Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montanaās backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marionāa remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forestāruns a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing Americaās public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer baseāand his livelihoodāvanish before his eyes.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. āYou cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forestsā (1).
Itās all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But itās never actually been about āwaste,ā and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.
The waste is in private contracts that donāt fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didnāt go for those.
I would argue they didnāt become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so theyāre all spending money on staff that writes up the bids. Additionally, they only hire the workers when they win the contract and those contracts usually expire after 5-10 years. This means there is no long term, institutional capacity building. It might be fine for small projects, but for large complex projects, tearing down an organization only to reassemble it under another contractor every 5-10 years is in fact terribly inefficient and produces worse outcomes. Organizations cannot become good at the work. Iāve seen it first hand. There are many contractors that specialize only in federal procurement regulations, but have almost no in house technical knowledge of how to run the projects theyāre bidding on beyond what is they need to say to win. And, most importantly, knowing what to say to win is different than having a mature organization in place to do the work.
Thatās what I meant by āprivate contacts.ā They donāt outsource every single possible federal job, otherwise there would be no executive branch left. So the public sector jobs are highly efficient, and the waste has been outsourced to the private contracts where itās more obfuscated.
We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be ābig government,ā even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So š¤·.
Have you thought about getting consultants in to get their institutional knowledge? They hote lots of recent grads who theoretically know what to doā¦they work them hard and then churn through more, overcharging for their time and underpaying them. Some progress to become senior consultants. Not many.
Itās more than just āgetting consultants.ā Organizations need to have systems in place to manage their work. Consultants might know some things, but they are not systems. Systems usually are born out of experience and become more mature over time. They are complex and interlinked and adapt to nuances in the understanding of their work.
The prevailing metaphor for organizational capacity is that they are comprised of interchangeable parts that can be rebuilt or replaced any time. However, the actual reality is they are more like plants that grow. Privatizing the public sector is akin to planting a tree with the aim of having it give you shade, except every 5-10 years you cut it down and replant a new one. In the end, you never really get what youāre supposed to, but a bunch of people are making money off it.
Yes. I was making a joke. Consultants often are inexperienced and just make cuts, not improvements. Most of the work is done by cheap grads, who compete for few roles in the hope they make it. Most donāt. The customers get overcharged for poor advice.
Usually, they are just a way for management to have someone to point to for the decisions they make that negatively impact people or the business.