Creating a Bureaucracy to Make Government Efficient

Among a series of cabinet and advisors that President Designate has chosen, he has created a new position, Chief Performance Officer, and chosen Nancy Killefer for that role.

President-elect Barack Obama has picked Nancy Killefer to serve as the federal government’s chief performance officer (CPO), a newly created post designed to help improve government efficiency and reform budget practices.

“We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done,” Obama said during a news conference this morning at his transition office. “Even in good times, Washington can’t afford to continue these bad practices. In bad times, it’s absolutely imperative that Washington stop them and restore confidence that our government is on the side of taxpayers and everyday Americans.”

The Chief Performance Officer will be in charge of figuring out where there is waste in the entire federal government and figuring out ways to make it more efficient. Of course, President Designate Obama has been vague about how all of this will work. There are currently nearly three million federal employees. The yearly federal budget is several thousand pages long.

As such, this is not a job that one person could possibly take on. So, what will happen? Of course, she will get a staff. In order to examine each bureaucracy and each budget, the Chief Performance Officer will get a team of analysts. Some of those analysts will get assistants, and of course we will need a secretary. For all of this, CPO will get their own budget. All right, let's call a spade a spade. Soon, the Chief Performance Officer will get their own bureaucracy complete with several hundred if not several thousand employees as well as its own budget. In other words, the tax payers will pay and fund a government bureaucracy to study and make government bureaucracy more efficient. The whole idea is thick with irony and waste.