Normally, and maybe ideally, provision of government services is managed by a political process that balances enthusiasm for services received against the cost of the taxes required to provide those services (green loops). There are lots of ways this can go wrong, but at present 3 pathologies seem especially prevalent. The driving force behind these is wealth inequality, because it unbalances the benefits of services and the costs. The benefits generally accrue broadly, whereas costs (taxes) fall where the money is (at least in a flat or progressive system). This means that, if you’re wealthy, it’s cheaper to use FedEx than to fund the USPS, and cheaper to move to a place with clean air than to clean up your refinery. This process is shown with heavy lines below.
The oldest pathology this triggers is outright corruption (red loop), by hijacking agency resources for private gain rather than public benefit. I’m thinking of the mysterious award of a $300m contract to restore Puerto Rico’s electric power to a company with 2 employees, coincidentally acquaintances of Interior Secretary Zinke.
While there may not be anything new under the sun, the other two pathologies seem to be ascendant lately. These rely on the fact that you don’t have to steal an agency’s money if your goal is to quit paying for it. If you can’t defeat it politically in an open contest, because a constituency enjoys its services, you can undermine that support by destroying those services (orange loop). This reminds me of destruction of mail sorting machinery and the general degradation of USPS service that has happened under DeJoy’s tenure.
If you can’t destroy the reality of the agency, you can destroy the perception of the agency by attacking its measurement systems. If, for example, the EPA can’t measure air and water quality, or climate, it not only undermines the ability to operate standards and enforcement, it destroys the ability to even perceive the need for these measurements. This is often easy to do, because measurements don’t have direct constituencies, unlike roads or education. This is the first deadly sin of complex system management, and will leave us effectively flying an airplane with a clown car cockpit. Even worse, it makes it easier for the leaders of these misguided efforts to believe their own BS, and get away with it – at least in the short run.