Efficiency Is Not the Enemy

A Rebuttal to Aiyar and Honig’s Critique of Government Reform

In their April 2025 Foreign Policy piece, Yamini Aiyar and Dan Honig offer a dire warning: the pursuit of government efficiency, as spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is not only misguided—it’s a threat to democracy itself.

Chainsaws, they claim, are being taken to the administrative state. Discretion is being sacrificed at the altar of cold algorithms. And efficiency? Well, that’s apparently the gateway drug to authoritarianism.

But for all its rhetorical flair, the argument is built on a shaky foundation of conceptual confusion, selective history, and romanticized government nostalgia. Leaving aside the actual efficacy of DOGE, or lack thereof, let’s talk about what efficiency actually means—and why it's not the villain here.

Beyond the Buzzword: What Efficiency really means

Aiyar and Honig treat efficiency as a narrow, cost-cutting obsession. That’s like describing health as nothing more than "not having a fever." Sure, budget cuts masquerading as reform can be harmful—but that’s not what efficiency, properly understood, actually is.

Real efficiency is about doing more with what you have—smarter, not necessarily cheaper. It considers outcomes, not just inputs. It weighs the desires of the public, the impact of service design on human interaction, long-term consequences, administrative friction, and institutional health. If anything, it demands more judgment and nuance—not less.

At its core, the question facing policymakers is whether or not public action or intervention is worth pursuing among the alternatives available. Answering this question is devilishly difficult. In any given circumstance, the public cares about value. How do we, as a people, value the “stuffs” we are getting? How do we value the impacts those “stuffs” create? And, most important to the current consideration of efficiency, how to we value the current state of affairs as compared to an alternative state and the resultant effects it may create? Government efficiency is far deeper than simple cost cutting, it is the consideration of what the public values in terms of action and how, in cases where action is provided, effective the implementation presently is.

Think of it this way: a truly efficient government is more like an IndyCar than an F1 Car. It’s not just about speed, it's about the track. The engineers must ask if the car will be raced on a curated track, public road, short oval or super speedway. Each requires a unique set up and system to coordinate action on race day. It’s about responsiveness, over long sweeping curves or tight hairpin corners, depending on the day. Government efficiency is about asking what is required and implementing that requirement smoothly, accessibly, and within a spending constraint.

When a train runs late, commuters don’t blame democracy; they wonder why the system isn’t working. Just as patients do when instant care facilities leave a person in a waiting room for too long, or when a letter gets lost in the mail.

Salt, Stew, and Statecraft: Finding the Right Balance

Aiyar and Honig emphasize the need for human judgment in public service delivery. Fair enough. But let’s not forget: judgment without constraints can just as easily become guesswork—or worse, gatekeeping.

Hand discretion to a good actor, you might get empathy and responsiveness. Hand it to a petty official with rent to pay and little oversight, and you get what political scientists politely call “facilitation fee” (and the rest of us call bribes).

A little discretion is like salt in a stew—it brings out the flavor. But dump in too much, and now you’re drinking seawater. The key isn’t to eliminate judgment but to build systems that use it wisely, within rules that are clear, fair, and predictable. That’s not technocracy—it’s good design.

Government is not a beacon of perfection and public will -- do not romanticize the state. In this world, every solutions has costs, every system has imperfections. Just as markets may lead to external effects, state action runs risks of those informal economies, gatekeeping, poor incentives and those same external effects created by the state supported action. Discretion is worse than worthless when a service was not called for in the first place. Good judgement is harmful when an alternative system would be more valued to the public.

Despots Prefer Red Tape

The piece’s most dramatic claim is that a focus on efficiency risks descending into autocracy.

Let’s be clear: authoritarianism doesn’t always arrive draped in data dashboards and performance metrics. Sometimes, it walks in wearing the robe of “people’s justice,” handing out favors through opaque processes, fueled by personal networks and discretionary power.

In fact, inefficiency is often authoritarianism’s best friend. When accessing basic services requires “knowing someone,” or waiting months for approval, or slipping a few notes under the table—who really benefits? Not democracy. Not ordinary citizens.

Hayek warned of both dangers: too much central planning and too much arbitrary discretion. The answer isn’t to fear efficiency—it’s to route it through accountable institutions that serve public goals without surrendering power to unaccountable actors. To rely on institutions that are efficient, and curtail those that are not.

Maybe People Just Want Stuff to Work

One of the more casually dismissive lines in the article is that “efficiency talk is often a ruse.” A ruse! As if voters concerned with delays, dysfunction, and digital forms that crash halfway through are just unwitting pawns in a master plan for dictatorship.

But maybe, just maybe, people are tired of bad government.

Perhaps we exist in a moment when the inefficiency of government, the inability to ask the “if” and “how” and “at what cost” questions, has finally filled the dam to the brim. When politicians promise to “clean house,” they’re not always weaponizing fear—they’re channeling real frustration. Long lines, outdated systems, and Kafkaesque procedures are not just inconvenient. They are signals. They say, “This institution does not respect your time, your dignity, or your life.” Reform—if done well—is a way of saying, “We heard you.”

To dismiss this as a dangerous populist impulse is to mistake the symptom for the disease.

Upgrade the System, Don’t Idolize It

We need institutions that serve well, fairly and in spaces that beg for their presence. That means embracing efficiency—not as cost-cutting theater, but as a serious effort to align public action with public needs.

So let’s move beyond false binaries. Efficiency versus democracy? How about efficiency for democracy?

The task ahead is not to protect the state from improvement, but to improve it in ways that protect what matters most: responsiveness, accountability, and the citizen’s justified belief that the system is working—not just for someone, but for them.

The real slippery slope? It’s the failure to act because someone might do it badly. Let’s aim higher.