This piece originally appeared in American Affairs.
The debates over the Department of Government Efficiency have revealed, if nothing else, that the federal budget is obscure even to the political combatants ostensibly responsible for developing and overseeing it. In the executive branch, Elon Musk highlights that billions of dollars of payments are processed by the Treasury without even a memo line. Meanwhile, in Congress, Republican politicians highlight the incompleteness of the bureaucracy’s spending records, while Democrats bemoan the Trump administration’s dissimulation in ceasing to share budgetary guidance documents. The camp followers of these obscure programs are thousands of federal contractors, pursuing vague goals with indefinite timelines. As soon as the ink on a bill is dry, it seems, Congress loses sight of its initiatives until their eventual success or their all-too-frequent failure.
Contrast this with the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration provided Congress with hundreds of pages of spending reports every ten days, outlining how tax dollars were being put to use in minute detail. The speed and thoroughness with which these reports were produced is hard to fathom, and yet the administration was actually holding its best information back. FDR’s Treasury had itemized information on hundreds of thousands of projects, down to the individual checks that were written. Incredibly, politicians had better dashboards in the era of punch cards than we have in the era of AI. The decline in government competence runs deeper than our inability to match the speed and economy of New Deal construction: even their accounting was better. What happened
Political scientists discuss the decline in government competence in terms of “state capacity,” which describes a government’s ability to achieve the goals it pursues. Most political scientists agree that the United States not only suffers from degraded state capacity in absolute terms, but has less state capacity today than in the early twentieth century. A popular theory for this decline blames the excessive proceduralism of the U.S. government: the “cascade of rigidity” or the “procedure fetish.”
