The Guardian view on spending cuts: behold the grim return of slash-and-burn government | Editorial
Spending public money carefully is a virtue in itself, but running down the public sector can cause huge problems later on
Slash-and-burn government is back in vogue. Whether it is ElonMusk and his engineers taking the axe to US agency spending, the Conservative leader, KemiBadenoch, wishing she had her own mini-Musk, or Sir Keir Starmer complaining about the tepid bath of managed decline", the complaint is that bureaucracy is bloated and needs to be cut down to size.
We've heard such charges before. For some it is ideologically driven: they believe that the state is inherently inefficient and that only businesspeople know how to make money count. For others it is prompted by the expansion of government in response to crises ultimately caused by state undercapacity, not overreach. They were wheeled out in the 2010s, after rich states stepped in to save the banks and prop up the economies. Then came the Covid pandemic, in which rich states stepped in to save employees (through such measures as furlough) and support businesses.
Last time, it was David Cameron's team who styled themselves as disruptors" and brought in the businessman Philip Green as an efficiency guru". This time it's Donald Trump. Yet, measured as a proportion of all US workers, the US federal government workforce is smaller than it was just after the second world war, when Mr Trump was born. And shifting its work to costlier private-sector operations has not been a boon.
One of the great parables of the consequences of an outsider hacking away at a complex organisation is contained in a history of Britain's trashy cable channel, Live TV. The authors, Chris Horrie and AdamNathan, give a picture of what happened when the lifelong print journalist Kelvin MacKenzie suddenly got to be boss. Not understanding many of the technicalities of television, he would apparently charge into the studio gallery while programmes were going out live anddemandstaff answer his questions. Who are you? What do you do? ... If you can't tell me in20seconds ... you're out." If the programme felloffair after they'd been given the boot, he wouldplead with them to come back.
Even Live TV's viewers are unlikely to have been gravely distressed by its inadequacies. But government touches everyone's lives, and in the most serious manner.