Opinion: How about entrance exams and performance reviews for Bay Area gov't?
Office Space (1999) movie performance review scene with "The Bob's"
Last month, SF Mayor Breed tightened requirements for nonprofits' spending documentation—and local CEO Min Chang urges Bay Area school districts to follow suit. In a Substack article, entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale thoughtfully defends using more merit-based accountability processes in local gov't, for this (using his words) “Makes Bureaucracy Less Dumb.”
In May we wrote: “If a culture doesn’t aim for excellence and competence, it will tend to be not excellent and not competent.” A government policy that aims for competence won’t always work. But it will always be better than a government policy that outlaws screening for and demanding competence. Competence solves so many more problems than anyone understands. We should once again make it our lodestar. This should be a goal we all share, left or right or otherwise (though one suspects that for a while longer, the organized political left will still oppose this, even if center-left entrepreneurs agree with us!). …
Recently a number of elite colleges in the US made the same intellectual mistake that our government did by removing standardized tests from the admission process, telling themselves a story that they could keep accurately recruiting talented students without clear measures of aptitude. But after removing the SAT from college admissions, institutions like MIT, Harvard, and Yale have reinstated standardized tests, realizing how effective they are as a predictor of academic performance. Those were institutions that had the power to react to an obvious reality: that giving up merit wasn’t working for them, and was affecting the quality of their student body. They reversed course and restored merit.
We need the same realization in our civil service, and it starts with realizing that the very idea of disparate impact is misguided. As Thomas Sowell wittily put it, “Even with things whose outcomes are not in human hands, ‘disparate impact’ is common. Men are struck by lightning several times as often as women. Most of the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United States.” Merit isn’t discriminatory, and the case law should reflect that common sense reality. You may or may not agree with recent court decisions that revisit rulings from 40+ years ago, but the disparate impact doctrine is more obviously mistaken — and it’s still causing harm to the country. Today, we have millions of people in government who have never passed any tests. A huge number are incompetent of all races and identities, and there's no way to fire them.
At the state level, a bold merit-based testing effort by any single state with clever leadership could prompt the legal challenges necessary to finally resolve this question.
In the first quarter of 2024, government jobs at the federal, state, and local level made up over 25% of all jobs added in the United States. It’s an astounding figure. Today there are officially 2.9 million federal bureaucrats, and even more contractors — at least 4 million. And D.C. funds nearly 2 million state and local jobs. All together, the Federal Government spends well over $1 trillion a year on the wages of some 8.6 million people. And our government is on a hiring (and spending) spree at the same time that trust in its ability to get things done is at an all time low, and debt is at an all-time high.
We need accountability frameworks that make clear that the executive branch can fire employees for poor performance — and that separation of powers should ensure this right. With those frameworks, a spirited executive could test everyone in an administration, let the poor-performers go, and raise salaries for those left — making the cultures stronger and cutting waste. There are powerful special interests on the other side, demanding that we keep the status quo. Fighting against such interests requires bold leaders. But it’s worth the fight. …
We may never get back to the scope of federal government we had a century ago, and that is something that practical-minded people have come to accept. But we can do so much better. Unfortunately, most people on the left (and some on the right, to be sure) don’t have “government incompetence” as a top-5 policy problem in America. They have resigned themselves to a growing government, and a less and less competent government. Competence should be at the top of our list. It solves all of the other issues that fall on one side or the other — in the left’s case, things like the state of the working class, regulations that cut pollution without crushing businesses, more effective welfare, affordable healthcare, even functional training programs and education opportunities.
But if we want back the type of government that gets to the Moon and beyond, we have to be honest about what’s gone wrong. And we have to accept that it will require some bold fights against entrenched interests!
Our civilization will decline rapidly from here if we continue lighting trillions of dollars on fire, adding illogical rules and regulations, and harassing our top innovators for the wrong reasons - all of which will happen if we cannot bring back competence. And on the positive side - there’s so much we could be doing to lift up the lives of millions of our citizens with just a fraction of the money our bureaucracies squander.
Read the whole thing here.
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