Don’t fire the guys collecting the money
Occasionally we excerpt something we come upon that might be of interest to readers of this website. We had not previously seen the substack published by Don Moynihan, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Here’s how he describes his work: “I spend a lot of time studying, teaching, and thinking about how governments function and how to make them better.”
Prof. Moynihan also has proven quite good at understanding how governments can be made much, much worse.
The post from which we took this excerpt, DOGE Mismanagement Principles, also contains sections headed: “Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes” and “Don’t fire employees, unfire them, and then fire them again.”
Don’t fire the guys collecting the money
Governments can’t function without revenue, so ensuring that the agency that collects taxes can do its job is pretty fundamental to maintaining state capacity. Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.
The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.
Or did DOGE want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires?
We have our answer. In the middle of tax season, the IRS was told to lay off thousands of workers hired as part of the rebuilding project.
Part of the DOGE hype is that after they fire everyone, they will figure out better ways to do the job using, uh, AI and such. But there is no second act where it gets better. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. It is not as if DOGE has some magical IRS plan up their sleeve. There is no plan.
In addition to making it less likely that the wealthy will have to pay taxes, the other attraction to the IRS is its data. DOGE has been hoovering up all sorts of data across government. No single entity has ever had this type of centralized access to government data. But the IRS stands alone. It is the holy grail of government data, incredibly tightly controlled. It requires an Act of Congress to share this data even within government. But when DOGE employees landed at Treasury “the main thing DOGE is asking for is extensive access to the tax agency’s information and internal systems. They’re just trying to snap up data right now." This includes access to personal bank information that political appointees, including even IRS commissioners, traditionally do not have access to because of the concern of abuse of such data. Now white nationalists who traffic in far-right hate and neo-nazi messaging will have that information. . . .
Thanks to Brad Abrams for acquainting us with Prof. Moynihan’s blog.