The U.S. government is a big stage, and it’s not too surprising if what happens there plays out in the rest of the country, including the workplace. When Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, the widespread belief was that the move empowered employers to get tough with their own unions.

The Trump administration’s takedown of DEI in the federal government has had the same effect on the private sector. At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) approach to improve productivity matters for the federal government but also creates pressure on the private sector to do things in the same way.

Let’s start with the problem, which is complaints about bureaucracy in government, which many of us have experienced. Why are there so many rules and regulations in government that slow things down and chew up time? Because they were put there in legislation by Congress and also created by the agencies that carry out what the legislation requires. The priority in these laws is not operating efficiency—that is, doing things quickly and cheaply.  The primary concern is to do things fairly, transparently and honestly.

No one bats an eye in the private sector if the nephew of a company CEO gets a job in her company, but it would be a corruption headline if a Cabinet official did that. We expect to be able to go around our internal procedures for a major client, but that is a criminal offense if government officials do it. Board meetings are prized for being buttoned-up, but many government meetings where decisions are made have to be open to the public. The list of rules and procedures mandated by law in any federal agency makes a pile big enough to sit on.

Could we make government more efficient in the sense of being faster and cheaper? Easy if you start by taking down those fairness, transparency and ethics rules—but they are there for a reason.

Now we come to DOGE and its practices. Its first assumption seems to be that cutting headcount improves efficiency. It does not. Cutting the work improves efficiency. If you take out employees and leave the work, the remaining employees just struggle to try to do it all, and then things really slow down. (I may have experienced that last week when the State Department first lost my application for a passport renewal, and after I resent it, then lost my passport.)

There was a view early in the days of “reengineering” corporate efficiency that if we cut headcount, departments would be forced to figure out how to become more efficient to get the same amount done with fewer staff. But that requires giving those employees the authority to change what gets done, and no one is suggesting that will be the case with the DOGE practices. Even then, it burns out employees quickly.

Flaws in the DOGE approach to productivity, performance management

Corporate America could give DOGE insight into how best to improve efficiency, starting with practices like GE’s famous “work-out” programs designed to get “work” out of the system. The heart of that approach was engaging the employees in each area who can see what’s wrong, to figure out how to do things better and cheaper. This is the opposite of the top-down approach. It also takes a lot of time and energy. In this case, change efforts will bump up against the enabling legislation.

Now we come to the DOGE HR and performance management tactic in the news recently that requires each employee to give a weekly report on what they accomplished. Outside of government, this approach is mainly limited to professional service firms that have to bill clients by hours spent. But there are places where it is sensible if the supervisor knows what employees should be doing (i.e., gave them the assignment), knows that not all tasks take the same amount of time to do and if it is their job to help their subordinates overcome roadblocks to get work done. The goal of that approach is to help move things along, not to hold employees accountable, per se.

If you find that employees are working on the “wrong” tasks, you should go after the bosses who gave them those tasks, not the employees. If, on the other hand, we assume that the DOGE approach is just limited to finding and then firing lazy workers, employees working on hard tasks or ones with a long horizon may have no accomplishments that week, which doesn’t mean they are not trying.

If the report goes to someone who does not know the work, it’s worthless as a guide to whether the employee is lazy. If you’ve ever wondered what the phrase “micro-management” means and the negative consequences that stem from it, this approach is a good example.

If employees believe that they will be fired for reporting the wrong kind of information, they will spend their time and energy figuring out what the right thing to say is and work on that.  One might counter by saying that you will fire them if the reports are not accurate, but if they think you are going to fire them anyway if they don’t say the right thing, they won’t care! With this reporting request, DOGE is essentially asking them to say whether they should be fired.  So, they will spend their time trying to manufacture a good-looking report rather than trying to get the real work done. The effort required to find out if they are not reporting the truth is enormous.

Stoking layoff fears

Another lesson from the corporate world is that continuous threats to lay off employees don’t make them perform better, especially where the criteria for layoffs are hard for them to understand. Instead, they simply freeze up and spend their time figuring out what to do after they get laid off.

As with most important things, improving efficiency is hard to do. To do it well requires time and effort. Slash and burn just leaves blood.

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