Why the Government Isn't a Bigger Version of a Startup
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Government is usually optimized around operational activity, and it usually does so very well from the perspective of how the organization is designed. Things get weird because priorities are driven by external mandate. DMV issues licenses, taxes are collected, social services are delivered. The downside of scaled operations is that changes are difficult and expensive. The exception is when there is growth -- the government is good at borrowing money and good at building stuff.
Large corporations aren't that much different. If anything, the average medium/large corporation has fewer controls and is less competent at a given task that a .gov organization would be, but delivers each marginal task at a lower cost and less red tape. (aka compliance requirements)
Startups are different. They are built to build and tend to do the minimum viable activity and are usually a big mess operationally.
I think that’s missing the point entirely. What governments offer is stability. “Inertia” is a feature. If governments swung around rapidly the way tech trends change then it would cause tremendous damage to people’s lives and to the economy as a whole.
Too often we focus on the outsides of a venn diagram, and fail to invest proper effort where the overlap is. IMO, the part in the middle done well is more than enough for a good world, and the bits on the outside are just flavors.
Often this ineffectiveness is misconstrued as incompetence and used as evidence to further decrease the resources available.
Not that the amount of taxes paid ever stopped a government from trying borrow and spend way more than that.
Government, taxes, and private industry are all tools of civilization. Tools are imperfect and the human managers & users are imperfect. One has to monitor all of them to keep them in decent working order. They won't just automatically run in an optimum mode if citizens don't keep a critical eye on them all.
The only things a government can run out of are faith in the future and internal and external trust. When either or both of those disappear, human animals panic and the economy stops working.
Private enclosure of capital - which is equivalent to private enclosure of political and economic power - is far more likely to create that sort of breakdown than high taxes and generous public spending. (Effective - non-corrupt - public spending being equivalent to policy decisions that broaden and diffuse political power rather than concentrating it.)
Effective generous public spending is actually a political negative feedback mechanism that damps wild oscillations in confidence, seeds future investment, and enhances political stability.
Laws are the same way: members of civilization have to mutually agree on how to create and follow the laws for them to "work".
Civilization is the Mother of All Handshakes. If a large enough percentage of the population disagrees with the "agreements", anarchy happens.
Modern technology and civilization are both inherently driven by standards: both written and de-facto.
Governments frequently consume more resources than they can purchase with the taxes they collect.
Yes, they could just print all the money they could ever need. And when they do, inflation runs wild. Then a government cannot borrow in its own currency because no one will trust it. Or it must pay a high rate.
The US government is in a unique situation. It's been able to print much more than a government normally could because it is the most trusted reserve currency in a rapidly globalizing world. Trillions of dollars are held overseas. And if the dollar loses that role, you will see a lot of inflation as those dollars return to the US. Even if it doesn't lose that role and the world just stops taking additional dollars, the US would have to print less to keep the same rate of inflation.
Most governments don't fall into this category. And no country is in this category forever.
A country's currency is really just another form of debt. And while it may never run out, the more it prints, the more it declines in value. It's not debt people can collect on, but the law of supply and demand will certainly collect on this debt.
And it's also a tax, a tax on savings. And the country could remove dollars from circulation, thereby reducing this debt and reversing the decline in the value of savings.
Hating on the general concept of taxes isn't very productive but people are quite unhappy about the details. Politics involves painful compromises and tax is one of the pointy ends of politics.
I'd hazard that taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose - because otherwise presumably said taxpayer would already be paying for the service.
Sorry, the first half of your sentence is too broad for the rest of it to possibly be true.
Logically speaking, the assertion that 50%+ of taxes are driven by the same motivation seems impossible. Taxation is such a generic mechanism at work in so many different places, your assertion seems like a non-starter to me.
Did you intend to make such a strong claim?
The intent was quite different, I didn't see a reading of that sentence that involved motivation but now that it has been pointed out I can see that it is the most obvious one. My intent was more about the outcomes of a tax but that wasn't expressed.
What I wanted to say was something more like "No political decision has perfect support, and many cause stark divisions. But taxpayers financially support all the decisions taken and they will be vehemently opposed to some of the things they fund".
