The Efficiency Commission

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The morning Marcus Preel was appointed to eliminate government waste, he requisitioned a leather chair that cost eleven thousand dollars.

He explained this to no one, because explaining things to people was itself a form of waste.

Preel’s official title was Director of the Federal Office of Operational Long-Term Streamlining, a name that had been workshopped over eighteen months by a committee of fourteen and which still managed to be abbreviated as F.O.O.L.S. His mandate came directly from the new administration: find every dollar the federal government spent foolishly and kill it. He had been chosen because he had once appeared on a business podcast and used the phrase “burning the fat” four times in eleven minutes, which impressed the transition team enormously.

His office occupied the seventh floor of a building that had previously housed three separate agencies, all of which he had consolidated by the elegant method of firing everyone in them and renting the vacated floors to a lobbying firm that represented pharmaceutical distributors. The rent revenue, he told reporters at the introductory press conference, more than offset costs. A reporter asked which costs specifically. Preel said the costs in general. The reporter followed up. Preel’s communications director materialized beside her like a protective fog and explained that the director did not have time to relitigate arithmetic.

The staff of FOOLS consisted of Preel, a deputy director named Gareth Sull, two policy analysts borrowed from Treasury who cried quietly in the stairwell on alternating Tuesdays, and an administrative coordinator named Linda Foss, who had survived six administrations by perfecting the skill of looking extremely busy while doing absolutely nothing objectionable.

Gareth Sull was twenty-six and had graduated from a college, after six years, that his parents funded and that had named a building after his grandfather. He wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow in a way that suggested he had recently been doing physical labor, though he had not. He believed deeply in Preel’s mission because he had not yet had occasion to doubt anything that had made him comfortable.

“Today,” Preel announced on the morning of day nine, standing at the head of a conference table that the previous tenant had left behind and that Preel had appraised and invoiced back to the government as a capital acquisition, “we identify the single greatest source of waste in the federal system.”

He paused for effect.

“Oversight,” he said.

Linda Foss wrote the word on a legal pad and circled it. Then she drew a small star next to the circle, because she had learned that drawings communicated engagement.

The logic, as Preel laid it out over the following hour, was elegant in the way that things are elegant when they have not been tested. Oversight cost money. Oversight required auditors, inspectors general, review boards, compliance officers, ethics panels, and accountability frameworks. All of these people were paid salaries. If you eliminated the oversight apparatus, you eliminated those salaries. You also eliminated the friction that slowed government functions. Projects would move faster. Money would flow more efficiently. The system would breathe.

“What about fraud?” one of the Treasury analysts asked. Her name was Diane. She was thirty-four and had a master’s degree in public finance and the expression of a woman watching a child walk toward an open manhole.

“Fraud is what happens when people feel unwatched,” Preel said. “If we build a culture of excellence, fraud becomes culturally impossible.”

“I don’t think that’s—” Diane began.

“A culture,” Preel repeated, louder, which in his experience solved most disagreements.

The executive order eliminating the offices of forty-one federal inspectors general was signed on a Thursday. Preel held a press conference in which he displayed a chart showing projected savings. The chart had been made by Gareth, who had rounded some numbers up and omitted others entirely, which he described as “narrative clarity.” The savings figure was four point two billion dollars. A journalist asked how that number had been derived. Gareth’s fog materialized again.

What followed was not dramatic in the way that disasters in films are dramatic. There was no single explosion, no memorable villain’s speech, no scene where a lone hero runs through a corridor. What followed was quieter and more thorough, the way water gets into a foundation.

A defense contractor in Virginia began billing for equipment that existed only in spreadsheets. Without the contracting inspector’s office, the invoices cleared automatically. A rural hospital network received a federal grant and spent thirty percent of it on a conference in Scottsdale that featured a keynote by a motivational speaker whose primary credential was having finished a triathlon. A regional transportation authority quietly reclassified a portion of its operating budget as infrastructure investment, which qualified it for a different funding stream, which it then accessed twice. Not fraudulently, exactly. More like creatively. The distinction mattered in court, and there were no longer people whose job it was to bring things to court.

