After all the sound and fury, the Department of Government Efficiency, once billed as the Trump administration’s biggest domestic policy agenda, has been disbanded with barely a whimper. Ten months ago, the chainsaw waving Musk looked unstoppable. DOGE was his personal wrecking ball—smashing through what he branded “waste, fraud and abuse” in the administration firing an estimated 2,60,000 federal workers.
By May, the Trump-Musk bromance soured and with it the project of reducing “waste”, “fraud” and “abuse” went into cold storage until last week’s announcement. DOGE was “DOGE’d.
For anyone paying close attention to its 10-month long run, DOGE was a chaotic, dystopian project that had little to do with government “efficiency”. It envisioned a hyper-privatised, techno-state run by algorithms, the goal of improving efficiency by reducing “waste, fraud and abuse” a ruse to legitimise this dystopia. But it did succeed in placing a spotlight on the pursuit of “government efficiency” and generating broad based consensus over the goal itself. Even the political opposition within the US had to first acknowledge the centrality of efficiency as a value proposition before arguing that DOGE’s actions are the wrong way to pursue the goal.
Across the seas, in India, many looked to DOGE with envy—after all, we have all been subject to the endless red tape and bureaucratic obduracy that fails to deliver even the most basic of things like clean air—arguing that we too need our version of DOGE. Indeed, most debates on the incompetent state veer quickly the possibilities offered by technology as a magic bullet that can allow us to bypass human intervention in state tasks. And where this is not feasible, perfect the panopticon through technology-based surveillance and discipline the bureaucrat. Think back to how we celebrated the introduction of biometric attendance in government offices in 2014. Yet, DOGE is a cautionary tale on the dangers of the blind pursuit of “efficiency”, which the Indian debate must remain alive to.
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Bureaucratic autonomy
Debates on bureaucracy in India and across the globe, inevitably conjure up images of red-tape loving lazy, slothful, overpaid civil servants trying every trick in the book to avoid “work”. Indeed this is why the Trump campaign slogan of “waste, fraud and abuse” of the deep state resonated widely with his voter base. Inevitably, the reform impulse is to find ways of curbing bureaucratic discretion, particularly at the frontlines where citizens and the state meet, and tightening surveillance over officers such that they are disciplined into being “efficient”.
DOGE sought to eliminate the officer through algorithms. In India, we have developed an array of shiny digital tools to perfect the Panopticon. MIS systems, real time IVRS and GPS trackers, biometric attendance all come together in command-and-control centres’ where senior bureaucrats surveil and monitor their juniors, in the hope of making them more efficient. But this simply misses the point.
At a practical level, the urge to curtail discretion inevitably closes off essential feedback loops necessary for getting policy and its implementation tools right. Officers at the frontlines of implementation have a wealth of knowledge on what it takes to get the job done that those in backrooms and on the policy high table cannot replicate. Without this feedback, technology inevitably becomes a burden rather than an aid. In her book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and What We Can Do to Fix It, Jennifer Pahlka vividly illustrates how a historic backlog in veteran affairs disability claims was created by layers of policy decisions that were misaligned with the capabilities of the technology system. The frontline knew exactly why the system was breaking but their voice was rarely heard.
We have seen this time and time again in India. New data requirements burden critical frontline staff from Anganwadi workers to school teachers, who in turn complain that they have been reduced to “clerks” and glorified post officers, pushing data into MIS systems that are of little value to their everyday jobs.
Worse, when officers have no say in decision making that affect their ability to do their jobs, they inevitably stop considering themselves active agents of public services tasked with teaching, providing health and nutrition services, or improving sanitation. This has entrenched an old pathology of the Indian state—a bureaucratic culture that serves to glorify accountability of process rather than outcomes.
When asked what they can do to improve conditions in their administrative areas, I get a standard response from frontline officers, “if the government wants, it can do a lot but I have no power, I am just a post officer responding to data requests”.