All of the competency arguments aside, this smacks of a "the free market will solve it" argument. These arguments are tiresome because the one example raised for the best evidence of this is the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
People don't generally pay for things that are in their core competencies. A very common reason to pay someone else to do something is because the person with money doesn't know how to get the result they want.
> the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
You might want to pass that on to the migrants of the world. Judging by total migration the United States are possibly most attractive destination available. Its migration intake isn't shabby when looked at as a rate either. That dumpster fire is a powerful attractor.
And even then you've missed the argument. I didn't say taxes were a bad thing. I said that people often have very strong principled objections to what their taxes are used for.
> taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose
This is wrong, because they are raised to support a country and most of that (hence the "usual" qualifier) is to support things people might not know they need. Your response to this is apparently that people do pay for things they don't know they need (or don't understand are necessary), but you fail to tell the reader why. Instead you reiterate that you are convinced they'll definitely pay for them.
That point isn't reasonable. There can't be a division where people know what they want when they vote but not when they spend money. I suppose there could be in theory, but a system that encourages that that would generally be called 'corrupt government' and the actors involved 'lying politicians' where the people who get voted in do things that the individual voters vehemently oppose.
Voting someone in to office is a broadly similar decision to going out and buying something. Individuals in their capacity as voters are not that different from individuals in their capacity as buyers.
This tends to happen because the owners are usually a relatively small group of people or an individual, and their individual personalities and changing goals will shape the quality of job they do. They may decide on a whim, "I'll milk out my fortune now and dump the problem on the public."
Where privatisation does fix things, it's usually simply because the process of privatisation gives somebody the political capital to implement massive organizational change, and that somebody happened to be the right person for it.
Conversely, when privatised infrastructure is a mess, it can be beneficial to have it taken over by the state. Again, the mere fact of doing so will give somebody the political capital to implement massive changes, which can fix things if that somebody happens to be the right person (or group of persons) for the job.
As a corollary, it would be possible to fix many "broken" state-run offices by enabling the right person(s) to implement massive changes. That's probably even preferable to privatisation in many cases: you still have the same risk that you didn't choose the right person for the job, but you eliminate the risk of them just cashing out.
Despite one of the highest fees in the country, my DMV took 4 months to transfer a vehicle registration.
At one point I spoke to an employee who told me they needed to go find the the appropriate microfiche to print the next form needed to continue processing.
At least hackers cannot delete it :-)
My tax rate in NYC was something like 36% (not counting student loan payments and healthcare premiums), but where was this money going? We're paying practically the same tax rate as countries with universal healthcare, free/affordable universities, and strong safety nets, but we have none of the above. In my 5 years in NYC I saw the subway get progressively worse every year, while the homeless population exploded. I felt like that money might as well be getting flushed down the toilet.
If I could more tangibly see where that money is going, then I'd probably feel differently. I think taxpayers should have some agency in choosing where their taxpayer money goes. Andrew Yang proposed something like this, and I love the idea:
> "Each American should be able to direct 1% of their taxes to a specific project. During Revenue Day, these projects will be highlighted, showing what, exactly, America’s money was able to accomplish during the previous year. Initial profiles of the next year’s projects will also be announced so people can get excited for them." [1]
I wouldn't mind paying taxes in the U.S. if I felt like they were being productively used. It's hard to feel that way.
1. it has too much government 'civil service' ?
2. or too much private and corporate emasculation of effective government?
ie the very sentiments you echo are directly supporting the agenda of 2 and not 1.
I'm not sure if you knew where the money was going you'd feel much better about it.
For one, it's not necessarily about inefficiency, but that is part of it. For all the hate for the NHS (foreign, that is, most of the UK apparently feels love), the UK spends about $171B (USD) to provide healthcare for 66 million people. The Federal government here spends $600B to provide healthcare for 44 million people (via Medicare). It's not the same population of course -- Medicare is heavily involved in end-of-life care. But then if you include even just federal spending on Medicaid, you end up with $1T spent to provide care to 110 million people. At UK spending rates, $1T could provide medical care for the whole US population. Yes, if we had the same healthcare spending profile as the UK's NHS, we could provide healthcare for all, pay no more than we do now in taxes, and meanwhile eliminate private insurers and the hefty premiums individuals and their employers currently pay today.
