I mean, it’s no secret that there’ve been deep-rooted problems in the culture of ED. There were the endless meetings, frequently missed deadlines, the FAFSA debacle, the failed audits, a sprawling communications office, and an extreme number of unanswered emails and calls. There were employees who maybe were capable but putting in, at best, probably 10 or 20 hours a week of actual work. Mark Schneider, the former director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), recently discussed the sense that many staff were more focused on protecting their own fiefdoms than anything else. In an anecdote that would’ve warmed the two Bobs’ hearts, he related:
When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people—staffers, program officers—to try to get some idea of what was going on. . . . They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop.
Reading accounts of departing workers, I’ve been struck by how frequently they described working for ED in ceremonial rather than substantive terms. There was the employee who said, “This is an assault on public education, because . . . a person like me, who came from nothing from Toledo, Ohio, from nothing, can end up working in a place like this.” Another staffer, who’d been at the department for a decade, explained, “My goal was to work at all these wonderful places, learn as much as I can about education and then go to the federal government as a culminating experience: the final step of my career.” Reading these heartfelt testimonies, I kept thinking that these seemed like nice people, but for the life of me I could find nothing that left the impression their roles were necessary or useful.
It all brought to mind the scene in Office Space where the two Bobs are interviewing checked-out Initech employee Tom Smykowski about his job:
Bob Slydell: “What would you say . . . you do here?”
Tom Smykowski: “Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
Through decades spent interacting with ED, I’ve imagined that conversation many times. But the issue isn’t just unnecessary employees; it’s organizational culture. It’s kludge. It’s misaligned incentives. It’s accountability (or lack thereof). Until the DOGE posse came to town, ED officials hadn’t sketched a vision for addressing any of this inefficiency in anything but the most platitudinous sense. They never explained how they were streamlining processes, eliminating redundancy, evaluating performance, or altering incentives.
Motivation is partly about the individual, but it’s also a function of organizational culture. I’m reminded of the Office Space scene where protagonist Peter Gibbons explains Initech to the two Bobs:
Peter: The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Bob Porter: Don’t . . . don’t care?
Peter: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime, so where’s the motivation? And here’s something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation, is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Thus far, the cuts have been made in a manner that’s frequently seemed chaotic and ham-fisted. That’s not a great way to reset organizational culture. There’s been no explanation for why some units were cut and others were not. Civil service rules dictated a strategy of axing some whole units while keeping the entirety of others. This is nobody’s idea of how to streamline operations.
