> Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.
This is in some ways talking about two different things.
Suppose you run the DMV like this. To do anything you need an appointment, to get an appointment takes 45 days, and appointments are scheduled back to back so even when you come for your appointment you have to wait for hours because previous appointments may have run over. In terms of minimizing the number of government workers this solution might be almost optimal -- they're all busy all of the time -- but in terms of wasting the public's time it's idiotic.
Now suppose you do the opposite. No appointments so you have to show up at 8AM and wait all day until someone can see you, because everyone shows up at 8AM, because if you show up at 3PM they'll be closed before you get in. This is also miserable.
What you really want is to allow appointments but not require them, and then give appointments priority. Then some proportion of slots would be unscheduled and filled with walk-ins, but those would also prevent anyone with an appointment from having to wait because they get priority, and appointments would be available two or three days out instead of weeks because you don't need a fully-packed schedule to prevent idle workers when any unscheduled slot just means they take one from the walk-in queue. Meanwhile if you absolutely have to get in today, you still have the option to get in line at 8AM.
Doing either of the dumber alternatives is the kind of government inefficiency that really pisses people off, and yet all three are basically the same in terms of how many government workers you need, because all three have them fully occupied with some combination of appointments and walk-ins.
Likewise, a lot of inefficiency comes from bad laws. Laws and regulations run the gamut from the obviously good (criminal penalties for homicide, ban on leaded gasoline) to the needlessly over-complicated (tax code, many business regulations), to the corrupt (certificate of need laws, many aspects of building/zoning codes, exclusionary financial regulations). The inefficiency here isn't just that you need too many government bureaucrats, though the more needless complexity there is the worse that gets. It's that the inefficiency bleeds into what the public has to do to comply with it, like wasting your time at the DMV. The government requires you to hire excessively many accountants and lawyers and compliance officers, or prohibits or bankrupts societally net-positive endeavors.
A body whose purpose is to ferret out and eliminate those kinds of inefficiencies has the potential to do good, because the government doesn't otherwise have a great accountability mechanism to prevent them, as evidenced by their widespread proliferation.
This is in some ways talking about two different things.
Suppose you run the DMV like this. To do anything you need an appointment, to get an appointment takes 45 days, and appointments are scheduled back to back so even when you come for your appointment you have to wait for hours because previous appointments may have run over. In terms of minimizing the number of government workers this solution might be almost optimal -- they're all busy all of the time -- but in terms of wasting the public's time it's idiotic.
Now suppose you do the opposite. No appointments so you have to show up at 8AM and wait all day until someone can see you, because everyone shows up at 8AM, because if you show up at 3PM they'll be closed before you get in. This is also miserable.
What you really want is to allow appointments but not require them, and then give appointments priority. Then some proportion of slots would be unscheduled and filled with walk-ins, but those would also prevent anyone with an appointment from having to wait because they get priority, and appointments would be available two or three days out instead of weeks because you don't need a fully-packed schedule to prevent idle workers when any unscheduled slot just means they take one from the walk-in queue. Meanwhile if you absolutely have to get in today, you still have the option to get in line at 8AM.
Doing either of the dumber alternatives is the kind of government inefficiency that really pisses people off, and yet all three are basically the same in terms of how many government workers you need, because all three have them fully occupied with some combination of appointments and walk-ins.
Likewise, a lot of inefficiency comes from bad laws. Laws and regulations run the gamut from the obviously good (criminal penalties for homicide, ban on leaded gasoline) to the needlessly over-complicated (tax code, many business regulations), to the corrupt (certificate of need laws, many aspects of building/zoning codes, exclusionary financial regulations). The inefficiency here isn't just that you need too many government bureaucrats, though the more needless complexity there is the worse that gets. It's that the inefficiency bleeds into what the public has to do to comply with it, like wasting your time at the DMV. The government requires you to hire excessively many accountants and lawyers and compliance officers, or prohibits or bankrupts societally net-positive endeavors.
A body whose purpose is to ferret out and eliminate those kinds of inefficiencies has the potential to do good, because the government doesn't otherwise have a great accountability mechanism to prevent them, as evidenced by their widespread proliferation.