Reckless CHAINSAW!!! Masacree

Elon Musk as Leatherface

Who will survive
And what will be left of them??

-- Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Delicately. These things must be done delicately!

-- The Wicked Witch of the West

Reckless CHAINSAW!!! Masacree

Okay, I admit. As analogies go, a horror film massacre is a little over the top. But these are unusual times. And I didn't fire up the chainsaw.

In his The Collapse of Complex Societies Joseph Tainter documents a trend in which needed bureaucracies inevitably grow, layer upon layer, until they become unsupportable and society collapses. It's happened time after time. 

In the case of our present government the system is vast and very complex, tightly coupled, poorly understood and already highly stressed. In Tainter's terms, it is top-heavy, unstable and, historically speaking, at the brink of collapse. So okay... agreed. Reforms and reductions are in order.

In Musk's DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), we see agreement-in-action with that assessment. He's taking a metaphorical chainsaw to the flesh, blood, bone and ligaments of our federal government.

Problem is, as the Wicked Witch of the West observed, these things must be done delicately.

To take a chainsaw to it? To move fast and break things?? To fix later the needful stuff we broke??? [Their words, not mine.]

Government is a complex adaptive system. In a computer system, the grid, an ecosystem or our own bodies, small failures - normally dampened by healthy, negative feedbacks - can sometimes push a system beyond a tipping point. After that... well... who knows? Things spin out of control. There is real risk that the computer crashes, the grid goes down, the ecosystem disintegrates, our bodies die.

Those of us who consider that a full collapse is possible are a tiny minority. We hear talk of deep recession, or even depression. Of the bull gone bear. Of debt and deficit. All these are seen as problems to resolve within a more or less functional system. Like treating cancer (Fox commentator analogy). 

Without entertaining possibility of collapse, one assumes that the system stumbles if we act to trip it up, but won't fall. Why be delicate? Why not use a chainsaw?

If our government were a patient with treatable cancer and a surgeon, foggy on anatomy and oncology, commenced removal by chainsaw... 

...Wanna bet on that patient's prognosis?

*****

Years ago, I read a study which modeled the random loss of institutional personnel lost in a pandemic context. The question was, what percentage of loss is the threshold for institutional failure? It was surprisingly low... I don't recall the exact figure, but it was well below 5%.

When personnel are lost, they take with them a quantity of 'institutional knowledge'... professional knowledge concerning the institution's field of purpose, networking  interconnections within the institution and external to it and functional knowledge of how to keep the lights on and pay the bills. And more. This was the original meaning of the phrase 'the Deep State' before it came to mean some secret, conspiratorial cabal embedded within government. It referred to institutional continuity despite the turmoil of politics.

The administration and DOGE purges aren't entirely random, but neither are they entirely directed. They have demonstrated a lack of understanding of the purpose, means and requirements of the agencies they've infiltrated and begun to mess with. One might argue that they have mis- or under estimated their importance as well, both in terms of mission and system function.

Their means (e.g., incentivizing resignations) aren't focused, but draw rather evenly from those who feel vulnerable, at the same time creating a situation in which all feel vulnerable. They're arbitrarily changing and in some cases breaking the mechanisms which underlie the whole (e.g., the governmental payment system).

On top of it all, the upper levels of agencies are being co-opted with loyal but inexperienced new-comers with axes to grind.

In our patient analogy, how long before a vital organ fails for lack of specialized cells? How long before the circulation system shuts down? How long before the central nervous system - mishandling the signals necessary to coordinate the body - stutter and seize?

And when the patient codes, where are the experts to resuscitate them?