In today’s Washington Post the editors provide their opinions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). To be clear I’m not a DOGE fan; I think the effort was misguided. Here’s a snippet of the editorial:
Remember DOGE? The good idea to find government efficiency and reduce spending was so poorly executed that it undermined the case for scaling back the size of government. Yet a little-noticed bit of news out of the Justice Department in recent days suggests that some in the organization were not just incompetent but malicious.
What follows is a compact illustration of two logical fallacies. I won’t fisk the whole thing but the two fallacies in the piece are what are called “hasty generalization” and “intentional fallacy”.
Here’s a key passage:
For a group that was meant to root out waste, DOGE officials were shockingly unfocused on their main goal. One person was apparently more interested in relitigating election results than making government more efficient.
That passage illustrates both of those fallacies. One or two individuals behaved badly; those individuals are representative of DOGE; therefore DOGE was incompetent and/or malicious.
I think that striving for government efficiency should be ordinary, unremarkable, and ongoing. Quotidian. Not done with fanfare by a core group of “experts” parachuted in for the purpose. Unfortunately, that is a repeated practice for the Trump Administration. See the president and members of his cabinet’s speeches at Davos for the most recent example.
Sadly, bureaucracies by their structure and sociology are resistant to such efforts and they would be impossible within our present governmental and legal structure. They would need to have incentives to do their work, e.g. their compensation would need to be based on efficiencies gained, and my reading of the civil service code suggests that would be illegal.
However, I am a fan of solid editorial writing and this isn’t it.
I have found the performance of the WaPo’s editorial board puzzling lately. This editorial reads less like institutional analysis and more like partisan polemic, which is increasingly characteristic of WaPo’s editorial tone.
How many examples should they have cited and how long should the editorial then be? If you followed the DOGE issue there were many other examples of incompetence and malfeasance. If memory serves the published a lot of those stories including a running account of the errors DOGE made in the amount of money they claimed they were saving.
I do think this is not an uncommon writing style where the writer(s) choose what they think is an especially egregious action by the group they want to criticize. Personally, I would prefer numbers. Tell us that there were over 3,000 instances documented of incompetent, illegal or stupid actions by DOGE. That would be more convincing for me. However, I think there is a story telling element here which writers think is important and people will actually remember this one thing they cite. In this case that one was not alone and many others have been documented so it’s not really unrepresentative. (Just one of hundreds of articles on the topic at link.
https://reason.com/2025/03/13/elon-musk-who-promised-to-be-maximally-transparent-makes-doges-numbers-even-harder-to-check/
Steve
Cite the statistic, give an example or two, criticize it, then provide an alternative. Without the statistic it could be cherry-picking or overgeneralization. Without the example it lacks rhetorical force. Without the criticism it’s dry. Without the alternative proposal it’s a lament. If you do not will the means, you cannot will the end.