But the main thing that separates us from our HDI neighbors is military spending. The USA allocates $600-800B/year to the DoD and VA (healthcare for vets). By some measures the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost nearly $7T. I'm not here to argue about the value of wars, but it's pretty clear that the primary focus of American conflict in the Middle East is oil. I'm not making a claim one way or the other that the USA is going to war just for oil, but it's also pretty clear that if the world were not purchasing ungodly amounts of the stuff pumped from the desert, the folks the US armed forces have been fighting would not have the kind of resources they do, and I'm pretty sure these wars would have cost much less -- if they'd happened at all.
That seems like a huge tangent, except that the $7T the US spent fighting oil-funded adversaries literally could today buy every driving-age American a Tesla Model 3. We could have eliminated almost 50% of domestic oil consumption, and perhaps shifted the world's power structure in a way that better serves what the DoD probably considers American interests, compared with the unending wars we currently have.
Would that have been better? Maybe we'll do it next time.
And sometimes governments respond rapidly in very negative ways, such as when the Nazis passed the Reichstag fire decree [1]. This was the first major step to elevate Hitler to dictatorship.
I think this figure inappropriately separates humans from nature.
The government is simply the extreme version of "too big to fail."
And governments should be treated as "too big to fail" entities; a failed government is a very, very bad thing.
But it's also inevitable that government has the same problems as any organization with that label: misalignment of incentives, stagnation, tendency to corruption, reduced customer choice, inefficiency, etc.
http://codeforamerica.org https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://usds.gov/
This is so key. I do a lot of government consulting and one of the iceberg issues right now is how to reconcile devops, whose economics are designed to facilitate revenue growth, with fixed budget public service horizons of a decade or more.
The whole public enterprise model was up front costs for expensive developers, then offload it to cheaper operations teams on shared production infrastructure for long haul. The unspoken implication of devops/CICD/cloud/agile, etc, is that you have developers available to roll out patches and features, which sends the long term cost of the service multiplying. Imagine retaining your development consultants and a product team past the 2-3 dev years through the 10+ years of production, with no revenue growth and more probably, budget cuts.
The table in the article provides a good overview, with the caveat that defence is not normal public services in government.
Even many bank architects aren't close enough to the code of their services to meaningfully reason about what's going on. Tech is necessarily the expression of economic relationship models, where if you don't have a grasp of them, implementing tech without a view to the economics is going to sink some ships.
That play of getting those %80 features into production and leaving the %20 people to fight it out afterwards as tech and feature debt is standard product management, but it takes extra finesse in govt.
I have seen some great success stories. Seemingly simple things like QR codes for game tags, federated logins for citizens, online license and permit renewals, a city parking app, pothole reporting.
This project is really interesting to me: https://www.open311.org/learn/
First, I think this depends a lot on your locality. I think you'll find a lot of places where people are nowhere near as complimentary about basic government services like DMV as you seem to be.
Second, I think this depends a lot on the type of service and how large a segment of the population needs it. Everybody gets driver's licenses, so there is a limit to how much suckitude the DMV can have before it becomes a political issue. But many social services are only used by a small fraction of the population, so unless you are one of those people or know one of them closely enough, you won't be aware of how much those services suck, and if you are aware of it, you will have a very hard time getting other people, who don't use the services and don't know anyone who does, to care. And the people who do need those services are usually those who have little if any ability to push back at suckitude.
Finally, I think you are ignoring the huge difference in how the incentives of a government organization are determined, as compared with those of a corporation. A corporation is a business: its fundamental incentive is to make money. Corporations that don't do that go out of business. A government organization, however, has whatever incentives were put in place by the political process that created it (and those incentives can gradually change as the political process changes); and the one constant about government organizations is that, once they're created, they never go away.
Its not clear from your answer how much blame you are putting on operational issues and how much blame (if any) you are putting on the misaligned incentives between governments and the people who use their services.
