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Professor Parkinson was so right.
In the 1950s, a mild-mannered British naval historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson stuck a devastating blow against bureaucracy. His crucial analysis is even truer today than when The Economist published it in 1955.
Work (in government) expands to fill available time for its completion, observed Professor Parkinson. In his original essay written for the Royal Navy, Parkinson found that while the number of Britain’s warships had declined by two-thirds, the Royal Navy’s desk-bound bureaucrats had grown by 6% each year. Other studies by Parkinson concluded that an annual growth rate of bureaucracy of 6% would inevitably result in the organization consuming itself. Office workers, Parkinson found, would keep hiring subordinates to make themselves less likely to be replaced and, seemingly, more important. Parkinson called it ‘the law of multiplication of subordinates.’
My father, a brilliant businessman, turned me on to Parkinson’s wisdom. When I used to run companies, I would walk their aisles to stop and ask the workers in their cubicles, ‘what are you doing? What did you achieve this week?’ Needless to say, I was not popular, but my companies moved swiftly and were quite profitable. President Donald Trump has been doing the same thing on a grand scale with America’s monster, bloated bureaucracy.
As I’ve seen while serving in the US Army, our government is near paralysis from too much fat and lack of decision-making capability. We are pretty good at blowing up Arabs, but not good at all in forging effective policies and strategy. Too many cooks and too much politics are involved in making this broth.
Government bureaucracies are like human hair. They keep growing and must be trimmed. Cutting down on government employees is always difficult and invariably produces howls of anguish and heart-rending tales of hardship. They must be ignored. Under the awful former president Biden, government became a piggy bank for every sort of nonsensical left-wing claptrap and reverse racism. The Biden people were trying to buy this year’s election by bribing non-white voters, women and the liberal media. They deserved to lose the election and suffer the Trumpist retribution they are now going through.
Some of the most effective businessmen I’ve known would each year fire the bottom 10-20 % of their work force – and particularly sales reps. Crude but effective. My Army boss, Maj. Snyder, made civilian bureaucrats change their desks twice a year. This brought cries of anguish but uncovered top secret files and old ham sandwiches.
Parkinson’s law applies to all bureaucratic organizations. It’s quite possible to thin out entrenched bureaucracies by attrition and not replacing retirees. Or it can be done the flamboyant, theatrical way that Trump is using, with Elon Musk waving a chainsaw.
Original article: ericmargolis.com
