Fruits of “Reinventing Government”

Since the Reagan administration in the 1980s there has been a move to outsource core governmental competencies to the private sector.

This became more aggressive under then GWWB Secretary of Defense, when Dick Cheney massively expanded the use of mercenaries military contractors at the Pentagon, and further supercharged by the Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, which served to supercharge this process with the justification that the power of the private sector to save money.

It has left the government unable to manage the business of government, which has led to increased costs and protracted project schedules.

Nowhere is this more egregious than in transit projects, where the cost of project construction is 10 times that of France.

Of course, all this inefficiency leaves lots of money for campaign donations.

This is 3rd world nation bullsh%$:

In 2006, Alon Levy moved to New York to attend graduate school. Levy took the subway to get to class and events around the city, as most New Yorkers do. But unlike most New Yorkers, Levy is the type of person who will instantly become inquisitive about the most seemingly mundane issues. For example, when told there are people waiting at the elevator to get to an event, Levy starts crunching numbers in their head about elevator capacity.

So naturally, Levy took an interest in the subway — especially the new Second Avenue subway, when construction began in 2007. Levy heard this first phase of the project with three new stations and 3.5 miles of tunnel would cost $3.8 billion. (It actually ended up costing $4.5 billion in the end.) “OK, really high cost,” Levy recalled thinking to themself during a recent panel discussion at New York University on transit construction costs. “But this is how much it costs to build a subway, right?”

This idle thought led Levy to poke around and find out how much it actually costs to build a subway. They recalled finding that in Tokyo, around the same time, the government had implemented a moratorium on subway building because costs had risen too much, to approximately $500 million per kilometer. At the time, New York was building the Second Avenue subway for an estimated $2.5 billion per mile, or well over a billion dollars per kilometer. Paris was building subways for $250 million per kilometer, some 10 times less. The more Levy looked, the more they found New York wasn’t just paying more for subways than every other city, but many times more.

Most troublingly, Levy found, nobody seemed to know why this was the case — why New York specifically and the U.S. in general are so expensive to build in. “I keep asking New York rail fans why,” Levy recalled, using the term for subway enthusiasts who often have encyclopedic knowledge of the system, “and I never get satisfactory answers.”

Some 15 years after these initial inquiries, Levy now has an answer. It is a dastardly combination of:

• Hiring contractors to do the work in a manner so bizarre it almost seems intentionally designed to drive up costs
• Hiring consultants to design and manage projects rather than having the staff to do so in-house (or not having the necessary staff expertise to manage consultants in a way that keeps costs manageable)
• Haphazardly coordinating complicated work with local utilities
• Viewing infrastructure projects as job programs and therefore hiring more workers than needed (union and non-union, blue collar and white collar)
• Over-designing projects (stations in particular)
• And, on top of it all, having local politicians who micro-manage, slowing down planning at best; changing projects in a way that makes them more expensive and less useful at worst

Levy has these answers because after writing about the problem for the better part of a decade on their blog Pedestrian Observations, Levy has, alongside a team of researchers at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management — including Elif Ensari and Marco Chitti — spent the past three years crunching massive amounts of data, interviewing hundreds of experts all over the world, and conducting in-depth case studies on transit projects in Sweden, Istanbul, Italy, Boston, and New York. The group plans to release its final report this month on what the U.S. and New York in particular can do to start building transit at least on par with the rest of the world. It is part of a growing body of literature — the Eno Center for Transportation launched a similar project around the same time — examining the question of how the U.S. can be more productive with its transportation infrastructure dollars.

………

It’s important to emphasize why this matters. All too often, politicians say they want an efficient, effective government but do the opposite. Two transportation-related examples come to mind. One is Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s failed experiment with the Purple Line, a light rail that will connect Bethesda and New Carrollton in the D.C. suburbs, built under a public-private partnership model ostensibly to save money; it has been such a disaster that the first contractor abandoned the project midway through construction and it is now set to cost $3.4 billion, or 75 percent more than budgeted. The other is in New York, where in 2019 then-governor Andrew Cuomo launched a “transformation plan” created by a consulting firm to “simplify a complex and inefficient organization,” the MTA (still) says on its website. The most noteworthy “accomplishment” was hiring six-figure executives who promptly left with golden parachutes; once Cuomo was gone the transformation team was shut down. There are countless more examples where that came from.

We have been systematically destroying our government’s capabilities for over 40 years, because of the promises made by the free market mousketeers that they can save money, deliver sooner, and keep our daughter from dating that guy with the tattoos and piercings.

Rather unsurprisingly, it does not work. Ever.

It is a corrupt philosophy, which creates corrupt public services which never work.