For the worst ones (the ones that only a small fraction of people, most of whom are indigent, use), neither. They suck because of misaligned incentives, but the systems were not "designed" to suck; they were designed in response to political pressure from voters, who are mostly ignorant of the misaligned incentives and believe that, if they vote for a system that will "help the poor", for example, that the system that results will actually do that. And since most of them never have to interact with the system directly, they don't realize that in fact it is not doing what they voted for.
To outsiders, this looks like a mythological problem in the US. There's a simple-minded - and wholly wrong - narrative of "private sector good, public sector bad".
There's certainly room for improvement in the public sector. But there's a lot more to the public sector than the DMV and the IRS, and the sector as a whole doesn't do too badly - when it isn't being interfered with politically.
As I said, I think it depends on your locality, and of course on the large corporations. Also see below.
> there's a lot more to the public sector than the DMV and the IRS, and the sector as a whole doesn't do too badly
I think you are giving far too much credit to the public sector. As I said, government services which everybody uses, like DMV, have much less room for suckitude than services which only a small fraction of people, most of whom are indigent and hence have little or no ability to push back at suckitude, use. I think most people would be shocked if they knew how badly many of these services suck. (I only happen to know because I happen to have married someone who was helping several friends to try to navigate these services, and so I have had first-hand experience with them.) The suckitude of the large corporations that you describe simply pales in comparison. And, unlike in the case of those corporations, people have no alternative if the government is providing the services.
It is by definition larger. But may be not so different when an idea caught up, you do not know the end but still try.
There are many government process, role, citizen ... within one Gov
Read the 3 lens approach.
1. Defense systems are, in general, useful for offense. Unless I can know that the primary utility of an innovation is for good, I cannot work on it. Our only control in the matter is our choice of which innovations to make. I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work.
I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day, but won't touch a system that can kill another human unless we are at war. Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
2. Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/09/Bubble-and-lines-...
The modern world is unaware of how terrible major wars and nuclear weapons can be, because we are now generations removed from the experience. I fear that we are poised to re-learn some of those lessons.
Circling back: Yep, sure is possible, but I'm not going to work on weapons systems unless we are at war. I'd rather work on the education and science needed to help everyone respect one another and lead healthier lives. I've only got one life and don't want to spend it building systems that might end others' lives more-efficiently.
I don't think you can stop humans from getting better at killing each other. So the real question is: who should have the best killing systems? If the answer is "not the US," then who will it be?
What is necessary is to have sufficient distributed killing-capacity to prevent any one actor from gaining outsized power over everyone else. If people collectively agree that WMD are bad, and are willing to go to conventional war to stop everyone else from developing WMD, there may be a WMD-free equilibrium.
Don't we already have the technology for that? I see no technical reason that prevents totally automating the execution of launch commands for existing nuclear arsenals (i.e. building literal, not figurative, nuclear button).
The issue is that academics in other countries do not have qualms like yours, which could eventually give those countries a destabilizing competitive advantage. From the OP:
> America’s adversaries understand this. China is tightly integrating its defense establishment with startups, companies, and academia in “military-civilian fusion.” Russia, Iran, and North Korea have also fused those activities.
So the question is: will it be an improvement over the current status quo if one or more of those countries gains military edge over the US? Will things be better if, say, the US lacks the military technology to repulse a conventional invasion of Taiwan by the PRC, because Chinese scientists developed better stealth coatings or better missile seekers, while the American ones said "I'd rather not"?
Some would argue that we have a major problem on our hands ;).
Regarding, "I'd rather not", the point is well-taken. I'm probabilistically alive because my grandfather, who had orders to ship out the time of Japan's surrender, did not participate in an invasion of Japan. I live in a country whose political system endures in part because of the dedicated active service of more than a million citizens and in part because of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives to the cause.
When I say, "I'd rather not." I hope to lead by example. The weapons we have are sufficient to cause the end of days, which seems like enough. I don't mind if the tools I build have some military use -- making a better bandage keeps anyone who happens to be leaking blood alive. I do mind if the primary purpose of my work has lethality in mind.
I'm a precision-measurement experimental physicist, and the thing we do is optimize. I believe it would be corrosive to my soul if the goal of my daily optimization is the death of another person -- a person with a mother, a father, friends, loved ones, and perhaps children. So long as the world is at peace (and one can readily argue that it is not, or that battles are won before they are fought), I will not make weapons. If I have to make weapons, they will be good ones.
