Why Government Hiring Is So Inefficient

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Regardless of your political ideology, it's easy to agree that government should work well; that it should be able to hire talented officials, and build things in a timely, cost-effective manner. Of course, what that means in practice is open for debate, and different people will have different priorities. But at the moment, there are reasons to believe the public sector isn't operating optimally. Things move incredibly slow in many cases. Software systems are often old and extremely costly, and don't do a good job serving the public's needs. It can be extremely difficult to bring on the best workers, even setting aside questions about public sector salaries. Jennifer Pahlka is the author of Recoding America, and was the founder of Code for America. She has also served as the US Deputy Chief CTO and has seen how much of government operates up close. We talk to her about what she's seen, how waste happens, how government operations get bogged down by inertia, and why simply identifying things that are going wrong isn't enough to change them. She talks to us about Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, and why a major jolt may be necessary to get better results.

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0:34.4	I'm Matt Levine.
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0:40.2	Every Friday, we dive into the top stories about Wall Street, Finance, and other stuff.
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1:20.5	Okay. podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall.
1:21.7	And I'm Tracy Allaway.
1:28.3	Tracy, remember that episode we did several weeks ago about waste and fraud and abuse in Medicare? I do. It was full of interesting facts and figures, such as the U.S. government spends
1:33.7	1% of the federal budget on dialysis. And the thing about that episode, so we were talking to
1:39.6	BU, Professor Jetson, Leader Louise, you know, the thing about that episode that's striking is
1:45.6	if you look at government spending, and probably a lot of all bureaucracies, even outside the
1:50.0	government, but if you look at government spending or government waste or government fraud,
1:54.7	etc., there are many things that everyone can point to and say, this is waste, this is bad, we should change this.
	...

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