The Efficiency Con

They call it efficiency, but it’s really the slow liquidation of democracy.

They call it efficiency—but it’s really a demolition con in a business suit. They wrap their agenda in the language of optimization, as if a nation can be run like a tech platform or streamlined like a balance sheet. Then Trump and Musk brag about cutting billions by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” gutting federal agencies, and firing public servants. But the dollars saved are a fraction of the true cost. And the real con? The only thing they’re making more efficient is the speed at which a functioning democracy collapses.

From an anthropological perspective, dollars are just one kind of capital. The real wealth of a society lies in its human capital—skilled scientists, teachers, public health workers, career diplomats—and its social capital: the trust people place in public institutions, the cooperative networks that hold communities together, the institutional memory embedded in agencies that remember what the last disaster looked like—and how to prevent the next.

Institutions carry memory. They embed collective experience. Cut them, and you don’t just lose staff. You lose foresight. You lose capacity. You lose the ability to respond before a crisis becomes a catastrophe. That’s the cost the efficiency crowd refuses to count: what doesn’t happen.

A weather warning system doesn’t just predict a storm—it represents generations of learning, local knowledge, and cooperation designed to protect life. When that’s gone, the loss echoes far beyond the budget line. The warning isn’t issued. The village isn’t evacuated. The disease isn’t detected. The school isn’t rebuilt. And the adversary steps into the vacuum we created.

The cure that isn’t discovered because NIH was gutted. The epidemic that spreads because the CDC’s early warning system was dismantled.The storm that kills because NOAA’s forecasts no longer reach the vulnerable.The peace that unravels when USAID withdraws and adversaries move in.The child left behind because public schools were defunded in the name of “parental freedom.”

These aren’t hypotheticals. These are cascading failures. And they multiply. Dollars “saved” become lives lost, opportunities squandered, and adversaries empowered.

This is what happens when governance is mistaken for coding and public service for cost-cutting. What they call streamlining doesn’t begin to describe the ripping of institutions from the body politic—like a beating heart in an Aztec sacrifice—severing the bonds between government and community, expertise and trust, public systems and the people they’re meant to serve.

What gets sold as reform is really abandonment. What gets framed as innovation is often dispossession. And what they call “efficiency” is a cover story for extraction—turning public need into private profit.

And this disembedding isn’t accidental. It’s strategic. The more the public loses faith in the state, the easier it becomes to privatize everything—health, education, infrastructure, even truth. In place of civic obligation, we get market logic. In place of mutual aid, competition. In place of the commons, scarcity.

The anthropological record is clear: when states withdraw from the social contract—when they sacrifice care for control and people for profit—collapse doesn’t always come with a bang. Sometimes, it comes disguised as efficiency.

What Trump and Musk call efficiency is really liquidation. They’re strip-mining the future to make the present look solvent. It’s austerity with a buzzword, privatization with a smirk. And the cost? We won’t measure it in billions. We’ll measure it in broken systems, abandoned people, and global instability.

Efficiency isn’t about doing more with less. It’s about knowing what must never be cut. And when a government slashes its capacity to care, to respond, to lead—it’s not efficient. It’s dangerous.

Suggested Readings:

Berman, Sheri. The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.