"Government Efficiency": In the Eye of the Beholder?

Welfare was long seen as epitomzing government waste and fraud. Today, it wreaks its havoc with ruthless "efficiency".

​At first glance, President-elect Trump's proposed new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems like the fashion here in Europe for "anti-corruption" agencies.  They quickly become politicized, weaponized, and, well, corrupted.  Resembling the bureaucracies it is supposed to oversee has become somewhat the fate of the General Accounting Office, which is already charged with monitoring government waste.

Avoiding that fate depends in large measure on what DOGE decides to cut. The most flagrant example of government "inefficiency" — by the Republicans' own assessment during the decades that they made it their highest priority — is the welfare system.  Why do we hear almost nothing about it today?  Not because it has become a paragon of administrative rectitude.  President Bill Clinton's 1996 "reform" act did reduce the welfare rolls (a bit), until President Barack Obama increased them again, but it also politicized welfare more than ever by allowing control to be consolidated (and weaponized) in a feminist gendarmerie.  This is really why Republicans dropped it like a hot potato. They fear to criticize anything that benefits radical women.

To be sure, just how inefficient the welfare system is depends in part on your definition of "efficient". For years, inefficiency was the principal Republican complaint: bloated rolls, fraud, disincentives to work.  

But the welfare machinery proliferates multiple evils far more serious than waste, and arguably it does so with admirable "efficiency". If you share the feminist premise that single-parent homes are a positive virtue for their own sake, and you want to create as many as possible, then the welfare system is indeed the most efficient way to accomplish that goal.  If your aim is to proliferate the crime, substance abuse, truancy, homelessness, prostitution, health problems, and other social ills that inevitably attend such homes and communities with many of them, then again, welfare could hardly be better suited.  Indeed, if you want to enlarge the overall size of the government – especially the bulk of domestic spending for problems of law enforcement, incarceration, education, and health, then welfare is a model of administrative ethics and efficiency.

Likewise, if you hope to increase illegal immigration, nothing could provide a more efficient magnet.

For that matter, if you want to create a political patronage machine that will mobilize low-income voters for the Democratic Party — a national one that makes Daley, Rizzo, and Tammany Hall look amateurish — the welfare apparat is a ready-made machine (as Obama realized).

My sarcasm is not gratuitous.  All this social havoc that devours taxpayers’ money is desirable from the standpoint of government functionaries themselves, because it rationalizes their existence. But even more disturbing is the fact that what at one time were regarded as social ills are, in some quarters, now looked upon as positive achievements.  This is because welfare never proceeded from an altruistic motivation to help the poor out of their poverty.  From the start, it stemmed from an ideology that was deeply hostile to traditional values like family and country, and saw that enlisting and manipulating the poor as political pawns could help to eradicate those values. From the start, it was designed to control a population.

Some leftists used to argue that welfare was designed to forestall “the Revolution” by bribing the poor to be quiet.  But over the years, others have dreamed of enlisting welfare recipients as a revolutionary proletariat.  In the 1960s, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven devised a fantasy that they could mobilize welfare recipients to rise up, smash the capitalist state, and construct socialism.

Conservatives nowadays take this preposterous dream seriously and dwell on Cloward and Piven as evidence of “cultural Marxism”. This provides conservatives with an excuse to avoid having to confront the more effective and destructive way that the Left really radicalized welfare.

Cloward and Piven’s dream never had the faintest hope of materializing. But the welfare machinery was politicized by another method. The real weaponization of welfare was accomplished not by Marxists but by feminists, who created gendarmerie that turned social workers into plainclothes police. Generating national hysteria over “child abuse” (which takes place entirely among single-parent welfare households), they terrorized families into raising their children according to feminist methods or risk having them confiscated. A similar gendarmerie furthered the process of purging men from the nation’s households with accusations of “domestic violence”. This was so successful (“efficient”?) that they broadened the campaign with #MeToo and used it against celebrities and politicians who fell afoul of feminist ideals of acceptable “masculinity”.

These campaints were codified in federal legislation for which no constitutional authority exists. These laws have wreaked havoc on not only families but constitutional government.

Child abuse accusations rationalized CAPTA (a.k.a. the Mondale Act), which gave local governments and social workers financial incentives to find — or fabricate — child abuse. The horror this perpetrated in homes throughout the United States (and beyond) — mass confiscation of children and incarceration of parents — has been investigated by so many scholars that it hardly needs to be reiterated here (though it is still studiously ignored by the mainstream media) .¹ It is enough to say that no evidence has ever been presented that the nation experienced any real epidemic of child abuse, except the one created by the social workers themselves in their single-parent welfare homes. There was even less evidence of significant child abuse in intact, middle-class families, whose homes the social workers ripped apart.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has a similar effect for accusations of domestic violence. Here too the problem — to the extent there ever was one apart from the hysteria generated by feminists — took place in the process of evicting the fathers by the welfare operatives. Yet the feminists have used it to decimate not only middle class families but the US Constitution and Bill of Rights itself.

If Elon Must and Vivek Ramaswamy are serious about using DOGE to reduce unnecessary domestic spending, they will scrutinize these two federal measures — and the entire welfare machinery that spawned them — and they will not limit themselves to the cost of the programs themselves. Even more serious is the multiplier effect that rationalizes so much other spending by creating and proliferating and exacerbating the very problems that government agencies claim to be solving.

Coda:

As I was about to send this off, the viral news arrived of the latest developments in the horrific case of Jeff Younger and his son James. This illustrates the horror that ensues from what I describe above. Especially striking is that Elon Musk weighed in with a brief comment: “There are many such situations. It is utter psychotic.”

If Musk knows this, and given his enormous advantages — his new responsibility with DOGE added to his unparallelled endowments of wealth, status, and ingenuity — he is uniquely positioned to do something about it. I hope to write about this further, but my initial reaction (and I often regret initial reactions) is that if he knows about this and fails to act on it, he may go down in history as not only the richest man and most innovative brain of our time but also a spirit of questionable courage. Let’s pray he seizes this opportunity, as he has so many others.

---

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

1. I summarize the neglected literature in my books, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007), chapter 4, and The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017), pp. 175-207.