In preparation for his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump has commenced the process of choosing a cabinet that will assist him in the onerous task of governance. Being a very controversial figure himself, Trump’s many appointments are already setting the public sphere on fire. From Marco Rubio (for secretary of state) to Pam Bondi (for attorney general), and from Pete Hegseth (for defense secretary) to John Ratcliffe (for CIA director). One of the most controversial of the cabinet pick, however, is the choice of billionaire Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for the post of leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Elon Musk is as controversial as Donald Trump. The combination of both of them was a handful during the presidential election these past few weeks. Musk was so invested in the possible election of Donald Trump that he offered a $1m a day giveaway for voters in critical swing states. And then Trump won the election, and now Elon Musk has got a cabinet position. This is not just a role that Elon Musk is already well suited for given his leadership of a private business enterprise and many years of business leadership. It is also one he has been angling for since Trump won the Republican nomination for president.
In appointing him, Donald Trump said that the task for Musk and Ramaswamy will be to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” And this is one responsibility that Elon Musk is rearing to step into. In line with the critical restructure that he brought to Twitter (now X), he has once said recently that he strongly believed that the US government’s budget is capable of being cut by $2trillion out of about $6.5trillion. And that a number of government employees and departments can also be significantly reduced.
Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk, his vision of government efficiency and Musk’s willingness to accept the task all have historical antecedents, especially in the emergence of managerialism as the framework for reconstituting bureaucratic efficiency and productivity. Public administration all across the world is now forced to operate in what has been called VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world that revolved around the idea of polycrisis. A polycrisis define a situation in which several crises converge at the same time and in ways in which the impact they generate together outweighs their impact individually. Within such a context, public administration must necessarily also adapt to the emerging context of crisis and difficulties. The implication is that the old and traditional Weberian idea of the bureaucracy has become too inflexible and outdated as an administrative means for getting government business done effectively and efficiently in the quest for democratic service delivery to the citizens. In its Nigerian incarnation, the inherited Weberian bureaucratic model rides on a one-model-fits-all service-wide standard operating framework encoded in the General Order (GO) that we now call the Public Service Rule (PSR).
The old Weberian—“I-am-directed”—administrative tradition is founded on an underlying theoretical framework that has been aptly called Theory X. This framework has three propositional dynamics underlying it as the basis for understanding how the bureaucracy works. One, it conceives management as involving the deployment of people, material and money in order to facilitate particular economic objectives. Two, organizational objectives require the control and motivation of people. Three, it assumes that without a strict organizational regimen to put employees in check, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organizational protocols.
We are able to therefore exhume a very gloomy understanding of human nature that perceives an average employee as being (a) indolent by nature, (b) lacking in ambition and motivation, (c) naturally egoistic and therefore set to work contrary to organizational requirements, (d) naturally resistant to change, especially those that antagonizes selfish desires, and (e) naturally deceivable. Given these assumptions, organizational goals can only be achieved if the discerning manager employs a very strong “command and control” tactic in getting his indolent employees to achieve the set targets and objectives. It is easy to see how this Douglas McGregor Theory X of administrative structure has the capacity to evolve into a monolithic and bureaucratic culture that breeds passive subordinate who are not eager to deploy their creative and entrepreneurial energies to further organizational objectives. This Weberian structure required from civil servants the requisite characteristics of anonymity, neutrality and impartiality, and an overall profile circumscribed by efficiency, effectiveness, integrity, accountability, responsiveness, representativeness, loyalty, equity, fairness, and so on. However, it is a system that is essentially hierarchical, cumbersome and acutely bureaucratic to effectively fulfil the mandate of good governance.
With the managerial revolution, the public service is compelled to adapt to a new normal that is motivated first by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic struck most governments and their public administration dynamics at the critical service delivery point. Aside the regulatory and policy functions, service delivery is the mechanism that connects or disconnects the governments from the well-beings of their citizens. And the tragedy of the pandemic is that it caught the entire world at varying administrative stages and phases of the normal. This is even worse for the third world countries, and Africa especially. The significance of the pandemic is that it stipulates several initiatives that public administration must confront in order not to ever be caught napping again. This initiative must however ride on the existing new public management (NPM) framework that delivers efficiency through new managerial developments that, for instance, leverages new digital technologies, artificial intelligences and open government initiatives to deliver fast, economic, flexible and efficient service delivery to the citizens.
The new normal for public administration involves the imperative of administrative new thinking. The idea of new thinking is conditioned by a reform program that is strategic. In other words, new think for any organization or institution combines strategic thinking and strategic planning to be able to face the future. It is this strategic thinking that allows an institution like the public service to rethink and reengineer its modus operandi and business model to become better. And this new thinking framework is backstopped by strategic decision-making that builds on various development in decision science. Decision science has become a critical field that has integrated cognate developments from artificial intelligence, organizational psychology, systems thinking, machine learning, probabilistic modeling, scenario analysis, big data analytics, and many more to become a key area that the public service must buy into to push forward its policy intelligence that strengthen decision-making. Modern policy making that has taken cognizance of decision science will most likely possess nine fundamental features: (i) forward-looking; (ii) outward-looking; (iii) innovative, flexible and creative; (iv) evidence-based; (v) evaluation; (vi) review; (vii) joined-up; (viii) inclusive; and (ix) learned lessons.
Thus, it becomes strategic for Donald Trump to want to shake up the US bureaucratic processes in order to facilitate government efficiency. He is simply toeing the path taken by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she strategically appointed Lord Derek Rayner, the Chairman and CEO of Marks and Spencer, to put in place a rigorous managerial and capability review of the MDAs at Whitehall. Much earlier after the Second World War, Japan deployed the Keiretsu principle that brought the organized private sector—manufacturers, suppliers, bankers, industries and so on—around a unique dynamic of economic cooperation, further strengthened by the introduction of experts with deep understanding of the relationship between economic growth, development, productivity and performance. And the private sector expertise of the American management consultant, W. Edward Deming, was contracted in the bid to introduce and deploy the idea of quality management that led to: (a) Better design of products to improve service; (b) Higher level of uniform product quality; (c) Improvement of product testing in the workplace and in research centres; and (d) Greater sales through global markets.
No matter the disapproval that attends Donald Trump’s governance capacity, one cannot quarrel with the significance and prospect of the dealing with the cost of governance in ways that accentuate government efficiency. If Elon Musk is able, as he claims, cut $2trillion from a $6.5trillion government budget, that is already a huge success in terms of the reduction of the cost of governance. This, for me, is one huge lesson for the Nigerian government and the fundamental challenge of the cost of governance and the dearth of a waste management strategy for achieving efficiency in performance and productivity. The transformation of the productivity profile of the Nigerian economy is the most critical premise that recommends the audacious institutional reform of the public service. And the reform initiatives will involve critical transformation of the civil service commission, the industrial labour law, the pay and compensation dynamics, and also the trimming of the workforce as a means of undermining the cost of governance burden.
The Oronsaye Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies still remains a crucial first condition in getting the situation right in terms of a critical restructuring of government efficiency, the same way Donald Trump has fingered Elon Musk as the key personality to weed out inefficiency in government productivity and service delivery. All in all, it might not be who sits at the helm of government affairs but what such a person is able to achieve to alleviate the well-being of the citizens.
