to ignore your friends. It’s the fence-sitting moderates and more friendly “enemy side” people who are willing to say “Well that man is ok at least” who while relatively small in number are the kingmakers in a divided topic.
The targeting of more respected spending like foreign aid such as PEPFAR, his obsession with giving ridiculously incorrect savings estimates, constant framing of everything within the culture war, and barely disguised idealogical arguments as you point out is a breeding ground for generating the hostility and pushback from people who might have otherwise been more friendly.
True: whitehouse.gov.
This is tangential to the main point so I don’t want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn’t show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It’s simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it’s waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it’s valid use of government money. So “waste” = “spending I disagree with” again.