This is not the voice of a lazy, incompetent civil servant who needs to be “surveilled” but rather the outcome of a work culture that reinforces a professional notion of accountability to process rather than accountability to outcomes.
Improving “efficiency” of outcomes requires breaking this culture of process driven accountability by empowering frontline civil servants to take decisions relevant for their jobs, including how to solve for implementation problems, rather than curbing discretion and casting them as mere passive cogs in the wheel, beholden to the demands of an MIS based command and control center.
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Right-sizing vs downsizing the state
The view that bureaucracies are bloated with far too many employees preying on taxpayers money is a widely held myth. In February 2025, DOGE achieved some notoriety for mindlessly firing critical nuclear staff and then scurrying back to rehire them. It was an embarrassing reminder that governments’ need people not algorithms.
This myth of a bloat is widespread in India too. But the real problem of efficiency here is too few, not too many workers. Research by civil servants and academics show how significantly understaffed the Indian state is.
Consider the following statistic: In 2011, the government employment as a share of total employment was 4.6 per cent. Contrast this with the United States where government employment accounts for 15.9 per cent of employment. Put differently, India has 1,622.8 government servants for every 1,00,000 residents; the US has 7,681. The problem begins at the top. In 2018, there was a 23 per cent shortfall between sanctioned positions and actual recruitment among IAS officers. India has a mere 940 diplomats in its civil service compared to the US State departments’ nearly 14,000. And despite a large expansion at the grassroots, personnel shortages remain rampant. In a study on Block Development Officers, Devesh Kapur and Aditya Dasgupta found that on average 48 per cent of officially sanctioned full-time posts are vacant.
These facts have been documented in an important book State Capability in India coauthored by the current cabinet secretary TV Somanathan and IAS officer GULZAR Natarajan, who quip, for its size and the burdens it shoulders, the Indian state is remarkably efficient.
Somewhat counterintuitively, making the Indian State more efficient will require hiring rather than “DOGEing” officials.
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The State is not amazon.com
The pursuit of efficiency in government has long been the holy grail for bureaucratic reform. The debate traces its intellectual roots to the new public management tradition that seeks efficiency through an embrace of market principles—choice, competition, cost effectiveness. In the contemporary moment, these ideas have coalesced with the start-up Silicon Valley logic of platforms and algorithms valorised by DOGE. But the state is not amazon.com.
As citizens, we relate to the state in affective terms, as clients we relate to firms in transactional market-based terms. The State must balance equity, justice and social stability as it seeks ‘efficiency’. Sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman’s book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy, illustrates these dilemmas. Berman’s core argument is that the shibboleth of efficiency, what she calls the “economic style reasoning” in public policy, has constrained governmental ambition. One of her case studies, the evolution of the Clean Air Act from the 1960s to 1990s demonstrates how environmental policy turns from a moral framework that seeks to stigmatise polluters to a position that pollution was an externality that needed to be priced. Thus rather than arriving at a democratically negotiated consensus on acceptable levels of pollution in society, the Act and its regulatory framework focused on the “price” of pollution rather than the costs of pollution on society.
The point is simply this, the functions of the state and policy it designs affect broader societal concerns that cannot be monetised. These are an outcome of a political bargain and may necessitate inefficiency as it makes trade-offs: Between redistribution and growth, environmental protection and business interests, representation (reservations for example) and competence in its hiring. Algorithms for efficiency cannot resolve these trade-offs. They require messy, hard democratic negotiation and the outcomes may not be appropriate in “value for money terms” but are essential for social cohesion. These are outcomes of democratic bargaining necessary to preserve freedoms and a stable society.
If there is one lesson from DOGE that we in India must urgently learn it is this: Democracy may not always be efficient, but it is a value that must be preserved. We must not allow debates on “efficiency” to undermine this powerful truth. Making the Indian state more efficient must primarily be about making the Indian state more democratic and accountable to its citizens rather than an algorithm.
Yamini Aiyar is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center and Watson Institute, Brown University, and the former President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research. Her X handle is @AiyarYamini. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)