It turns out the great American experiment in slashing the deficit with a machete borrowed from Silicon Valley has achieved something rather more modest. It has managed to annoy a lot of academics, trigger a flurry of lawsuits, and leave the $2 trillion deficit sitting there, entirely untroubled.
There is something almost endearing about the scale mismatch. You take a problem driven by pensions, healthcare, defence and debt interest, and you go after humanities grants with a keyword search and a sense of moral purpose. It is a bit like tackling a knocking engine by removing the radio because it looks fiddly and vaguely unnecessary. Very decisive. Entirely irrelevant.
The best part is the candour. Under oath, no less. Yes, the aim was to get the deficit down to zero. No, we did not achieve that. No, I do not regret people losing their incomes. One almost admires the honesty. It saves everyone the trouble of pretending this was ever about fiscal arithmetic rather than ideology in a high-vis vest.
And the arithmetic really is the awkward bit. About $100 million in grants here, a few hundred million there if you are feeling generous. Against a $2 trillion deficit. You start with a number like that, you go hunting for arts grants, and at no point does anyone stop and ask whether those two things are even in the same postcode.
What they actually seem to have done, if you read the depositions, is sit there running keyword searches, leaning on ChatGPT, and trying to work out what counts as DEI after the fact. Which is one way of allocating public money, I suppose. Not one that would normally fill you with confidence.
Still, it has a certain theatre to it. Young operatives, light on subject knowledge, sweeping through institutions with the confidence of people who have never had to run one. It is all very modern. Data driven, in the sense that there is a search box involved.
And now we have our own version being trailed over here. A British DOGE, no less. Teams of bright outsiders parachuted into councils to uncover the hidden treasure apparently buried in municipal budgets. One waits with interest to see which dusty vault they imagine exists between adult social care swallowing most of the money and the weekly argument about whether the bins will still be collected.
The early returns are not promising, and in some cases they are quietly rather awkward. In Kent, one of the flagship Reform councils, senior figures have already admitted they went looking for “craziness” in the books and did not find it. Not hidden reserves, not vast waste, just the same tight budgets everyone else has been dealing with. Warwickshire has told a similar story, albeit with slightly more polite language.
What you do get instead is a bit of rearranging. Projects paused or cancelled, some of which were going to save money later. Existing efficiencies rebadged as new ones. The odd consultant brought in to help identify savings, which is a nice touch given the campaign rhetoric. And, in at least one case, a council tax rise to keep the whole thing on the road.
Which is roughly the point at which reality tends to intrude. Councils are not sitting on piles of discretionary spending. Most of the money is tied up in adult social care, SEND transport, and other statutory obligations that do not disappear because someone has arrived with a spreadsheet and a sense of purpose.
But that does not quite kill the idea, because it was never really about the numbers. It is about the feeling that somewhere there must be waste, and that someone suitably brisk can go in and sort it out. If the savings do not appear, well, that can be put down to obstruction, or the wrong people still being in place, or not having gone far enough.
Meanwhile the deficit carries on, serenely indifferent to the removal of arts grants and council consultants, like an engine that continues to knock while someone triumphantly waves a detached radio aerial.
And if you are wondering what it all cost to run, the answer is suitably vague. Tens of millions here or there, lost in departmental budgets, plus the lawyers now circling. One suspects the final bill will be one of those small ironies where the exercise designed to save money ends up costing roughly the same as it saved.
The ashtray has gone. The radio might be next. The engine is still knocking, but at least everyone can say something decisive has been done.
No comments:
Post a Comment