"Once upon a time, in the very earliest days of interplanetary exploration, as unarmed human vessel was set upon by a warship from the planet Kzin-home of the fiercest warriors in Known Space. This was a fatal mistake for the Kzinti, of course; they learned the hard way that the reason humanity had decided to study war no more was that humans were so very, very, good at it." -- from the jacket of the anthology 'Man-Kzin Wars'.
Or, to draw an idea from the cultural history of China:
"Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself."
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 31 (https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu31.html)
You say it would be corrosive to your soul to optimise death of currently living human beings. However, if those humans were trying to wipe out your mother, father, friends, loved ones, children and perhaps the rest of the world, by optimising their death you would be optimising the chance of the human race to survive. From that perspective, you would not delight in killing, but delight in preserving the peace and quiet which could only be achieved by cutting out the cancerous tumor which threatens the whole body of humanity.
Then again, who's the cancerous tumor here - the West or the East?
I was reading about the decisions behind the nuclear bombings of Japanese cities near the end of WWII.
I wonder how it felt being a physicist that contributed to the Manhattan Project after those droppings.
By the way, the Wikipedia pages are in interesting study in how to downplay certain... aspects.
In bullet 2, you say that classification is the antithesis of science because projects are classified (read: not published)
But in Bullet 1, somebody cited you in an unclassified paper, and also once you publish you obviously don't get to control who uses your ideas or for what purpose short of a patent.
These seem mutually exclusive, but I might be misunderstanding.
Or a declassified paper. (Not everything that starts behind the classification wall, stays behind the classification wall... but neither does everything behind the classification wall come forward in any reasonable timeframe.)
> I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work
Isn't a cornerstone of scientific research that you never know what fruitful unrelated applications could be created by your work? The scientific community is collaborative, multidisciplinary, etc.- you should be happy your work contributed to progress.
> I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day
Even though full non-proliferation will likely contribute to more war?
> Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
Shouldn't we ALWAYS strive to get better at everything? Isn't that the point of scientific research?
> unless we are at war
Well, we are at war. In 2018, Congress identified 7 countries that we are officially in conflict with. And if you have a broader definition of war, the number is much higher.
> Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
Not all defense projects are classified.
…no?
Step 1. Obtain bigger stick.
It is far from proven that a world without nuclear weapons is necessarily a world with more war.
We should not strive to get better at everything. Improving our ability to cause one another pain for its own end, for example, is cruel and inhuman. To me, the point of scientific research is a deeper understanding of Nature.
Agreed that the United States is actively engaged in armed conflict, but the integrity of our nation is arguably facing greater threats from within; a difficulty we must find our way through together.
Agreed that not all defense projects are classified -- that was a simplification. Many of the projects for which my skills are suited are classified. I'm perfectly happy accepting DARPA or similar funds for peaceful research.
> The very definition of a contractor implies a contract. And a government contract starts with fixed requirements that only change with contract modifications. That makes sense when the problem and solution are known. But when they are unknown the traditional methods of contracting fail.
This I think is the biggest failure in public private partnerships. These arrangements were supposed to save the taxpayer money by allowing nimble contractors to come in and do the heavy lifting on projects.
However what it really did is:
1) Create an adversarial relationship between between the government and the contracting entity, which is very much filled with even more red tape then it was were trying to replace.
2) Hollow out the talent in the government, causing more reliance on the private sector.
I'm not convinced these relationships can exist in a healthy way. If there isn't a lot of red tape and strict contracts then it's likely the government will get robbed blind and that leads to stricter contracts and more red tape: a virtuous cycle of red tape and lack of progress.
I think less emphases needs to be put on these partnerships and more on developing talent within the government that can innovate from within. This creates the possibility of empowered leaders within government departments that can run projects like agile mini-startups.
To your last point - I agree there is a lot of red tape. This needs to improve but it's also there for protection.
At a minimum, updating the GS scale / hiring authorities to ensure that the right expertise can be hired at competitive rates to effectively manage and guide contractual expertise is a MUST.
