Henry Newman was special adviser to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and director of the OpenEurope think tank.
“¡Afuera!” Javier Milei, the Argentine Presidential candidate was promising a radical reshaping of a Government bureaucracy bloated by Peronism.
Standing by a board, he read out a list of names of departments, and exclaimed ‘Out!’ as he chucked them over his head: “Ministry of Tourism & Sports, Out! Ministry of Culture, Out!….Ministry of Education – indoctrination – Out!” As the Buenos Aires Herald put it, this was ‘rock, meet window’ approach.
On his first day in office, Milei signed an order roughly halving the number of government departments, bringing the total down to nine. Whether these changes succeed in driving long-term reform, or are deck chair rearranging, is open to question.
Italy has often been the birth place of Western political trends: Berlusconi was a populist two decades before there was populism elsewhere. Perhaps Argentina, the most Italian of Latin American countries, is also now anticipating political trends, because in Donald Trump’s America something similar is planned. This time under a DOGE.
The last time a doge was in charge was 1789. It was Napoleon who ended the rule of the elected lords, the doges, in the Venetian Republic. But now over in Washington DC, a new DOGE (a Department for Government Efficiency) is looming into view.
The President Elect has said the DOGE mandate is to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies”. Trump argues it could be a Manhattan Project of our day – indicative of the scale of effort and the radicalism required. His opponents will fear that analogy speaks to its potential for total destruction.
Trump knows this will be controversial. He suggests the DOGE will bring “drastic change”. And he has decided to send two big beasts in to run the project: businessman Elon Musk, and his former rival for the presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Inevitably, critics are critical; Fortune magazine noted, with seeming glee, that “Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency will ironically require two men to run it”. Others have lampooned the idea of creating a new department to drive efficiency. (There is, admittedly, something quite ‘Yes, Minister’ about it.)
The structure of the DOGE is also somewhat surprising. Trump has suggested it will provide “advice and guidance from outside of Government”. If it’s outside of government, is it really a department?
But Trump also said it will “partner with the White House and the Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform.” That Office controls the budget process in the US Government, and so DOGE should have levers to drive change.
The vision is not just about cost cutting – although Trump has spoken about saving trillions of dollars. He says it’s about creating “an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before”, liberating the economy, and making Government accountable to “we the people”.
Some of this has given me a sense of déjà vu. Not in terms of taking an actual chainsaw to government, but the idea of championing government efficiency. My first job in government was working for Francis Maude in the Cabinet Office under David Cameron, where he established an Efficiency and Reform Group to save money and improve public services.
None of Maude’s work was particularly easy, let alone glamorous. But nor was it unbelievably complicated. It involved, for example, renegotiating contracts with suppliers, improving the use of digital technology, and clamping down on the promiscuous use of consultants.
Maude’s reforms saved a huge amount of money. Shortly before the 2015 general election, he announced that we were on track to exceed £20 billion of savings for the final year of the Coalition Parliament compared to a 2009-10 baseline. That was then about three times the total budget for the Ministry of Justice.
By 2015, systematic assessments of the Government’s major projects were being published for the first time, along with details of Whitehall’s top earners, and officials – paid for by taxpayers – working for trade unions. The Civil Service was at its smallest since the Second World War.
Some of the changes have lasted pretty well. Before 2010, different departments had their own websites. Now there’s a single Government website – gov.uk. It needs improving, but it’s infinitely better than what was there before.
Back in 2010, almost no government services were online. Maude’s team had a simple aspiration that if you could bank online or buy airline tickets, why couldn’t you also renew your driving license? Some of that has been a success, but Whitehall strangled plans to allow users to identify themselves online.
Now, no-one finds it strange that Civil Service departments share office space. Before, agencies used to bid against each other to rent the same office block, which was then left half filled.
Although many civil servants were inspired by the changes, Maude was attacked. The system fought back. Decisions were delayed or deferred. Officials asked whether he had a sufficient “mandate” – even when one policy had been signed off by the actual Cabinet.
The then Cabinet Secretary led something of a concerted effort to get Maude promoted, reshuffled or sacked. Others chose to brief against him, including government suppliers used to cosy deals.
Snide journalists observed that creating a new team to drive efficiency was oxymoronic. One of my special adviser colleagues was told by an official that delivering what Maude wanted wasn’t going to happen, and anyway Maude wouldn’t be around for as long as her ‘real’ boss, the Permanent Secretary. That was wrong.
The most important levers at Maude’s disposal were spending controls, delegated from HM Treasury. These forced departments into compliance, and allowed cross-cutting functional teams (covering digital, property, major projects and so on) to drive change.
After Maude left the role, some of his successors (Lord Agnew for example) continued the push. But there was so much more to do, both in central government and the wider public sector. It felt very much like an unfinished revolution.
Depressingly, there’s been something of a concerted attempt to unwind things more recently, and a suggestion that the new government will abolish the reforms altogether. None of that comes as a huge surprise.
High ranking civil servants (especially Treasury types) were never particularly interested in the changes Maude introduced, and the Labour Government has shown little interest in either efficiency or reform.
But if Elon Musk is wondering about how to go about making major cost savings in a bureaucracy, and how to drive improvements at the same time, perhaps he should give Maude a call.
