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You might have heard of the 2,900-word blogpost-cum-job-ad in which senior Number 10 advisor and longform think-piece author Dominic Cummings called for “data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos” to apply for a position in government.

Behind the recruitment drive is Cummings’s longtime yearning to reshape the UK civil service – which he deems slow and useless at decision-making and policy implementation, dominated by innumerate Oxbridge jabberers, and marred by outdated groupthink – along the more data-driven and goal-oriented lines you may find in technology companies or large scientific facilities.


Cummings plans to hire an “unusual set of people with different skills and backgrounds” – that is: mainly people who can code, interpret datasets, and converse in hard sciences – take them to Number 10 and start turning the whole state machine around.

The blog post poses three big questions: What is Cummings actually proposing to do? Can he do that? What is his endgame?

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What is Cummings proposing?

Strip the Slate Star Codex lingo, the braggadocio, and the overuse of bullet-points, and Cummings’s proposal amounts to the creation of a policy delivery unit. You might have heard of it before: it was first launched by Tony Blair’s New Labour government back in 2001; it was reinvented and rechristened – as the Implementation Unit – during the coalition years.

“This is something which many previous administrations did,” says Mark O’Neill, a former civil servant who has worked as the head of the Government Digital Service (GDS), and the Department for Education’s chief digital officer.


“That is: to set up a central unit, which can look across government, and provide another voice into the conversations and discussions at cabinet. In particular about what might be the answers to particular policy issues, or things which departments may have not spotted themselves.” While individual departments tend to work according to a “silo-based model”, O’Neill says, these units can try and look at issues in a more unified way. (In some cases, they address macro-themes straddling more departments’ remits: New Labour’s delivery unit mostly focused on health, education and crime reduction.)

O’Neill also cites the GDS itself and the government’s “Skunkworks” as other examples of units driven by the same kind of thinking: putting together teams of specialists to work on innovative projects that cut across multiple departments. “Both were intended to do a number of the things which Cummings has listed in his blog post: looking at how we can use data better, how we can tackle some of the core issues in government,” he says.

What seems to be different about Cummings’s project is mostly the tone he uses to describe it. His advert wouldn’t look out of place on the website of a Silicon Valley startup. Partly, that is about optics: his ad was crafted to generate enough noise, tweets, and commentary to catch just the kind of people Cummings is interested in hiring.

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“Let's face it: the government cannot meet the salaries of the private sector, let alone offer equity or anything like that. The only way in which you're going to attract people is by creating a buzz and making it look like the place to be,” O’Neill says.


But, Cummings has form – backed up by thousands of words penned on his blog. This was not only an exercise in marketing: he genuinely thinks that an intake of scientists, cutthroat enforcers, and talented misfits is what it takes to challenge the civil service’s culture – which he despises. But can he do it?

Can Cummings’s plan work?

Changing how a government operates isn't easy. As David Henig, a director of the UK trade policy project at the European Centre for International Political Economy, and a former assistant director to the Department for International Trade, puts it: “If you actually want to make a big change to Civil Service you're not going to do it by hiring ten or 20 weirdos in central government.”

There is no way Cummings’s dream team can turn the whole system around without having the rest of the civil service onboard. And while Cummings opened his blog post with mellifluous words of praise for “brilliant people” in the civil service and politics, he has spent the last decade blogging vitriolic screeds against those same people’s ineptitude and the need to rid the country of their toxic influence.

He can now lead his conquering army of eggheads, startuppers, and quirkjobs marching through the black door of Number 10. But parking his driverless tanks on Downing Street’s lawn is only the start of the battle. “Those new people [will be operating] in an existing culture. And culture always wins,” O’Neill says. There is a fair chance that the people Cummings is trying to hire end up becoming an island of data-crunching futurism while the rest of Whitehall chugs along as per usual.

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“The risk is that you are seen as so foreign and so alien that people won't work with you. That's how civil service deals with threats: it doesn't take direct action. It will sideline people; it will try to distract them; it will not provide resources,” O’Neill says. “And so it's really important to find people in departments, people in government – and there are loads of them – who want to work with you.”

There is another snag Cummings’s technocratic blueprint might have to deal with – politics. Granted, Cummings’s vehicle to power, aka prime minister Boris Johnson, won the December general election with a stonking majority that – as Cummings duly notes – will allow the government not “to worry about short-term unpopularity.” But having taken care of parliament does not mean it will all be plain-sailing.

“Everybody has their own agenda. Cabinet ministers have their own agendas. Their junior ministers will have their own agenda, and then civil servants will have their own agenda,” O’Neill says. Which brings us back to: what is Cummings’s agenda after all?

What is Cummings’s endgame?

What does Dominic Cummings want? His blogpost is as granular in sketching out the kind of people he is looking for (down to assigning a thermoacoustics paper as a required reading) as vague in terms of what this whole thing is supposed to accomplish.

In a sense, that is simply the way he thinks. His post offers some clues. Borrowing the language of rationalist blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cummings mentions “trillion dollars bills lying on the street ” – that is: great ideas nobody is harnessing because of ossified behavioural patterns – that could be applied in various areas. One is education, an old hobbyhorse of Cummings’s, who in 2013 wrote a 237-page manifesto on the matter. Another is “the science of prediction”: devising tools and technologies – data science models, AI, or agent-based simulations – able to look at the available data and forecast the effects of a certain policy, or the development of certain events such as Brexit.

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In other words, while he might have some theories about what kind of policies the UK needs, it will be up to his nerds and experts to test those theories’ effectiveness, or come up with entirely new ones and prove they can work.

(The question remains of how “work” is defined – i.e. what principles Cummings wants to further. Judging from his blog, his long-term obsession is rebuilding the UK as a fortress of scientific and technological research. Think Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, only with Brexit done.)

Again, it is doubtful whether this plan can effectively be parlayed into a blueprint for administration. “The problem with Cummings’s post is that it doesn't set out what does success look like,” O’Neill says. “The problem with getting a group of bright people in the room is that it's easy to get very theoretical.”

The state machine is big, ramified and unwieldy. As things stand, we do not know how the Cummings squad’s musings and predictions would be rolled out and implemented across the various departments – rather than winding up just providing more fodder for Dom’s splenetic blogposts. “If it's just a fun thing [for Cummings] to do, that's fine. You hire these people, have some fun, come up with some weirdo reports – maybe make two or three things better,” Henig says. "It could well be a fun thing".

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