Right now, program officers may not even have the expertise / in-house resources to understand whether the work being done / reported is going to achieve their contract objective, and they might be relying on contractor project managers to translate. (Sometimes from the same company!) so checks are hard to come by and it's all very inefficient. To do this effectively you have to be able to hire folks that know, to create a culture around the effort at the agency so they can bring contractors on as true partners that understand the way the agency does business (norms, engineering standards, reporting, etc) - this goes a long way to ensuring objectives are met and real work is getting done.
I'm mostly in agreement, but regarding this point:
What needs to happen here instead of the strict contracts is that government nurtures good contractors. It's actually not terribly different from nurturing good employees. You need to look for people who do their jobs responsibly, efficiently and properly.
If they don't, you try to help them correct course, and if they can't, you let them go.
The strict contracts are precisely the problem - they lock everything down, lull you into false security and prevent you from discovering and cutting bad actors quickly. No cure, no pay never pans out, and meanwhile you're bleeding from the opportunity costs.
Of course, in order to make this work, you need people with clue on the inside so they can distinguish good work from bad work. I do think you can attract people like this, if you don't prevent them from doing their work by letting the lawyers run the show.
Strict contracts and the associated strict contracting rules do not exist to prevent the government from getting robbed by evil contractors that government officials are otherwise powerless to constrain, but to prevent the government from being robbed by corrupt government officers, including those at the highest level.
Likewise, strict government employment rules, which exist to prevent those with hiring authority (especially the elected chief executive) from instituting a spoils system with the government payroll.
Your ideas do not seem to address the threat model that the rules they would replace are concerned with.
But he's leaving out that many of the problems the government seeks to address are bigger than what a "startup" (his word) would ever address. A better comparison might be between governments and very large-scale enterprises -- not startups. A lot of his words have to do with software, when typically the problems governments address have to do with (in increasing order of difficulty) hardware, big infrastructure, or society, or other societies. The startup/government comparison is not parallel for other reasons too -- and it's exhausting to enumerate!
The simplest and biggest difference between public and private sector organisations is their motive: Private sector makes money. Public sector avoids being front page of the news. The behavior of each organisation often maps directly to these motives (albeit also, sometimes, perversely).
Secondary to that you have the fact that startups (and other private-sector organisations) fail and disappear all the time. Public-sector organisation's are enduring. If your defense force screws up and waste 100 billion dollars, there will still be a defense force the next day. This explains differing priorities around enduring, consistent activity and focus where in the private sector you might see full-blown pivots.
I like some of the stuff in the article's table but some of it is presented as a bit more immutable than is the case in reality. For example, fixed requirements on government projects versus agile/testing/story/feedback based delivery? Not true as a rule, lots of that kind of thing happening in the public sector. But fair as a broad generalization.
I've worked for defense contractors, but most of my time has been spent at a very conservative, results-driven, constantly-in-ship-mode commercial corporation.
It has taught me to make software that actually works; not software that looks like it works.
I don't give pitches; I give demos. I quickly learned to never try selling a pig in a poke. It had better work.
The problem with that, is that it takes more work and time to get to that phase, and, possibly, more risk.
It taught me to carefully evaluate projects, and plan for the long term.
I'm often painted as a "naysayer" because of this.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I plan to succeed. That means shooing the unicorns and pixies out to pasture, and concentrating on the raw materials, and how we will get from here, to there. That often requires resource husbandry, and compromises.
I also NEVER assume that the MVP will be a "one-off." It WILL be the seed of the product for the long term, so it can't be rushed, and it must be of the highest quality that can be reasonably achieved. I generally optimize for quality over features for early-stage releases; knowing that we probably will never be given the chance to "go back and fix it later."
In that respect, the corporation was very much like the defense department. There's a story about Hyman Rickover, and how he'd deal with tech salesmen, coming to his office with sample kit. I'm not sure if it's true, but it is fun:
He is said to have taken the kit, walked over to his second-story Pentagon window, and dropped the device out onto the ground below.
"If it still works, I'll consider it." He is reputed to have said.