The Treasury analysts put together a memo. The memo was forty pages long and included nineteen specific examples and a projected cost figure that had more digits in it than Preel’s savings number. Diane delivered it personally to Gareth, because she knew it would not reach Preel through normal channels. Gareth thanked her warmly and placed it in a drawer in the way that people place things in drawers when they intend to leave that job within the year.

Preel, meanwhile, had moved on to Phase Two.

Phase Two was the elimination of redundant federal databases. There were, he had learned, over three hundred federal databases that tracked various things—benefit recipients, contract awards, environmental violations, occupational licenses, and food safety incidents. Many of these databases overlapped. Some communicated with each other. A few, through some relic of legacy systems, communicated with each other twice. Preel found this appalling. He commissioned a study to identify which databases could be consolidated or eliminated.

The study was conducted by a consulting firm that charged two million dollars and concluded that consolidation was advisable but technically complex and would require further study. Preel paid for the further study, which also cost two million dollars and concluded that the complexity was significant and external expertise would be needed for implementation. Preel put out an RFP for an implementation contractor. Fourteen firms bid. The contract was awarded to a firm that had not bid but that Gareth mentioned over lunch with the procurement officer, describing them as “guys I really trust.”

The implementation contractor eliminated forty-seven databases over eight months. Three of those databases turned out to be the only record of certain things, a fact that emerged in the way facts of this type emerge—gradually, then catastrophically, then in litigation.

Eleven months after Preel took office, a Senate subcommittee opened an inquiry. The inquiry was chaired by a senator from a state with a significant federal contractor presence, which meant his interest in the inquiry was roughly equal to his interest in closing it before it reached certain names. He conducted four hearings. Preel testified at two of them. Preel was an excellent witness, which is a specific skill unrelated to honesty or knowledge.

“Director,” a senator asked during the second hearing, “your office was established to eliminate waste. Can you point to a specific, verified, documented reduction in waste that your office has achieved?”

Preel gestured toward a binder that Gareth had prepared. “We have over three hundred pages of documentation.”

“I’ve read it,” the senator said. “It’s mostly press releases.”

“Communication is a vital part of reform,” Preel said.

“Your office spent forty-two million dollars in eleven months.”

“To generate four point two billion in savings, yes.”

“The four-point-two billion figure comes from your own projection documents. Independent analysts put the actual savings at closer to sixty million.”

“Independent analysts have an agenda,” Preel said.

“What agenda?”

“Accountability.”

There was a pause in the hearing room. Someone in the gallery coughed. A C-SPAN camera adjusted its angle with a soft mechanical sound.

“Sir,” the senator said, in the flat voice of a man who has spent thirty years not saying what he actually thinks, “do you understand what an inspector general does?”

“I do,” Preel said. “They find problems.”

“Yes.”

“I eliminated the problems.”

“You eliminated the people who found them.”

Preel smiled. It was the smile of a man who believes that the difference between those two things is merely rhetorical. “Senator,” he said, “in any large organization, some waste is inevitable. What we’ve done is make the waste more efficient.”

The hearing room went quiet again, and this time nobody coughed.

The inquiry produced a report. The report produced a follow-up report. The follow-up report produced a working group. The working group produced a framework for further review, which was released in a PDF that loaded slowly and was never printed by anyone who had not been paid to read it.

Preel was not fired. He was, in the bureaucratic sense, transitioned. His office was reorganized into a new entity called the Department Undermining Managerial Bureaucracy, which was abbreviated D.U.M.B. and which had a slightly different mission that was described in language that nobody outside the building could parse. His budget increased by twelve percent. He kept the chair.

Gareth Sull left government to join the consulting firm that had conducted the database study. He sent a thoughtful email to the team on his last day, thanking everyone for their commitment to public service and encouraging them to keep pushing for change. Linda Foss printed the email, put it in a folder, and wrote the date on the tab in her careful handwriting.

Diane left two weeks later for a position at the Government Accountability Office, where she wrote reports that were read by other people who wrote reports. She was, by most measures, very good at her job. She did not expect this to be sufficient and was not surprised when it wasn’t, and she kept going anyway, which is a different kind of strength than the kind that gets written about.

The eleven-thousand-dollar chair had begun to squeak by March. Preel put in a replacement request.

The requisition was flagged for review.

There was no one left to review it.

He approved it himself.