Since his latest inauguration and the subsequent installation of Elon Musk as efficiency tsar, the world has been looking on with fascination as Donald Trump systematically dismantles public services in the United States. For anyone with an interest in good governance and workers’ rights, it has been horrifying to watch.
From the aggressive hostility towards DEI, to the arbitrary manner in which job losses have been identified, the headline approach being taken represents the very worst of employment practice. It is also one that will have a long-lasting and catastrophic impact on the country’s administrative knowledge and infrastructure. No agency seems to have escaped the attentions of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – or Doge – with an estimated 75,000 workers already laid off and job losses in every agency you care to name.
Of particular concern is that these roles seem to have been identified entirely by spreadsheet with no consideration to function, expertise or experience. This is entirely the wrong way to do things, but it is also redolent of the strategy playing out in parts of the tech sector where “human resources” are just disposable entries in Excel.
You may think that the UK’s regulatory regime is such that this kind of thing couldn’t happen here, and to a certain extent you would be right, in that our employment laws do not allow for such summary dismissals with no consultation. But the US approach is lauded by many on this side of the Atlantic, exemplified by the attitude of the previous Conservative government to the civil service. Passive-aggressive emails from Musk asking people to name five things they have done this week are not a world away from passive-aggressive messages from Jacob Rees-Mogg asking why civil servants are not in the office. More pertinently, the previous government, while asking more of the civil service than ever before, was obsessed with arbitrary numbers of what size it ought to be. The narrow ideological belief that the state is always "too big" is not confined to one corner of the globe.
Inspired by events in the US, right-wing campaigners and politicians have been quick to call for a similar process here. Numerous “UK Doge” projects have appeared, mainly on X, calling for civil servants to be sacked and for government to do less. Reform MPs have called for the process to be replicated here, directly attacking civil servants for hybrid working while having no clue what these hard-working professionals actually do.
Calls to emulate Musk are not confined to right wing politicians, though. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also called for a government efficiency drive, directly comparing it to Doge. There is always space for things to be done differently, and for government to work better, and Prospect has repeatedly said we are more than willing to work with government on civil service reform. But I would urge politicians of all stripes to think carefully before making such comparisons with Musk’s indiscriminate attacks on government. Not only is the approach against all the principles that govern employment practice in this country, but it is unlikely to end well for America. People who want to ape Doge now are unlikely to like the consequences once they start to be revealed.
This brings me to a more general point about the size and efficiency of the civil service and its agencies. The ongoing Spending Review is likely to result in reduced budgets, cuts to services and to jobs. The chancellor must get the balance right. Many vital services are already at breaking point and facing a recruitment and retention crisis. There is no slack left in the system. You only have to go back five years to the start of the pandemic to see what happens when you stress a system that has had all leeway cut away. It is very difficult to recover from – once you lose institutional knowledge, you do not get it back.
Prospect members have direct private sector comparators, which increasingly make a move out of the public sector an attractive option. These are specialists with a lot to offer, who have spent their careers in the service of their country but who often feel their only option for progression is to leave.
The government is faced with a very difficult situation financially but in seeking cuts it cannot simply look at numbers; it must also look at the services it has to provide and the skills it needs to provide them.
I would urge government to appreciate the depth of expertise that exists within government, particularly in regulatory functions, and the danger of undermining it. When Covid appeared, we saw the specialist scientific knowledge in the civil service was suddenly absolutely critical to all our lives. Public servants in specialisms as diverse as nuclear decommissioning or civil aviation regulation keep thousands of us safe every day. The fiscal situation is clearly extremely challenging, but this expertise is something that will be hard to replace if lost. Government must ignore the Doge fans and tread carefully here, or we may all rue the consequences in the coming years.
Mike Clancy is general secretary of the Prospect union