Shakin’ n’ bakin’

Washington is getting a much-needed makeover

There’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on in Washington. Because it was overdue, the shake-up is dislodging lotsa bad habits. Unproductive policies and systems are being dismantled left and right. Mostly left.

Under any other administration, the process would be called reform. No one opposing it has the grace to call it that, though. They call it an assault.

A business term for the shake-up is creative destruction. It entails tossing failed practices so that a company—or, in this case, a seat of government—can reinvent itself. It happens when said company or government is operating in the red (check), has gone off mission (check), and/or is alienating much of its constituency by pushing inferior products and services (check). Think Kmart or Sears. They didn’t renew themselves in time and are virtually gone.

Those invested in the status quo don’t cheer the makeover. They are appalled and are pushing back in defense of sacrosanct routines and practices. They fume at the audacity of it all. Some of their resistance is ideological, some just peculiar. “We’ve always done it this way!” Yes. We know.

The speed of the process also riles them. Elon Musk, the DOGE devil himself, has addressed the alacrity with which change is occurring. “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes,” he conceded a while back, “but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly.” More recently, the administration’s czar of efficiency couched DOGE’s work in terms of an old carpentry maxim, saying his team’s approach to making program and/or budget cuts is “to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once.” Had such caution been standard practice in Washington heretofore, we wouldn’t be in such straits.

Agencies that mostly exist to disburse federal moneys contend that the rollbacks undermine society, jeopardize professional careers, harm one group of Americans or another… and probably will cause climate change. For example, the American Alliance of Museums defends the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has been targeted for downsizing, by calling the decision “a disservice to future generations.”

Maybe. Then again, maybe not, for another facet of the reform process is called disruptive innovation, whereby fresh solutions are baked to supplant old ones that were solving nothing. Thus, the administration reaches for more transparent disbursement of federal dollars, more accountability in administration of programs, fewer agencies and employees. Such initiatives will not disserve future generations. Rather, they help assure that future Americans will have a stable, fiscally sound national government.

We’ll see if the administration’s efforts prevail against the upset frat boys whose clubhouse has been entered. There doesn’t appear to be an open mind among them. They simply are agin whatever the administration is for. They love their routines and legacies, their fraternizations and secret handshakes (all right, that’s just a guess), and delight in disparaging anyone who isn’t in the club.

They would cringe at being called self-righteous. So, how about self-lefteous, which is the bereft condition after common sense has left. It left years ago.