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The Meme Lords are rallying, with the DOGE Techno King and his digital court scheming their next big gambit. The internet's good citizens face a choice: cheer from the sidelines or chart a better path. Let's talk CATs, not DOGE.
Putting the future of American government in the hands of a self-styled “Techno-King” seems, uh, mildly antithetical to the spirit of 1776. Not to mention ripe for crony capitalism to advance the octupus-like interests of a sprawling industrial baron. But I digress! Life is about choices and as a wise professor once told me, politics is always about alternatives. So let’s build a better one, bottom up and with the pioneering spirit that’s made this land great.
The CAlifornia Transformation (CAT) protocol provides a decentralized alternative to improving how government operates. Looking at first principles, DOGE only focuses on efficiency. It’s right there in the name. Ultimately, however, as a great optimizer of industrial systems wisely said “possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.” We can do better than increase the efficiency of the department of horses and buggy whips.
Some might put forward that DOGE will eliminate Departments and vast swathes of bureaucracy that should not exist. Couple points: 1) Chesterton’s Fence. Ignoring those lessons is a shortcut to failure. Tale as old as time. 2) We need a muscular government that can deliver results, not just get out of the way. Both parties largely agree we need to build more public infrastructure such as interstate transmission or repair roads for instance. Potholes aren’t partisan! They’re a blight on all Americans.
There’s also been a bunch of under the radar wins to build digitally native and better managed government operations. In the wake of the healthcare dot gov debacle, our 43rd POTUS launched highly successful initiatives to modernize the federal government IT stack. You know it was really good since POTUS 44, who uh wasn’t excessively a fan of the 43rd, didn’t event attempt to dismantle those achievements.
In addition, at the state and local level many efforts have led to order of magnitude improvements that literally save lives. A global network of tech savvy do gooders has made countless important wins that make a real difference in communities across the globe. Those digital improvements in conjunction with old school management and governance reforms provide the foundation for bigger and bolder action.
In California, the wise and cunningly cat-like Jerry Brown stabilized California’s crazy public finances, ingrained the time tested principle of subsidiarity and planted the seed of the state’s excellent government operations agency. It’s easy to forget that there was serious talk in the state department of finance of California becoming a territory in the late Schwarzenegger era. It’s radically common sense to build on those successes.
California also provides the perfect place to lead the movement to pioneer order of magnitude better government operations. This state obviously has big problems. It’s also not about to slide into the Pacific. Nationally it actually ranks right in the middle of the pack on core metrics and globally ranks as a world leader in some areas, while lagging in others. Those mountain-sized problems like the housing crisis and the struggle to build physical infrastructure provide a great opportunity.[1]
What is a mountain if not an invitation to achieve with the excellence of our highest and best selves? Leveraging that world beating pioneering spirit, CAT aims to move the ball forward on a few core vectors, providing a three legged stool for accelerating innovation in government operations.
Foundationally American government operates on an industrial-era protocol. Public administration as a discipline and practice emerged in the OG progressive reform movement a century ish ago. That provided a lot of success! It addressed corruption, instituted management practices we quickly take for granted like a professional budget process. Those reforms resulted in massive civilization scale progress through universal access to public education, clean water, and the highway system.
Today we face an equally epochal shift with the advent of the internet and the digital revolution. How might AI revolutionize what constitutes a classroom and enable radically more access to personalized tutoring? How might web3 protocols entirely new ways to manage age old challenges like maintaining city streets? (The existing processes often involve windshield survey aka looking out the window to count potholes and cracking which is very facepalm.)
Let’s have the courage to pioneer the boldly new.
Consider a simple objective.: building basic infrastructure like water. Everyone needs water. No matter who you are, where you come from or whether you prefer DOGEs to CATs. Policy talkerfest types who’ve never built anything like to point the finger at CEQA or NEPA or local NIMBYism or whatever. That neglects the degree to which it’s not really always clear what permits are required to actually build anything. The problem goes deep. The thicket of regulations presents an unending maze that can presents a silent but deadly cost to new market entrants and the entreprenerial spirit.
Consider climate tech entrepreneur Casey Handmeyer’s experience with a California regulation that contains a typographic error that will take half a decade to update:
Five years!! The US public is not stupid. Google can somehow achieve 99.9% up time on a bewildering array of (free!) services in nearly every country on Earth and hundreds of languages on user-controlled hardware, but the government standard is five years to correct a spelling error which actively harms the execution of their own mission and prevents private actors from solving major problems at zero public cost. This is nuts!
