Why running the government like a business would be a disaster

THE fact that president-elect Donald Trump has tapped two businessmen – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – to lead an advisory commission focused on streamlining government operations suggests that these efficiencies will come from making the government run more like a business. In 2017, when he was a White House adviser, Jared Kushner, who now runs a private equity firm, made a similar pitch that business thinking would help to “achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens”.

It’s a popular idea; it’s also a terrible one. Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency.

Businesses often run more efficiently than governments do. So it’s natural to conclude that if only businesspeople were put in charge of public administration, everything would work better – shorter lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, fewer cost overruns at the Pentagon, service with a smile at airport security.