Consultant-ize The Government

One major problem that shows itself again and again as you meander through Yang’s policies is that Yang has a habit of thinking like a stereotypical consultant or venture capitalist. This habit manifests in two ways: a predilection towards simplified solutions/marketing flash over substance, and the assumption that government is actually really easy, if only you had the smart Silicon Valley tech guys and consultants running things. This habit will appear over and over, in a number of Yang’s proposals.

#1: Yang says that he would “Hire a management consulting firm to identify areas of inefficiency in the federal workforce” and cut 15–20% of current government workers. This scale of cuts is beyond the dreams of even the most slash-and-burn Republicans, and is incredibly short-sighted. Far from being bloated, federal government employment is nearing 40 year lows (and that’s total workers, not even federal workers per capita!). If anything, the federal government is actually critically understaffed from years of GOP driven cuts — see how the gutted State Department is unable perform many basic diplomatic functions, or how agencies as diverse as the DOD, the SEC, AbilityOne Commission and the NLRB are all woefully in need of workers.

Yang explicitly makes a comparison with the size of Apple, Google, etc, and the federal government, claiming that

If the top four tech companies can do as much as they do with fewer than 1 million workers, the federal government can find ways to do more with less.

Perhaps that sounds reasonable, if you’ve never taken even a few minutes to think about how the government is at least an order of magnitude larger and more complex than Facebook. The unspoken assumption is that if only the smart venture capital consultants ran the show, the idiots running various departments could finally be brought to task and shown how things should be done. It’s the height of shallow, consultant-esque thinking.

As an aside, this 15–20% cut also appears to be completely incompatible with the rest of Yang’s proposals. Almost all Yang’s proposals involve expanding government in ways both massive (Medicare for All) and small (creating large numbers of new departments like the “Department of the Attention Economy”).

#2: Yang has proposed that all laws passed by Congress must come with sunset provisions, and would need ‘KPIs’ or key performance indicators to measure their success. One of these ideas is merely silly, while the other may be the most dangerous thing any presidential candidate has proposed in decades.

The bit about KPIs being included with every law is another instance of lazy consultant-style thinking. Why are so many laws ineffective? It must be because nobody bothered to include KPIs. If only consultants were in charge and we thought to measure our results, we’d pass better laws! This bit of silliness wouldn’t actually hurt anything, but it’s indicative of Yang’s ignorance of policy making. The people who craft policy already think very deeply about outcomes and ‘KPIs’, and including them in the language of a bill itself won’t do anything to change how Congress operates. Laws are sometimes ineffective because making good policy can be really difficult and politics often makes first-best solutions impossible, not because bureaucrats are ignorant of the idea that they should measure their outcomes.

The mandatory sunset provisions idea is far more dangerous. Yang’s website says he will

Push for a Constitutional Amendment calling for an automatic sunset period for laws as they’re enacted, which will remove those laws barring Congressional evaluation and renewal.

Yang again identifies a problem — the US system of laws is very large and unwieldy. Again his solution is something that makes sense after about 5 minutes of thought, but not on any level deeper than that.

Let’s be clear about the political reality in play here. Congress is currently a dysfunctional disaster. It does not actually function in any meaningful way most of the time. As a nation, we can’t even stop the government from routinely shutting down due to lack of funding. We can barely manage to avoid defaulting on our debt, not because we lack the ability to pay but because Congress lacks the competence to push the ‘pay bill’ button without threatening to self-destruct. What serious person could see this institution and think that every single piece of legal code should be subject to the same brinksmanship? It’s an absurd conclusion and would lead to near-permanent crisis and dysfunction. Imagine a world where Ted Cruz could hold Social Security hostage every 10 years simply because he’s an ass. Imagine a world where the structure of the Federal Reserve could get regularly hijacked by Ron Paul. Imagine a world where the Freedom Caucus can simply wait for all climate legislation to delete itself and then refuse to reauthorize it. If you’ve been remotely paying attention to Congress for the last decade, you should not have any confidence that disaster could be averted. When you structure your institutions in a way that constantly threatens disaster, disasters will inevitably follow. If you put brinksmanship into every political fight, we will eventually fall off that cliff.

This is another instance of lazy, shallow thinking. Yang provides a gimmicky solution to an incredibly complex problem, seemingly without any understanding of the incredibly dangerous effects it would have.

#3: Yang seems to have an obsession with AI and wants to apply it to everything. AI life coaches with Oprah’s voice to help your marriage or help raise your kids! AI tele-counseling! AI financial advisers! AI for social workers!

There’s not any detail about how this would be accomplished or what it would actually mean. Frankly, it isn’t obvious that Yang even understands in much depth what AI actually is. Maybe he does, but there’s no way to tell that here. How would ‘AI’ apply to these areas? Who’s building all this AI? It certainly doesn’t exist right now, and the government just made drastic 15–20% cuts so they’re short-staffed and can’t do it. How exactly are we going to solve a social worker’s daily issues with AI? How is AI tele-counseling going to actually help people (especially when the benefits of human tele-counseling seem to be unproven)? How’s it going to save your marriage?

It seems like yet another instance of consultant style-over-substance policy. The primary intention seems to be to signal ‘All our problems can be solved with cool technology, trust me’. There’s a flashy solution with a cool tech buzz, and Yang throws it into his policy platform without seeming to have given any of the details much thought.

#4: Yang also proposes creating the ‘Legion of Builders and Destroyers’ (that’s the actual proposed name) which perhaps best encapsulates Yang’s penchant for both buzzwordy consultant style marketing and failing to think through the consequences of policy.

Rechannel 10% of the military budget — approximately $60 billion per year — to a new domestic infrastructure force called the Legion of Builders and Destroyers… The Commander of the Legion would have the ability to overrule local regulations and ordinances to ensure that projects are started and completed promptly and effectively.

One can choose to read the Legion in a charitable or in an uncharitable way. Charitably, this is simply the Army Corps of Engineers with ridiculous branding straight out of a tech-bro fan-fiction, and the clause at the end about overruling local laws isn’t serious. It’d be like if you proposed a ‘Department of Incredible Nuclear Power Force’ and pretended the Department of Energy didn’t already exist.

Uncharitably, we can assume Yang is serious about the Legion having the power to preempt laws, in which case this policy is incredibly dangerous (never mind that its constitutionality is extremely questionable). To be clear about what Yang is proposing: This appears to be a new military branch answerable only to the president, with an ‘independent source of funding’ that cannot be cut off by Congress, with the power to completely overrule local and state laws as they see fit. I’m not sure if Yang has made this leap, but what is the conceptual difference between “an executive who controls an independent military force that can ignore Congress and also local laws” and “a dictator”? What happens when someone like, say, Donald Trump gets his hands on such a military force? Imagine the politician you dislike most — would you trust them to only use this power for nice, positive infrastructure projects? Or would you suspect that in an era where Congress can’t get anything done, this would immediately become a tool for dangerous executive power grabs?