California climate hawks like to talk about how decarbonizing in time will be like the economic retooling in the second world war. The simple reality though is that our permit processes are failing California like they are failing the country in meeting the objectives set by our state and national elected leaders. How many infrastructure weeks do we need? How many examples of bridges taking longer to fix — at massively greater cost that to build — do we need? See the sixth street bridge in LA and the Bay bridge from SF to Oakland.
Fixing that tangled web will require surgical removal of outdated regulations. In addition, it will require deploying transformatively new operational practices for implementing regulatory processes. The de facto operational reality of massive pdf documents provides little benefit other than to arcane professional service providers and lawyers that navigate said thicket for a fee. Semantic search and LLMs can help here. There’s a big frontier for applied R&D here that is just calling for creative intersectoral collaborations.
Let’s deliver with the clear eye conviction of our ancestors.
Many of the most successful government projects in human history were massively inefficient. The Manhattan project pursued several uranium enrichment processes in parallel. Achieving the mission matters. Bean counting and box checking does not. The puritanical obsession with efficiency by the way is part of the reason we’re in our current state capacity crisis and our country struggles to build. The desire to measure every public penny in excruciating detail is what results in kafka-esque government chart-junk and kabuki theater like the paperwork reduction act that frustrates common sense digitization initiatives.
The aforementioned climate tech entrepreneur provides a common sense efficiency that upon closer inspection requires a bit less DOGE eagerness to jump on a lap and bit more cat-like cunning to avoid obstacles. Casey is an ex-Space-X engineer who I’m guessing has lived and breathed the five step process that made the company great:
As an illustration of that process, Casey offers the following example:
the IRS should not be requiring tax forms from nearly anyone.
That goes back to Chesterton’s fence. People have been (rightly!) pointing out the absurdity of the tax filing process for many years. Other countries will provide their people a pre-filled out tax filing that’s quick and painless. In the US, we have Intuit and a whole political economy. Here’s a ProPublica piece on that sad story from a few years back that’s worth reading in full if you’re not familiar. Casey noted earlier.
DOGE can focus on big wins that are easy to sell, rather than small, bitter zero sum squabbles with professional petty tyrants.
Of course realistically, that list of unicorns wins is a bit rare. There are reasons again that the bizarre situation we find ourselves in persists. Looking more deeply and structurally, ultimately you can’t disentangle improving government operations ultimately from broader political reform and all the messiness that entails. That’s a big reason for optimism behind the growing momentum for an article five convention of the states, a subject that Jerry Brown presciently pushed for decades ago by the way. But I digress. The point is to keep the main thing the main thing and not get distracted by the tempting tennis balls of ostensible efficiencies.
Let’s learn from history and keep a clear eye on achieving the mission.
How will CAT move the ball forward on those goals?
Rather than a big singular dog-like frontal assault, let’s take a more cat-like approach aiming at total transformation. The term the blob has been popularized in circles that obsess over matters gov ops to mean the array of government staff, adjacent NGO workers, academia, think tank types and news writers that intersect and overlap. Rather than launch a falcon-rocket assault from the top down, CAT should work with, around, beside, and in between the government blog to accelerate government innovation to achieve radically more imaginative, effective and efficient performance.
Here a decentralized protocol based approach offers promise to out-blob the blob with slime-mold like adaptive ingenuity. A vast array of organizations already work in this space. CAT provides an umbrella for new alliances and creative collaborations. A bottom up strategy coupled with clever top down collaborations provides a means for strategically ratcheting up more wins for TEAM CAT. Meanwhile it seems inevitable that DOGE will stumble and bumble its way forward like a golden retriever in a field of footballs. If you’re working in this space or have ideas, drop a note in the comments or hit me up on warpcast @patwater. Most importantly share MOAR CAT memes! In the meantime…
Let’s roll. Stretch. Nap. Meow. Leap. Tumble. Make plays before an era of unending DOGE domination is thrust upon us!
[1] As our new POTUS declared a few years back, “the American dream is dead.” California has sadly led the way in that regard, with the erosion of the basic bargain that anyone from any walk of life can make it here with hard work and gumption. It’s hard to make things work when housing costs escalate from ~3x to >10x typical household incomes for examples. Rather than belabor and bemoan that situation, why not pioneer a new dream? ;)
