Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, of course. Right. Unbelievable talent, unbelievable support from the secretary of defense, and, actually, then subsequent secretaries of defense, and good outcomes for sure, but is the Department of Defense fundamentally more agile than it was before? Not meaningfully so. So, we do have a real problem that isn’t even just that a lot of people are resisting change. I think most people want change, but somehow the system itself fights back against any individual who’s trying to change it. I told a story about being at an event where the person next to me . . . It was one of these events where people are off the record. This person was a pretty senior official in the Air Force. I said that I thought we would have a safer country with a smaller defense budget. People looked at me and they’re like, “Ah, she’s a hippie or something. She just doesn’t care about our national defense.” I spent four years on the Defense Innovation Board, and I learned to care a lot about our defense and to be quite worried about it. I felt a little awkward saying this next to this Air Force official because it sounds insulting. “I want to cut your budget.” He turned to me and, in front of everyone, he said, “You’re right except it needs to be 50 percent because when we’ve had 15 percent or 20 percent cuts, it doesn’t shock the system enough to actually change behavior.” Of course, you can have a cut like that that would be a shock to the system. A hot war would be a shock to the system, and we all know, we will see change when that happens. I have, in a sense, been an advocate for this kind of shock to the system. I was alarmed when Vivek Ramaswamy — when he was going to be on DOGE — was saying we just get rid of half the bureaucrats based on the last number of their Social Security numbers. I was like, “Wow, what he’s saying and what I’m saying rhyme,” and yet, I feel like I come at it from fundamentally a desire for government to work. Sometimes, it’s hard to see whether what’s going on right now is about government working better or just being smaller. I think it could be smaller and be better. That better is still really important to me. [laughs] You use the defense example. If we think about what has worked, it seems to me that outsourcing nonbureaucratic activity to, say, Palantir, Anduril has been very cost-effective, probably militarily effective. We’ll see. Also, Christopher Kirchhoff’s unit has worked pretty well. So, why don’t we do more of that? Just take government agencies and sidestep them. Create a new NIH, call it something else, figure it will be good for 10 or 20 years, and then we’ll need to start all over again. In the meantime, we cut the budget of the current NIH, say, in half and create a new agency like a DARPA for health, which we have a version of already. Why not just keep on doing that? Create new things and destroy parts of old ones. That does happen. That’s what we call the bureaucratic rigidity cycle. We haven’t, I think, been disciplined enough about dismantling the old when we create the new. I experienced that myself helping start USDS, the United States Digital Service. It’s creating something new, but it still — and I think, even up until inauguration day — just had far less power than the existing infrastructures, CIOs of agencies, the procurement frameworks. That stuff has a life of its own and a power of its own. If you are creating these skunk works to disrupt the old stuff, it has to actually disrupt the old stuff. You can’t just add. If you’re just adding new layers on the face —…

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