The answer here for me is to create a culture of experimentation and hypothesis testing whose results can be rapidly incorporated into the operations of the agency. Allow for testing off the critical path. Allow for smaller-scale experimentation to prove a concept that has an on-ramp into your day-to-day operations
This works for technology approaches, this works for regulatory approaches - it even works for opt-in citizen services IF you create the framework that supports it. (Director signs paper saying citizens can opt-in to test practices and those that do have X rights in the normal process, get the language cleared by legal, and you've got something that can last for a bunch of use cases)
Reduce the burden to get something started at a low level when your staff know it's a better way. Continue to reach out to line employees to ask what they would like to try out / attempt to make the organization better.
So much of government stagnation is the sheer burden of getting any sort of experiment approved / blessed, so you miss out on what's already in the building, let alone what can be gotten from outside. Maybe what I'm describing is "lean enterprise" type stuff.
As for Why Government Isn't a Startup and the original premise. Well... why isn't IBM a bigger version of a startup? Imagine dealing with all of the cruft ever written by congress since the formation of the country as your basis for operation. :)
Without a clear explanation of why this had been done, startups,..."
I don't think that lack of understanding of the reasons for surveillance is the problem. It is quite common for people to understand the desire to fight terrorism and prevent another 9/11, and still understand that the NSA's methods are ripe for abuse. Lying to Congress about the nature of the program (the what, not the why) doesn't inspire confidence that abuse won't happen.
I find the idea that the reasons for surveillance was simply not explained very well to be ahistorical. Perhaps that's just the bubble I've been in though.
Technocracy is another one. The Dilbert principle/Putt's law/corollary ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand"/competence inversion) is everywhere at play, however startups are too young and not big enough to really suffer from it.
Raw power, coupled to inertia, is also a reason. As J. Ousterhout pointed it out "The most important component of evolution is death. it's easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one. Most organisms are highly resistant to change, but when they die it becomes possible for new and improved organisms to take their place" ( https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php ). A government is very powerful and has huge inertia, it won't easily evolve or die.
The kind of risk-avoidance that pervades the public sector (really, all sufficiently large organizations) is actually one of political risk avoidance. It's perfectly OK for systems to fail for reasons that were forewarned, because management's ass is covered. If something is working, then don't fix it, because all change is political risk.
This happens because ultimately, at the end of the day, public sector organizations are led by politicians. The "deep state" is not genuinely independent from politics - the attitudes of leadership trickle down the chain. No matter which policies are currently favored by the politician serving at the head, the process of advancing your interests is largely identical.
That doesn't seem right at all. Shouldn't we all be equal before the law? Or has it become the norm that the foundations of democracy are being vanished one after another?
A startup can't coerce people to become its customers. A startup has to convince individuals to part with their money voluntarily.
We can have a lot of startup and we hope we will so some can fail !!! May be we want some government to fail as well but not most of them.
What? Is violating the Constitution on a massive scale just a casual pastime like pepper-spraying a protester?
Only that the common threat is now the nation's own citizens if the targets of surveillance are any indication.
It is not just one lens. There are many governments. Unitary, system, process and politics. There is not just one consistent same government even for communist. And there are many startup.
Further they serve different process, client, budget among all these group.
Solution may be smaller core, affiliated ... but not to abandon the core.
Essentially, I want a thing where I issue a new UUID (communication channel) for every party I'm interacting with, I can revoke these, redirect these, renew these at my convenience.
So much of clerical work is literally double checking forms. I want to fill out one for, the other parties can then request my info.
I'm very much concerned with the surveillance however as they say, good fences make good neighbors.
We already have a surveillance state in the USA without the convenience of good digital authentication with tokenized opt-in data-access authentications, as described by GP.
I'd rather have the benefits of a more mature authentication system. We in the USA pass around 3-4 strings (Social Security ID, Full Name, Date of Birth, Mother's Maiden Name, sometimes Street Address and/or Zip Code) and that is used as a proxy for Authorization (not even authentication).
It's ridiculously easy to get defrauded of your entire life savings (or more) in the US because knowledge of those strings (and sometimes a few more) is enough to someone to get access to a loan, mortgage, a cell phone (possibly porting/transferring from your existing SIM/line) in my name.